Destination maps are navigational aids designed to show anyone within a region how to reach a location (the destination). Hand-designed destination maps include only the most important roads in the region and are non-uniformly scaled to ensure that all of the important roads from the highways to the residential streets are visible. We present the first automated system for creating such destination maps based on the design principles used by mapmakers.

Turn your spreadsheet into a map

Synecdoche’s a term from literature, best explained as “the part representing a whole“. So: for me, Tower Bridge is synecdoche, for the Thames, for London, for the city, for home. Low Flying Rocks is synecdoche not only for the scale of the universe, all the activity in the solar system, the earth’s place in that – but also for NASA, for science, for discovery.

Synecdoche allows you to make big, terrifying data, human-scale.

We often think of rivers as following a given path for the course of its life, but really, the path changes over time as the flow cuts into the earth. The water flows through old and new and back again. In 1944, cartographer Harold Fisk mapped the current Mississippi River. It's the white trail. Then Fisk used old geological maps to display old paths. They're the old colored paths. And what you get is this long run of windy, snake-like things. [Twisted History | Thanks, Michael]

Fake filming locations of Paramount Studios
OneGeology Wants to Be Geological Equivalent of Google Maps
See the World Through SimCity’s Eyes – One Up On OnionMap

Do you know who owns the Arctic? As it turns out, it's a pretty messy subject:

In August 2007 Russian scientists sent a submarine to the Arctic Ocean seabed at 90° North to gather data in support of Russia's claim that the North Pole is part of the Russian continental shelf. The expedition provoked a hostile reaction from other Arctic littoral states and prompted media speculation that Russia's action might trigger a "new Cold War" over the resources of the Arctic.

Luckily things are at least a little more in control now though. Well, sort of. Canada, Denmark and the US still need to define their continental shelf limits. Keep in mind that the shelf can be more than 200 nautical miles from these countries' coastal baselines.

The International Boundaries Research Unit provides this map [pdf] of claimed boundaries and areas that will potentially be claimed in the future.

[via]

Maps that changed the world
Global forest heights mapped in detail by NASA
Neighborhood Boundaries with Flickr Shapefiles

Next gen street views from Microsoft.

Traverse Me is a map drawn by walking across campus with a GPS device to invite the viewer to see a different landscape to that which surrounds them. It questions the possibilities of where they are and inspires a personal reading of their movements and explorations of the campus.

From unrivaled vision science expertise, 2d3 delivers imaging technology to extract, manipulate, combine, create and enhance. We bridge the space between 2D and 3D, between the virtual and the real.

Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the Historypin map. Uniquely, Historypin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peaks into the past.

Part 1: Loading, projecting, and drawing geodata

I’m getting into more canvas and JavaScript for interactive mapping. Much of the Flash/ActionScript work I’ve written or come to rely upon is directly portable to JS/canvas. What’s missing is a sweet RIA framework and IDE for the kind of development Flash and Flex have made possible for years.

Luckily it’s not hard to roll our own interactive web map using web standard technologies. In this post I’m just showing off the basics: dynamically loading geodata, projecting it client-side, and rendering to the canvas element.

Hopefully the above map shows up for you. It’s loaded into this blog post with dynamic KML data, projected using the Proj4js library, and drawn onto HTML’s canvas element using JavaScript. You can check out the P.O.C. on a separate page.

Loading geographic data
It all starts with data. Points, polylines, or polygons — typically defined by latitude/longitude coordinates. Your data may be in a CSV file or in a database. For a simple interactive web map it’s best if it’s in a common GIS file format, like the Shapefile or KML.

These days, it’s not too hard to load a geographic layer on top of a web map — using Google Maps or OpenLayers, say. But since we’re looking down the road to interactivity, custom projections, and thematic mapping, it’s best to roll our own. Luckily, getting the data in is pretty easy.

In ActionScript I would use Edwin van Rijkom’s ESRI SHP parser, my own E00 parser, or some simple custom methods I’ve written to load in KML documents. Tom Carden of Stamen has done some great work porting the AS3 SHP library to JavaScript, with additional classes and methods to allow basic layering, panning, and zooming.

