Posts Tagged ‘mapgasm’

Open Data Yields Tangible Results – And Tangible Maps

In January of this year I made a hopeful prediction that 2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London’s geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler’s London wall map and a prototype of David Overton’s SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna’s London maps and it’s a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

Now all if this could be taken to be simply my crowing with delight over maps. But there’s a deeper context to all of these tangible maps. Both the London Wall Map and SplashMaps have come about due to one single thing … open data. The case has often been made, though equally as often misunderstood, that open data is an economic stimulus. As many people ask why should we give something away for free as ask for data to opened up to the public.

Both of these maps wouldn’t have been financially possible without access to open data; the pre-open data era licensing costs and restrictions alone would have put paid to any startup opportunities an aspiring entrepreneur came up with. But in these maps, the proof of what open data can do has become very real, indeed very tangible.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

The Changing Map Of Europe’s Boundaries

The boundaries of Europe’s constituent countries have changed a lot in my lifetime. Some countries don’t exist anymore whilst others have come into existence. But it takes a map visualisation to make you realise just how much the map of Europe has changed.

Actually, it takes two map visualisations. The first, courtesy of the BBC, dates from 2005 and covers the years between 1900 and 1994. Starting wit Imperial Europe and fast forwarding though two world wars, plus the Cold War and taking in the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the expansion of the European Union.

The other map takes a much wider view, ranging from 1000 AD to the present day. It’s oddly fascinating to watch the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires go from dominance to vanishing entirely.

But the purist in me finds as much to dislike as to like in both of these maps. The BBC one is just two small and cries out for the ability to pan and zoom the map. For some unexplained reason, the map is … tiny and, though I hesitate to use the word in this content, the cartographer has obviously been experimenting with differing shades of colour to try and clearly delineate the countries but didn’t experiment hard enough.

The LiveLeak map is also small and while the video containing the map can be enlarged to full screen, there’s a loss of crispness to the map. For a map with such a wide timespan, it would have helped massively to have some kind of timeline accompanying the animation, so you can see just where in history you are.

Two maps. Both interesting. Both, for me, ultimately flawed. This sort of map just cries out to be reworked. If only I could find a suitable boundary data set spanning over a thousand years.

Written and posted from BA Galleries First Lounge, Heathrow Terminal 5 (51.47017, -0.48711)

Marvellous Miniature Map

Some maps are works of art; this miniature marvel is no exception. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s deserved of a place hanging on someone’s wall, but the truth is that this map is far more likely to end up in a rubbish bin.

That’s because this marvellous miniature map lives on the cover of a box of matches and empty boxes of matches have a very short shelf life before they end up in the rubbish. Which is a crying shame as this beautiful map with Mount Fuji in the background, a house and what looks like a tram deserves a kinder fate than that.

Photo Credits: Jane McDevitt on Flickr.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps)

Back in February of this year, at the height of the madness that was the Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London’s #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London’s UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start … at the beginning.

Read On…

Organic Pigs Or Organic Pig Waste? Mapping The Pros And Cons Of Each US State

Where you choose to live is always a trade off between the pros and the cons, the good and the bad. It probably comes as no surprise that if you’re a resident of Iowa and you have the most organic pigs in the United States you will also have the highest amount of pig waste.

But who would have thought that the downside to having the most organic mushrooms is that your state has the most amount of dams in need of repair. Apparently, this is the case if you live in Pennsylvania.

And maybe the cause of the highest binge drinking rate that you’ll find in Wisconsin is all those acres of organic corn that’s grown in that state.

A lot of the statistics, from sources including the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, look like they’re issued by the Department Of Stating The Obvious and makes me wonder how much the residents of each U.S. State agree with how it’s seen that their home State excels or doesn’t.

Image Credits: Mother Nature Network.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Mapping Heavy Metal With A Little Help From The CIA

If there’s an unwritten law of digital map making it is this: given a data set with a geographical element, someone, somewhere, will probably make a map out of it.

A prime example of this law is mining data from Encyclopedia Metallum detailing the Heavy Metal bands per country and mashing it up with population data from the CIA World Factbook (yes, this really exists) to make a map of Heavy Metal bands, by country, per capita.

While I’m not the biggest fan of heavy rock, the resulting map does, err, rock.

Credit is also due to my lovely wife who, knowing my penchant for all things map related, pointed this out to me in the first place.

