Photogrammetry in action: dating the great "A trip down Market Street", 1906

Sometime before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a camera was attached to a streetcar travelling north along Market Street, San Francisco, and recorded the hustle and bustle, the multi-modal transportation options, and the wonderful fashions of early 19th century San Francisco. The movie, which I happend to catch last week at SFMOMA as part of their great (but too large) Stein collection, is mesmerizing. Check it out here on You Tube. It is clearly pre-earthquake, but its exact timing has not been known until now.

Ferry Building arrivalIn an article in Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, Richard Greene narrows the window of aquisition down to between 24 March and 30 March 1906, just weeks before the earthquake on 18 April. Remember, that earthquake and the fires that followed largely destroyed much of the city. He performs this feat of timing through detailed photogrammetry: determing the time of day, the solar position, and the time of year from shadows on cornices and other architectural details.

Another windy day in the city! these cornices were helpful in determing solar positionSo cool! The article can be found here. Full reference here: 

Greene, R., 2011. Dating the fliming of "A trip down Market Street". Photogrametric Engineering & Remote Sensing 77, 839-848.

Check out some fun pics from the movie.

GIS and historical analysis: a good mix

In the new NYT artilce "Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land," Patricia Cohen discusses the new academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.

“Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t possibly know,” said Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It enables you to see patterns and information that are literally invisible.”

Fun stuff!

New BAAMA Journal Published

Volume 5, Issue 1 - Spring 2011

BAAMA is pleased to announce The BAAMA Journal has been published in conjunction with Earth Day.  Special thanks to all our contributing authors and editors.  The BAAMA Journal is a publication that highlights Bay Area people and projects that use geospatial technologies.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Building Virtual San Francisco: Growing Up With GIS
• DPW Uses LiDAR and a Custom Algorithm for Delineating Drainage Catchments and Hydrologic Modeling
• Preparing Historical Aerial Imagery of Southern California Deserts for use in LADWP's GIS
• Where in the Bay Area

Geospatial Revolution Project launched

Penn State Public Broadcasting has released the first episode of the Geospatial Revolution Project,"an integrated public service media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact." 

These videos are a great resource for sharing the wonder of all things geospatial in an exciting and easy to understand format. Three additional episodes are set to be published throughout the year. 

View the site to watch the videos and learn more, and keep an eye out for Berkeley's own Kass Green who contributed to the project.

Mapping Ancient Civilization, in a Matter of Days using LiDAR!

From Science News in the NYTimesNYTimes covers lidar! The husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase used lidar sensors to penetrate the jungle cover to get 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands. See article.

Lovely geologic quads of SF Bay - 1914

The San Francisco folio, including Tamalpais, San Francisco, Concord, San Mateo, and Haywards quadrangles, California is available as scanned pages (and maps) from the Texas A&M library project.  This folio is part of the Geologic Atlas of the United States, a set of 227 folios published by the U.S. Geological Survey between 1894 and 1945. Each folio includes both topographic and geologic maps for each quad represented in that folio, as well as description of the basic and economic geology of the area. This is Folio 193, published in 1914. This edition has the charming and berkeley-relevant reference: "Geology by Andrew C. Lawson, assisted at various times by students of the University of California." You go Bears.

 Pre- Richmond-San Rafael bridge view of Pt. San Pablo and Richmond

This is the bay bridge plan... Goat Island is Treasure Is., there was a narrow gauge railway from Oakland for shipments to SF and beyond.The repository interface with integrated Yahoo! Maps was developed by the Digital Initiatives -- Research & Technology group within the TAMU Libraries using the Manakin interface framework on top of the DSpace digital repository software.

Geologic Atlas of the United States by Texas A & M University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The map that changed the world goes digital

Ancient volcanic rock under EdinburghFor those of you who devoured Simon Winchester's "The Map that Changed the World" about geologist William Smith's journey to create the first geologic map of England and Wales, the first geologic map in the world, this news will please you. (Smith published the 10' x 16' map in 1815. His pivotal insights were that each local outcrop of rock strata was a portion of a single universal sequence of strata and that these rock strata could be distinguished, followed for great distances, and their relative date ascertained by means of imbedded fossilized organisms. His work kick-started the science of geology, and contributed to the theory of evolution. Modified from Wikipedia.)

Now, as the BBC reports, the British Geological Survey's (BGS) has released their new OpenGeoscience portal, which allows the public to study all the UK's geology via a variety of webGIS formats (e.g. Google, and ArcServer). There is a viewer for bedrock geology and the overlying superficial deposits, and another for more geological layers — artificial ground, faults, mass movements, etc.

Worker at Pitlochry depot, Perthshire, processing Scottish mica.In a companion effort, the BGS is also releasing images from their historic image archive: 50,000 images are searchable and usable for non-commercial purposes. These images include lovely photography of some of Britain's icons of geology, but also includes image from 100 years ago of miners, explorers, and early 20th century industry.

Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved

New Interface for the Manhatta Project. Check it.

We talked about this before here; and the Manhatta project has a nice new interface for exploring the 1609 map of the island of Manhatta(n), block by block, through time.  I love this project! The combination of mashup, history, design and art are breathtaking.  (And our own Tim Bean worked on reconstructing the early topography! - see his comment below.) Go Fullscreen on your 30"-monitor. I dare you.

“The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future…. But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?”

- from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

A downside to sharing historical maps

From the SF Chron: When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, but they show the locations of former low-caste communities. The maps date back to the country's feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place. Some surveys have shown that such neighborhoods have lower property values than surrounding areas, and residents have been the target of racial taunts and graffiti. But the modern locations of the old villages are largely unknown to the general public, until these maps were overlain on current street maps.

Repro ancient boats

I've been a sucker for these stories of people re-building sailing and exploring craft based on 1,000-year old plans ever since my parents gave me  Kon-Tiki to read as an impressionable youth. Maybe it is why I love such riduculous Hollywood tripe like the 13th Warrior.

Now comes this news item: A replica 16th Century junk has sunk off Taiwan, one day short of completing an epic voyage to the US and back (see article). One day short of finishing! And you know why? They were, in BBC lingo, "rammed in two" by a freighter (there is a photograph). The 54ft-long (16.5m) Princess Taiping, powered only by cotton sails on three masts, was designed according to ancient specifications. Like the original Kon-Tiki, the raft used by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 expedition across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands. (Amazingly, there is a you tube video). Both expeditions set out to prove that folks other than the usual suspects could have made it here and back earlier than we thought.

There was another, similar, high-profile event with the building and sailing of the "Sea Stallion" Viking ship, which made the journey from Denmark to Ireland in 2007, fully blogged. The entries started with hopeful titles like "Building a Viking warship" and "the ship is launched", and quickly turned shorter and grimmer, with "a rough first night" and "hypothermia strikes" and "hampered by the weather" and "false hope"... suggesting 1) that Vikings were, perhaps not surprisingly, very hardy, and 2) reasons why they didn't have time to leave detailed on-voyage journals.

Still, I guess this stuff appeals to the same part of me that loves old maps, and that is the purported link to the blog.