geospatial matters
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Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 1:35PM Perhaps it's foolish to point out yet another awesome NYTimes infographic, but I found their recent set of maps describing growth and new architecture in Beijing to be both interesting and beautiful. Their Olympic medal history visualization is also cool. Damn them for being so awesome. All the time. </fawning>
Friday, May 16, 2008 at 9:51PM Check this out: a site that has historical maps of US counties. It's really cool stepping through time and seeing how the county borders shift and change. Dead simple site, great data. It's a little more interesting for the older states, like Massachusetts, but California has some interesting changes too.
Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 6:25PM 
For those of you without at least a passing interest in Martian cartography, Giovanni Schiaparelli was one of the first astronomer's to map Mars using a halfway decent telescope. He drew exceedingly detailed maps of what he saw, depicting massive, linear trenches he called canali. He firmly believed these were too straight to be formed by any natural process, and that they must have been artificially produced by inhuman minds (perhaps even cool and unsympathetic ones). His maps were the state of the art for about 20 years. BibliOdyssey has a wonderful post showing some of Schiaparelli's maps, which are far more beautiful than I had imagined, having previously only seen crude reproductions in 2-tone print. Wonderful stuff. Via The Map Room
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 6:01PM "After Google, What?" was the name of a course at the iSchool, but Paul Smith of EveryBlock has asked the same of Google Maps. His answer? An open source web mapping stack. Check out his cool article on A List Apart, "Take Control of Your Maps". If you haven't checked out EveryBlock, do so. Their maps are beautiful. We use a lot of these technologies in the lab and in the GIIF, with the exception of Mapnik, which, to my shame, I've tried and failed to install. Update Some responses: a thread on geowanking including a response from Google evangelist Pam Fox, and discussion and response from the author on ALA (for some reason the post isn't on Technorati yet...).
Friday, April 4, 2008 at 12:04AM 
It's probably wrong of me to find a UNOSAT map of recent pirate activity off the coast of Somalia kind of hilarious, but they actually used the skull and cross bones to iconify pirate attacks, and did, in fact, use the phrase "mother ship." I'm sort of ambivalent about the map as a whole. The spatial distribution of attacks is interesting (why so many hijackings around Mogadishu and Mudug?) as are the narratives, but the cartography leaves something to be desired. Land features get an inexplicable amount of detail and attention for a map depicting strictly maritime activity, and the iconography is almost meaningless (we get it, skulls and bones mean pirates). The colors create thematic associations fairly well, but seem primarily focused on the narrative callouts, which are arguably of secondary important to the locations of the attacks. Probably the most interesting data graphic is the bar chart at the bottom, depicting a (significant?) drop in absolute pirate attacks correlating with changes in government. Via humanitarian.info and Nick
Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 3:18PM 
The folks behind the excellent Oakland Crimespotting are giving a talk today at the iSchool. If you haven't seen the site, it shows crime data from Oakland on a map, with different icons for different types of crime, and allowing you to browse through time using a sliding, expandable window over a bar graph. Pretty sweet use of Flash. Here's the talk info:
Design Futures lecture series sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the UC Berkeley School of Information TODAY Thursday March 20 5:15-6:30pm 110 South Hall UC Berkeley Mike Migurski and Tom Carden, Stamen Design Visual Urban Data: A Journey Through Oakland Crimespotting A talk about the political, social and technical hiccoughs encountered since the inception of Stamen Design’s Oakland Crimespotting project just over a year ago. The talk will cover the inspirations and influences of the project, and how it relates to Stamen’s recent work in web-based information visualization and mapping. About Stamen Since 2001, Stamen has developed a reputation for beautiful and technologically sophisticated projects in a diverse range of commercial and cultural settings. They work and play with a surprising and growing range of collaborators: news media, financial institutions, artists and architects, car manufacturers, design agencies, museums, technology firms, political action committes, and universities.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 12:43PM Great story on KQED QUEST the other day: tactile street maps for the blind. This is about TMAP, a project that essentially aims to make a street map GIS for the blind, including web-based delivery of images that can be printed on an embossing printer, and phone-based request for mailed maps. You can learn a lot about the technical details in this Google Tech Talk given by Dr. Josh Miele (a Cal alum).
Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 2:49PM If you're an academic, or even a pseudo-academic like me, you need to stay current on the research in your field. You could just go to the library and grab journals off the shelf (boo), or perhaps steal your advisor's copy of Science every week and and peruse it over an Americano at your coffee shop of choice (yay), OR you could harness the awesome power of the Intertron. Well, you could, if there was some kind of killer app to help you out. As it is, there are only a few apps that range from impotent to mildly threatening, but some of them might be useful.
A feed is a machine readable log of frequently updated content on the Internet (you might have heard of feed formats like Atom or RSS). Say you have a favorite website, like the Kelly Lab Blog. Instead of coming back here every day to see if things have changed, you could subscribe to the site feed (or the comment feed) with your favorite feed reader, and check that instead. That way you could check to see if lots of resources had been updated in one place. Many journals that have their digital act together publish feeds of their content (Nature, Science, TREE, PLoS), so you can always know when new content is available, and/or peruse titles and abstracts. Feeds are a good way to keep up to date, but they might not let you do much cataloguing or recommending. Google Reader (my feed reader of choice) let's you "share" items publicly (and with your GTalk contacts), but doesn't let you specify who you're sharing them with (my shared items are mostly just things I find both amusing and not incriminating, but you could use them for papers). You can also "star" things, which is like bookmarking, and there are tags, but stars lack specificity and I feel like their interface for tags could get unwieldy if you use a lot of them. Other feed readers might be different (Bloglines, Firefox, Thunderbird, NetNewsWire, heck even Outlook 2007).