Image Credits: Reddit user depo_s via GIS Lounge.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Pigs On A Map

Each time I find a new map I always end up learning something, sometimes directly from the map, sometimes from the content of what the map is trying to show. But I always end up learning something. In the case of this map, from H. W. Hill and Co from Decatur, Illinois circa 1884, I learnt that …

That you really can put pigs on a map.
That in the 1880s each US state (apparently) had a nickname for a pig. Or is it that the States have nicknames that are best represented by pigs? Or maybe something else entirely.
What a hog ringer is. Apparently it’s a device for putting rings in the noses of pigs. Ouch.

How much use this information will be to me is yet to be decided, but every piece of information you learn might come in useful someday, even from this map.

Image Credits: US Library of Congress.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

You May Have Helped Map The Internet Without Knowing It

According to the Internet Systems Consortium there’s somewhere over 900 million things connected to the internet. This isn’t the amount of things, computers, mobile phones, tablets, that use the internet, but the number of things that have a public IP address. Maybe by correlating the locations of these public IP addresses you could make a map of the internet?

Almost anything is possible, but the devil’s in the details. Firstly you’d need to find all those internet connected things which respond to an ICMP Ping request, which is a technical way of asking something on the internet are you there? That’s a really big amount of things to ask this question of and that would take a lot of time for just one computer to do.

But a researcher tried to do this and in preliminary research found out that an awfully large amount of these internet connected things were servers running some version of UNIX and a scarily large amount of these also either had a root account with a password of root or admin or even no password at all. The root account is a superuser or administrator account on a UNIX system; if you can login with this account you have total control of a UNIX machine.

This is where things get technically interesting, legally dubious and morally questionable in pretty much equal measure.

The, so far anonymous, researcher wrote a small piece of code that could do three things. Firstly, run a scan of a very small subset of those 900 million odd connected things. Secondly, make a copy of itself on another of those connected things which were running UNIX and which had a wide open root account. Thirdly, make that copy of itself, small, unnoticeable, not consume too much system resources or bandwidth and delete itself after it had finished.

This is what’s know as a botnet and this botnet mapped the internet and vanished once it was done. At its peak, there were over 420,000 servers unwittingly participating in this map making endeavour. You may even have contributed to the map without even being aware of it. If you know that you have a wide open UNIX server you probably did and you should also run, not walk, and lock down your server right now.

As a map, the Internet Census 2012 map is interesting. As a piece of technology, the map’s origins are fascinating. You can also see why the researcher who did this chose to remain utterly anonymous, though I have to wonder how long his anonymity will last.

Written and posted from Nokia Location & Commerce, Am Kronberger Hang, Schwalbach am Taunus, Germany (50.16216, 8.53349)

Re-imagining Berlin’s U-Bahn And S-Bahn System

This is another mass transit map, but this time it’s not of the London Underground system, but the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can’t be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin’s transport, it’s about this, unofficial, map of Berlin’s underground and not so underground trains.

Not content with reworking London’s Underground network maps, Maxwell Roberts has turned his sights on Berlin’s, producing not only a rework map which looks very similar to the official London map, but also one which is all curves, with not a straight line to be seen.

I hope that both Berlin’s BVG and S-Bahn Berlin are aware of Maxwell’s work. As a fairly regular traveller to Berlin, I use the U and S-Bahn a lot and whilst the official map is accurate, it’s not the easiest of thing to use at times.

Photo Credits: Maxwell Roberts via The Local.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Countries That Cry; Countries That Don’t (100% Mercator Free)

March the 5th 2013 marked the 501st birthday of Gerardus Mercator, whose map projection appears on virtually every web map you’ll find on the interwebs today. It appears he’s none too happy about the lack of royalties on this and so I felt compelled to use a projection for my next map which wasn’t Mercator’s.

I’ve been using a lot of Natural Earth‘s vector data to make maps recently and so Tom Patterson‘s rather beautiful Natural Earth projection seemed fitting and avoided the wrath of Gerardus into the bargain.

Continuing my dabblings in Mike Bostock’s D3, reworking the Countries That Do And Don’t Cry For Me map that did the rounds on the internet some years back took up a couple of spare hours last night; making maps is addictive it seems.

The full map is here, hosted on maps.geotastic.org … and for those who don’t get the cultural reference, this song from a certain 1970′s musical might help.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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