Carden’s classes are great; for demo purposes, and to keep this as lightweight as possible, I’ve just written a quick JavaScript method to grab what I need from a KML document:

$.get( "data/kml/generalized_african_countries.kml", function( xml ) {
    var features = new Array();
    $( xml ).find( 'Placemark' ).each( function() {
        var rings = new Array();
        $( this ).find( 'outerBoundaryIs' ).each( function() {
            var ring = new Array();
            var coordsText = $( this ).find( 'coordinates' ).text();
            var coordStrings = coordsText.split( ' ' );
            for ( var coordText in coordStrings ) {
                var coordinate = new Array();
                var coordSplit = coordStrings[ coordText ].split( ',' );
                for ( var coordInd in coordSplit ) coordinate.push( Number( coordSplit[ coordInd ] ) );
                ring.push( coordinate );
            }
            rings.push( ring );
        } );
        features.push( rings );
    } );
       
    /* feature coordinates all loaded -- now do something with them */
       
} );
You’ll notice a bit of jQuery in there. And you’ll also notice that it grabs only coordinate data and works only for polygons. But it produces an array of feature coordinates, which is an array of ring coordinates, which is an array of lat/long coordinates, which is all we need for the current application.

Projecting geographic data
One of my biggest beefs with the typical online map providers is that they’re all rendered in a Mercator projection. No problem for most purposes (and great for producing those 90 degree road intersections), but not so great for country-level mapping and bad for many thematic mapping pursuits. That’s one reason we’re rolling our own here.

PROJ.4 is a generally sweet projections library, originally written in C by Gerald Evenden then of the USGS. It’s been ported to JavaScript as Proj4js. To use it you just have to define source and a dest objects:

Proj4js.defs[ 'albersEqualArea_Africa' ] = '+title= albers_AFR\
                                            +proj=aea\
                                            +lat_1=20\
                                            +lat_2=-23\
                                            +lat_0=0\
                                            +lon_0=25\
                                            +x_0=0\
                                            +y_0=0\
                                            +ellps=WGS84\
                                            +datum=WGS84\
                                            +units=m\
                                            +no_defs';
var source = new Proj4js.Proj( 'WGS:84' );
var dest = new Proj4js.Proj( 'albersEqualArea_Africa' );
And thereafter you can call

Proj4js.transform( source, dest, pt );
where pt is any object with x and y properties. So all coordinates gathered from the KML above can be run through the Proj4js.transform() method, in this case applying a custom Albers Equal Area projection (proj=aea) for the African continent.

Drawing geographic data on the canvas element
The results of the above can be easily rendered to HTML’s canvas element using JavaScript. I’m used to ActionScript’s Graphics class, and its assorted vector drawing methods. Of course, given the common ECMAScript heritage, the JS methods are nearly identical. So the projected linework is rendered thusly:

function drawPolygonFeatures( features, minX, maxX, minY, maxY )
{
    var c_canvas = document.getElementById( "map" );
    var context = c_canvas.getContext("2d");
    var multiFactor = Math.min( c_canvas.width / ( maxX - minX ), c_canvas.height / ( maxY - minY ) );
    var x = 0; var y = 0;
    for ( var featureNum in features ) {
        for ( var ringNum in features[ featureNum ] ) {
            var ring = features[ featureNum ][ ringNum ];
            context.moveTo( ( ring[ 0 ][ 0 ] - minX ) * multiFactor, c_canvas.height - ( ring[ 0 ][ 1 ] - minY ) * multiFactor );                  
            for ( var coordNum = 1; coordNum < ring.length; coordNum++ ) {
                x = ( ring[ coordNum ][ 0 ] - minX ) * multiFactor;
                y = c_canvas.height - ( ring[ coordNum ][ 1 ] - minY ) * multiFactor;
                context.lineTo( x, y );
            }
        }
    }
    context.shadowOffsetX = context.shadowOffsetY = 3;
    context.shadowBlur    = 4;
    context.shadowColor   = 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5)';
    context.fillStyle = "#0099cc";
    context.fill();
    context.shadowOffsetX = context.shadowOffsetY = context.shadowBlur = 0;
    context.strokeStyle = "#fff";
    context.stroke();
}
That method’s made a bit longer by that bitchin’ drop shadow (sorry Firefox, but you Konqueror folks should be cool). See above, or the P.O.C. on a separate page.

Up next
So far this has been pretty sweet: we’ve loaded coordinate data dynamically, projected it, and drawn it to the canvas element. But it hasn’t exactly lived up to the “interactive” part of the title. Next time I hope to get going on panning and zooming, feature mouse-over, and perhaps even attribute loading and thematic mapping.