The premier online bookmarking site isn't a bad tool for keeping track of articles. It won't tell you when resources are updated, but you could use it to save and organize articles you find interesting, by bookmarking and tagging them. Perhaps more importantly, you can recommend papers to other people using del.icio.us by using a tag like for:kueda, and likewise receive recommendations. Used in combo with a feed reader, it could be pretty useful. I actually use del.icio.us a lot for web resources in general. For instance, here's my limited collection of GIS data sources (tagged "gis" and "data"): http://del.icio.us/kueda/gis+data
Now we're entering the realm of specialized sites. Connotea is a sort of social bookmarking site specialized for journal articles, created by the Nature Publishing Group. It's got tagging, like del.icio.us, but it also lets you form explicit groups, and it will auto-extract citation information from the Web versions of articles (they even have a video). You could use Connotea to keep on top of what people are bookmarking by perusing tags (e.g. methane), or by subscribing to a tag's feed. I've found some interesting stuff browsing around the tags, but I haven't benefited from any of the social features like groups, because I don't know anyone else who uses Connotea. It also does some decent citation export in different formats, but it doesn't seem to export in different styles (Chicago vs. APA, for instance). citeUlike is another site very similar to Connotea, but I don't have as much experience with it. Also worth mentioning is Zotero. Zotero is an awesome plugin for Firefox that helps you manage citations. It's a local app without any social functionality (yet), so it's not really for keeping up to date, but it is great for extracting and exporting citations from papers and web pages. I've used it a bunch for writing papers. When it gets some network functionality it will be truly amazing. Ok, that's it for now. Anyone have any other favorite tools for keeping on top of academic literature?
Sunday, November 18, 2007 at 4:39PM The use of the Web and other networked technologies for disaster response is a hot topic, especially in nations like the US where such technologies are prevalent. Response on the Web has varied from insistence that everyone should use Twitter in disasters, to problems with signal to noise in crowdsourced search and rescue. Since maps and geospatial data play critical roles in disaster response, we spent a lab meeting discussing how web maps and webGIS have contributed. Read on for the collection of links and random thoughts.
Tim walked us through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Crisis in Darfur Google Earth layers, which feature photos, stories, and the locations of destroyed villages. The purpose seems to be to inform the population of Google Earth users about the extent of the crisis, and channel them toward the responses recommended by the USHMM.
We also discussed the imagery of Katrina's aftermath that was collected and shown on Google Earth very soon after the storm (and has been suspended at the time of this writing). This NYTimes article suggests the effort began with Google Earth users assembling imagery that NOAA had collected and released, but doesn't mention any data collected at Google behest. Forbes also has a good article. Several mashups, including Scorpionus.com, played a role in the response, and there was a apparently a significant effort by the open source GIS community to collect and distribute imagery, though I haven't seen much media coverage of it or any evidence of its use [please pass it along if you find some].
We've talked about a few maps made in response to the fires on this blog, including maps by
None of us knew whether any of these maps were used by people on the ground, which seemed like one of the purposes of the Google Maps, as they were created while the fires were burning and seemed to be regularly updated with fresh data. I would also argue that one of the most important maps of the fires was the MODIS imagery of the smoke plumes that made it into a lot of the popular news, at least in terms of communicating the magnitude of the disaster. Shasta also showed us maps made by NorthTree Fire International. I also talked briefly about the use of Twitter in disseminating information about the fires. Individuals and the Red Cross were both using Twitter to publish updates about the fires that could have been used in real time response, but it's still unclear how much these sources were actually used.
There have been a few interesting maps made in response to the oil spill in the Bay, including
Web responses to disasters take many forms, and serve several purposes. One interesting trend is the increasing ease of publishing geodata about disasters on the Web. Ten years ago, only governments would have the resources to quickly collect and disseminate imagery and ground-based data. With Katrina we saw a philanthropically motivated private sector achieve similar results based on existing business relationships (Google and imagery collection companies) and existing data infrastructure (Google Earth, Google Maps). Now we are seeing organizations with even fewer technological resources collecting and distributing data using mashups and web mapping tools like Google My Maps. There are even individuals who have made potentially important contributions during disasters (e.g. Nate Ritter during the 2007 SoCal fires, and Kathryn Cramer during Katrina). One issue that I find important in all these mapping efforts is that of trust. How much do you trust data from NOAA, Google, your local public radio station, or some programmer obsessed with microblogging? How useful is a large, crude polygon showing oil slick sightings?
Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 3:28PM 
Nick, a classmate of mine, pointed out this interesting use of Google My Maps for disaster reporting by KPBS News in San Diego. KPBS is also maintaining a Twitter stream for updates about the fires, which is the most useful potential use of Twitter I think I've seen. Has anyone seen any fire mapping systems on the web that integrate discussions? Requests for missing people, perhaps requests by evacuees for ground info on their homes?
