Visualizing the Paris metro system

 Mapping  Comments Off
Apr 152013
 

Parisian subway

Data visualization group Dataveyes looks closer at the Paris metro system from a time and crowd point of view.

This visualization offers to challenge the way we traditionally view our 2D metro maps. Métropolitain takes on an unexpected gamble: using cold, abstract figures to take the pulse of a hectic and feverish metropolis. The metro map is no longer arbitrarily dictated by the spatial distance between two points. By playing around with two extra variables — time and crowds — users can transform the map, view it in 3D and unveil the true reality behind their daily commute.

No doubt inspired by the Travel Time Tube Map of the London Underground by Tom Carden, Métropolitain lets you select a station and the lines morph to represent how long it takes to get to other stations. A layer underneath is a heatmap that shows annual incoming traffic per station.

Finally, you can switch between 2-D and 3-D. I'm not sure if the extra dimension adds much from an understanding point of view, but it is fun to play with. [via infosthetics]

Map: Travel safety by country

 Mapping, safety  Comments Off
Apr 092013
 

Dangerous travel

As summer rolls around here on this side of the planet, CBC News mapped countries to avoid in your travel plans, based on foreign travel advisories from the Canada Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Naturally, Canada isn't colored on the map because the map was made for Canadians, but I think it's safe to assume that they'd be colored green too and most, if not all, of the advisories apply to those of us here in the United States. [Thanks, John]

An experimental map service using 3-D data

 interactive, Mapping  Comments Off
Apr 022013
 

Stamen Here

For the past few months, Stamen Design has been working with 3-D data from Nokia's Here. Something pretty came out of the experiment.

For your viewing, embedding, linking, and otherwise internet-ing pleasure: http://here.stamen.com/ is live today. It uses 3D data from HERE for San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin to create city-wide 3D browsable maps, and it does this in the browser (though you'll need a WebGL-enabled browser to see it). As in many of our other mapping projects, the urls change dynamically depending on location and other factors, and the data conforms, more or less, to the Tile Map Service specification. What this means, among other things, is that it's not only possible to link to and embed these maps at specific locations and zoom levels, but that it's easy—and as we've seen with Citytracking, easy is good.

There are a bunch of views to play with, and you should try all of them. My favorites though are the city-planning look in Pinstripe and the glowing aesthetic of the height view.

Projects Selected & Participate in 2012-13 Digital Field Scholarship Sandbox

 Collaboration, geospatial, GIS, Liberal Education, Mapping, Mobile, pedagogy, technology  Comments Off
Apr 022013
 

In August 2012 Lewis and Clark College invited members of the NITLE network to experiment with digital field scholarship by playing in a digital field scholarship sandbox.  These projects were selected and have been contributing to a collaborative website for digital field scholarship, https://sge.lclark.edu/dfs/. View each project’s individual page to find out more. Davidson College, Math [...]

Gun deaths since Sandy Hook

 Animation, Mapping  Comments Off
Mar 292013
 

Gun deaths since Sandy Hook

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was horrible, but there have been thousands of gun deaths since. Huffington Post is mapping them.

Circles represent the number of deaths in a city, and the larger a circle the higher the count. A bar chart on the bottom shows the data over time and serves as a navigation device. Click on a day or a location, and the names of victims appear on the right with a link to the related news story.

See also: Periscopic's work on the topic, which now has filters and is updated in real-time.

Also: episodes 487 and 488 of This American Life, which focus on Harper High School in Chicago, where gang violence is a daily concern.

A new brand of cartographer

 Cartography, Mapping  Comments Off
Mar 212013
 

Emily Underwood on new cartographers and the growing field:

Geographers have traditionally studied how the natural environment contributes to human society and vice versa, whereas cartographers have focused more explicitly on the art and science of mapmaking. Over the past couple of decades, a new field has emerged: geographical information systems (GIS), blending the study and expression of geographic information. Cartography and geography have overlapped and spawned innumerable subspecialties and applications. Modern geographers and cartographers are involved in diverse projects: tracking fleets of vehicles or products, helping customers locate a Dunkin' Donuts, modeling environmental scenarios such as oil spills, and studying the spread of disease.

You could substitute visualization and statistics for cartography throughout, and it'd almost all still be valid. The reoccurring theme is that although academic programs can be fine resources, most of your success has to do with what you can learn on your own, as data-related fields are changing fast.

App shows what the Internet looks like

 Internet, iOS, Mapping  Comments Off
Mar 152013
 

what the internet looks like

In a collaboration between PEER 1 Hosting, Steamclock Software, and Jeff Johnston, the Map of the Internet app provides a picture of what the physical Internet looks like.

Users can view Internet service providers (ISPs), Internet exchange points, universities and other organizations through two view options — Globe and Network. The app also allows users to generate a trace route between where they are located to a destination node, search for where popular companies and domains are, as well as identify their current location on the map.

I can't say how accurate it is or if the described mechanisms are accurate, but it sure is fun to play with. The view above and a globe are placed a three-dimensional space, and you can zoom and rotate as you please. There's also a time slider, so you can see changes to the Internet over the years.

Get it for free on iTunes.

A CNNMoney segment of the app in action:

Visualizing Geography: Maps, Space, Place, and Pedagogy

 Academia, Cartography, digital humanities, geography, Mapping, maps, Visualization  Comments Off
Mar 122013
 

Mapping technology has recently been the focus of much critical attention as evidenced by numerous efforts to develop new ways of visualizing physical and textual spaces. The proliferation of tools such as Neatline, The DM Project, Google Earth, and Walking Through Time has made mapping the stuff of both academic endeavours and everyday life.

read more

Average commute times mapped

 Mapping  Comments Off
Mar 072013
 

Los Angeles commute

The United States Census Bureau just released county-level commute estimates for 2011, based on the American Community Survey (that thing so many people seem to be against).

About 8.1 percent of U.S. workers have commutes of 60 minutes or longer, 4.3 percent work from home, and nearly 600,000 full-time workers had "megacommutes" of at least 90 minutes and 50 miles. The average one-way daily commute for workers across the country is 25.5 minutes, and one in four commuters leave their county to work.

The Bureau graphic isn't very good [PDF], but WNYC plugged the data into a map, which is a lot more informative.

There's also a link to download the data on the bottom left of the WNYC map in CSV format, in case you want to try your hand at making a choropleth map. Or you can grab some flow data from the Census Bureau.

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