In a different look to the let's-map-geotagged-photos idea, photographer Eric Fischer maps picture locations of major cities in the world.

The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each one. This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures. The central cluster of each map is not necessarily in the center of each image, because the image bounds are chosen to include as many geotagged locations as possible near the central cluster. All the maps are to the same scale, chosen to be just large enough for the central New York cluster to fit.

Additionally, trace color indicates mode of transportation. Black is walking, red is bicycling, and blue is moving by motor vehicle. From what I gather, photos either come straight from Flickr or a teamed group of people. Unfortunately, that's all I can find though. Some more explanation would probably make these a lot more enjoyable. Nevertheless, they're nice to look at.

Major streets emerge, bridges with bicycle lanes appear, and they've got a sexy spider web thing going for them.

Here are the maps for London and San Francisco, respectively.

Check out Fischer's full set on Flickr.

Update: Fischer comments, "I got the photo locations from the Flickr and Picasa search APIs. The base maps that they are plotted on top of are from OpenStreetMap. I wrote some perl scripts to identify and plot the clusters of locations. The scripts generate PostScript which I then converted to JPEGs using Ghostscript."

Mapping with R and other free and open-source programs feels clunky and hacked-together at times. Tomislav Hengl provides a free e-book, A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping, that can hopefully help you with such tools.

[Sebastian Campion / Urban Cursor / 2009]

A few weeks ago the Cyprus-based NeMe art/theory platform published a compelling essay entitled Writing Within the Map produced by the scholar and artist Jeremy Hight. The text is engaging for a number of reasons – it sharply delineates how maps are temporal artifacts, interrogates the legacy of publishing and it provides a subtle examination of the narrative qualities of space. Contemporary media and technology writing would be in a much better state if all the tech journalists sipping on the augmented reality (AR) Kool-Aid—undoubtedly spiked with hallucinogens by the marketing team—read Hight's text and spent some time considering his nuanced perspective. The essay touches on a number of topics and I'd like to unpack a handful of these and discuss some related developments.

Perhaps the most noteworthy quality of Writing Within the Map is how closely it hugs the literary tradition. Hight points to a number of works of fiction that prefigure the present-day relationship between technology and the city – which we might broadly describe as read/write urbanism (see Shepard & Greenfield's conversation about that terminology). Both Mildorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) and George Perec's Life: A User's Manual (1978) are leveraged as examples of how fiction can be constructed as a experimental frame rather than rely on the conventions of "the novel" to tell stories. Specifically, these texts are examined as encyclopedic puzzles that require the reader to engage the non-standard parameters of the narrative in order to navigate. Hight springboards from these examples of non-linear fiction into the "spatialized narratives, multi-sensory mapping and the possibility of tagging" in AR and locative media and in making this connection explicit he keeps us firmly grounded in the 20th century. An excerpt:
To "read" a place is no longer about placing a singular narrative upon it, triggered from a map, nor is this notion of "reading" only to have a singular, unalterable experience or interpretation. To "publish" has long been a general association of taking a work and finding a print or web space for it to be presented as more than just a work in progress. This has also long been problematic as well as a gross oversimplification. To "publish" is also self publication and distribution in communities or like minded groups without the hard read of publication or rejection. Well, aren’t cities the same? Aren't all places to be interpreted as such?

Hight transitions from scrutinizing notions of reading and publishing into a vital discussion of how point of view (POV) plays out in literature and space. Conversations about first and third-person narrative highlight how both these strategies for storytelling engender the delineation of experience and cave paintings, trail markings, written prose and AR overlays are all equalized as related techniques of graphic communication. Hight's central question: what is the significance of the fact that the map can now function as "the archive" and act as the receptacle in which we store everything – fact and fiction, qualitative and quantitative information, both subjective and objective perspectives. One one hand High is proposing an unruly mess—information overload—but one can't help but imagine how fascinating it would be to navigate a map of a city like Rome, where the layers of historical annotations would reflect the patinaed palimpsest of the urban fabric.

