Eric Fischer- Twitter and Flickr World Map - CC Cultural Product Copyright 2011

Eric Fischer of Oakland California has produced a stunning set of maps of flickr photos and Twitter tweets from geolocation tags in the posts.  These respatialize the world as lit up by these particular forms of new media/Web 2.0 use.  A higher resolution image of the world map is also online.   I especially like the North American map with its annotated areas and zoomable detail.  A Toronto Star article gives more detail, but browse the photostream of cities.  What is interesting is to see the lack of popularity of flickr in a city such as Jakarta or Singapore, and the obvious importance of blue twitter in suburbs (see Toronto).  Twitter follows main roads, suggesting the importance of tweeting from automobiles and public transport.  Mobility:  Twitter as commuting, flickr as tourist travel?   Spectacular tourism sites such as Banff and Jasper in the Rocky Mountains appear as red-orange flickr concentrations without tweets. These media settle like mists, differentially on the topography and the activity-scapes of everyday life.

-Rob

“Here it is, our next Web Trend Map. No Metro lines, no URLS. This time, it’s the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Plus: When they started tweeting and what they first said. It took quite some time until we had it in the shape we envisioned. Since there is a lot of data we processed to get it here, we’d like to ask you to give it a final check. Tell us if you find any errors, before we send the file to the printer.”

Datamasher maps US state-level statistics from the US census and other sources.  An example is their map of fast-food restaurants versus obesity rates (above).  Sometimes these are revealing, sometimes not, and sometimes their statistical reliability may not be good due to sample sizes.  Makes a nice map, however.

Rhizalabs’ FluTracker also does a global mapping of H1N1 influenza using Google:

Hidden Landscapes by Chris Thompson

Geographical Methodology as Spatialization and Topology (Part of “Theorizing Place: Interdisciplinary Trajectories” A Panel Discussion at the Canadian Association of Geographers Meeting, Carleton University, May 27, 2009):

This presentation focuses on the virtuality of place, an object of study which resists specification in material or topographic terms. In effect, place exceeds the boundaries of topography. It cannot be adequately mapped. This raises a methodological conundrum for geography which has only be solved via interdisciplinary innovation, leading geographers into the study of social and cultural categorization, and statistical analysis of spatial data. What is a geographer to do? A relational approach to ‘place’ foregrounds the tissue of geographical space and the multiple flows and passages through it. Multiple passages suggests that geography explore a multiple, n-dimensional topology as a paradigmatic shift out of Cartesian space.

Maybe geographical information systems already work in n-space, but my sense is no, and geographers think of cartography as a 3d and 2d endeavour.   Any thoughts?  This is a step toward a paper on topology as method for social science in the 21st century, part of my belief that at university level we should teach methodology as something evolving, to think past mastering a particular program and ask ourselves what is it for?  And, how do our chosen methods guide how and what we see in our studies?

Global Map of Male Circumcision Prevalence at Country Level

via

Douglas Wilson

- Anne

How could one avoid being just a technical end-user and late-adopter of Geographical Information Systems – that’s geodata or spatial data in other lingo : Does anyone have truly theoretical and methodological innovations in areas such as GIS for visualization of local and of community issues, locative and mobile media applications, GIS-amateur sketch map interfaces and cognitive mapping methods, or use of maps in a range of disciplines.

One example is Proboscis artist group’s  mapping – or is that unmapping? – of community issues.  The way they transform radio-controlled cars and other toys into ‘feral  robots’ equipped with eg. air quality sensors to allow schoolchildren to playfully gather data which is then posted up on interactive maps of their community.

Are we at at the beginning of a paradigm-shift in the use of GIS because these technologies have come off of the desktop onto portable devices.  Consider GPS devices, smart phones – almost ubiquitous in some industries.  What is the research agenda?

This is uniquely urban but the spill-over into touristic areas is already evident (take a drive through the Loire Valley with  a GPS enabled smart phone).

Are there examples of revitalizing old geodata (geodata for Edmonton goes back to 1963 but is in inaccessible formats) by making it available in museums, in exhibits or to the public for use in the form of downloadable and /or interactive maps?  Are their other projects such as Andre Lemos, Marilei Fiorelli and my locative art of drawing on Google Maps with a GPS logger?

How do we get from desktop/supercomputer style GIS to the scampering world of geotagging, geocaching and interactivedata accessed on the go (Google Earth on my mobile)?

-Rob

Barcelona-based artist Liz Kueneke:

Given the great number of inhabitants, all with their own perceptions and uses, there is literally an infinite amount of different meanings and interpretations of a city. Manhattan’s Urban Fabric is a public intervention which intends to show just a glimmer of this richness, and to make visible what normally remains invisible about a place: our opinions, impressions, and feelings about it. Participants answer various questions by sewing simple symbols into the map, and they are also welcome to embroider freely along the edges of the cloth. Through this work I want to offer a participatory experience to the people (and visitors) of Manhattan, which permits them to reflect upon their own use of the urban space.”

Part of last week’s Conflux festival.

- Anne

European Space Agency Envisat mosaic image of summer sea ice in the Arctic. I’m in Ottawa and Washington this month doing interviews for a preliminary project with Phil Steinberg (Florida State University) on contested sovereignties in the Arctic and on Canada’s ‘virtual sovereignty’ in the North. On the one hand, we are reliably told that the Northwest Passage is a non-issue in terms of international law and transit. But by many others we are told that this goes to the heart of Canadian identity, is a claim fraught with ambiguities and even if steadily asserted, it is a sovereignty which is relatively recent, residents rather reluctantly and belatedly accepted as Canadians, and is a territory inconsistently developed… Until the last 20 or 30 years. But despite the bombast, it would be very Canadian to really hope everyone loses interest and goes home!

-Rob