Letters From Here

Last summer, we wrote about a DIY aerial mapmaking kit from The Public Laboratory for Open Science and Technology that enables anyone with $95, a camera, and some helium to become a citizen cartographer. The project empowers people to document events (oil spills, Occupy protests) that official mapmakers might overlook. But this kind of grassroots aerial surveying (distinct from other forms of grassroots mapping) also has another benefit: It produces bird’s-eye images that are sharper and more beautiful than airplanes and satellites can capture.

To that end, a cache of more than 100 maps from the Public Lab project have now been incorporated into Google Earth itself, signaling some nice recognition of rogue mappers (and their DIY data) by the biggest commercial behemoth in the field. If you happen to stumble in your Google Earth wanders across a patch of surprisingly high-resolution landscape, you may be looking at a Public Lab contribution. Or, if you want to go looking for these images with a little less happenstance, you can also find all of them indexed in this Google Earth KML file.

 (via DIY Mapping Goes Mainstream - Emily Badger - The Atlantic Cities)

transitmaps:

Weekend Fun: Name That Transit System!

Here’s something a bit different, just for kicks. These extremely abstracted topological diagrams of U.S. rail transit systems were sent to me by Herbie Markwort, who runs the Gateway Streets blog about transportation issues in St. Louis.

Personally, I love the way that these diagrams look. Simplified down to their bare essentials — connecting points and termini — the systems take on an almost runic appearance. As much as possible, the distance between connection points is kept the same in these diagrams, regardless of the length of the lines in real life.

Obviously then, diagram “A” could represent any of the single-line rail systems in the U.S. — Buffalo, Phoenix, Seattle, et al — and diagram “B” represents a system (or systems) with just one branch line extending from a main trunk line. It’s certainly a fascinating way to look at something familiar from a different viewpoint, and had me scratching my head for quite a while before Herbie let me in on the answers.

Let me know what you think they are — reblog, reply, or use the Disqus commenting system to post your answers.

Any guesses?

(via secretrepublic)

In his free time, linguist Rick Aschmann collected a treasure trove of information on the English dialects of North America on his website, North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns. The centerpiece of the site is a hugely detailed interactive dialect map of North America. The map is linked to a huge collection of audio samples of local dialects.

(via Interactive Map of North American English Dialects)

Last May, New Yorkers were so peeved abuot noise pollution that they called in 4,625 complaints to the city’s nonemergency number, which was more than any other month. You can see the entire year’s expression of mass annoyance nicely visualized in the below maps, created by Brooklyn-based designer Karl Sluis. This cacophonic cartography represents the 40,412 noise complaints that the authorities received in 2012, which touch on everything from police sirens to “lawn-care equipment” to “other animals.” (Dang porch parakeets!)

Sluis was inspired to craft his “2012 Manhattan Noise Complaints,” which actually is not the first noise map of New York, after learning that the city was offering the data on an open platform. “I was drawn to the noise complaints because they reveal a lot about the structure and ecology of the city,” he says. “The map was a good excuse to get my hands dirty with some data and I uncovered more than a few surprising patterns and stories.”

 (via Yo, I’m Trying to Sleep Here! New York’s Wonderful Map of Noise - John Metcalfe - The Atlantic Cities)

accordingtomac:

(Source: Radical Cartography)

(via secretrepublic)

thejogging:

meaning, 2013

screenshot of a desperate search

•••

For her scholarly research article, Missed Connections - Seen but not spoken to: An atlast of where we’re (almost) finding love published in this month’s issue of Psychology Today, Dorothy Gambrell delved into the Missed Connections posts on Craigslist to see where Americans are trying to find love.

The Missed Connections Map - Neatorama

It might feel like our communications systems have evolved past the point where we’d need tons of cables, but it couldn’t be further from the truth—undersea cables are an integral part of the internet’s backbone, as we investigated here. But where are they, exactly, and which cable links which hubs?

TeleGeography makes these great four-color graphics every year that show exactly that—definitely worth a look. Check out this year’s map here.

(via All Of The World’s Undersea Cables In One Map | Popular Science)

Using tags, with which users describe the content of the photos, he presented popular subjects as word clouds, located at the weighted center of frequency. We can see below, for example, that visitors are photographing the Golden Gate Bridge mostly from two places: the three Fort Mason piers, and halfway out on the Van Ness pier. For photographs of Alcatraz, the legendary island-prison, one viewpoint, at the end of the jetty, is predominant. The red-to-blue color scale of the circles indicates what Dunkel calls “second-level clustering” — whether a viewpoint is marginally more or less popular than the area mean.

(via What Flickr Can Teach Us About the Way We Photograph Cities - Technology - The Atlantic Cities)

Previously: Pictures of the Familiar