[Holden Caulfield's Manhattan in The Catcher in the Rye]

Given the traditional uses of maps for navigation and record-keeping, methodically geolocating fictional events may seem indulgent or even irrelevant. However, the application of this kind of rigor may be just what the humanities need – this kind of approach could definitely inform cultural geography and literary studies. The above still is from an interactive map produced by The New York Times Graphic Department (in January) that depicts the site of numerous passages from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In browsing these quotes the linear narrative of the source novel disintegrates – a carefully orchestrated procession of scenes are scattered across the city like seeds thrown into the wind. This recontextualization of narrative raises two questions:

How might narrative and the walking tour intersect? (see Conor McGarrigle's 2008 project Joyce Walks)
Reverse engineering the cartography that underlies a novel is simple enough, but what fiction and new media work might we look to as examples of spatial narratives? (that is not a rhetorical question - please leave links and suggestions as comments)

These questions are obviously not limited to literature as location scouting within the pre-production stages of a commercial film project explicitly spatializes narrative. The irony here is that places are (generally) used as "extras" – to sub in for inaccessible locations in favour of cheap approximations. A great example of a project that capitalizes on the tension between artifice and reality is Thom Andersen's 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, an exhaustive excavation of the mythologized (and genericized) L.A. of 20th century American cinema.

[Layar AR Browser / comprehensive overview]

A particularly evocative moment in Writing Within the Map occurs in schematizing third-person POV in narrative as "…the distant 'he' or 'she' that allows text to be a camera that can zoom along a surface, into space, race down to atoms…" One can't help but wonder if this is the description of kaleidoscopic prose or a seamless 3D interface. While Hight is discussing perspective shifts in locative narrative, I've heard this desire for infinitesimal detail elsewhere over the last several months. Last fall, when I was guest editing the ScienceBlogs Revolutionary Minds Think Tank blog, one of the most provocative contributors was Nick Matzke. When asked what fields he would combine to capitalize on the possibilities of cross-disciplinary research, Matzke (an evolutionary biologist) said history, good "old-fashioned, document-based, interpretive history" could greatly benefit from a technological overhaul. Pointing at the digitization of libraries and alluding to exhaustive text analysis and cross-referencing of historical records, biographical information and the corpus of print media, Matzke proposed docuinformatics – a workflow for quantifying and analyzing influence (and the psychological profile) of significant historical figures. The proposal was undoubtedly speculative but very exciting.

Quantitative Cultural Analysis (QCA) is also a terminology associated with the Software Studies Initiative's Cultural Analytics project. In How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analytics for Beginners (2009), Lev Manovich posed the following question to humanity scholars:
If slides made possible art history, and if a movie projector and video recorder enabled film studies, what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the use of interactive visualization and data analysis of large cultural data sets?

This question is not dissimilar to Hight's – now that the map is moving towards becoming a "wiki-space", what new modes of representation will emerge?

[Sergei Larenkov / Leningrad merges with St. Petersburg / via: Kosmograd]

Another facet of Writing Within the Map focuses on how maps function as historical documents and how archival information might be deployed in the present. Hight presents a scene of "spatial spelunking" where an explorer moving through downtown Detroit is privy to augmentations that detail the past architectural configurations of the fabulous ruins of Motor City landmarks. In this example, AR functions to amplify historical echoes and call into question the fixity of the space we inhabit. This discussion of foregrounding the past is nicely complimented by The Museum of the Phantom City, an iPhone application that allows inhabitants and visitors of New York City to consider the sites of never realized speculative architectural proposals. Geoff Manaugh nailed the uncanny quality of this app when he discussed it last fall: "You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you're being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur…" We've always used maps as historical records but what are the implications of carrying around archives of unrealized futures on our mobile devices? Armed with (or perhaps encumbered by) this wealth of information, urban navigation and exploration could be drastically transformed.

Using the map to destabalize our perception of time dovetails with some of the main points in Bruce Sterling's recent atemporality keynote at Transmediale. Sterling has really been on a roll of late and he seems to have encapsulated his broad awareness of contemporary manufacturing practice, locative media and social software to astutely contextualize a number of mid-progress cultural shifts. Sterling on the current milieu:
Becoming 'multi-temporal', rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we are closer to a potentially objective history than anybody has ever been.

A "potentially objective history" – that brings us back to docuinformatics, Cultural Analytics and Hight's third-person POV in mapping and literature. Beyond topical relevance it is appropriate to cite Sterling here as his talk and Writing Within the Map are probably the most exciting thinking on media and culture that I've encountered so far this year – th[…]