Artist Stephen Walter has found and documented the city's underground complexion in a hand-drawn map of subterranean London. Part of a new exhibition running at the London Transport Museum, Walter's map reveals the buried history of the city, and also the underground infrastructure that keeps it running. From the underground transportation network to homicides to World War II underground shelters, the map bring the under-recognized and maybe even forgotten parts of the city to the surface.... The space under our feet reveals the history of the world and us as a species. Its can be read like a layer-cake book. It holds secrets and offers a huge amount of untapped space.

“Changing Waters” looks at the meteorological and oceanic interactions within the Gulf of Maine. Using data from NOAA and GOMOSS buoys within the Gulf of Maine, as well as weather stations along the coast, I am translating data that explores the seasonal variations of marine life by looking at the interactions of atmospheric and marine data. Elements of the rich New England fishing history are also included. This large-scale installation consists of a large wall installation (33 feet wide) that plots information through the geographic anchors of a map of the Gulf of Maine, as well as a series of large, hanging structures (10 feet high) that look at more specific biological, chemical or geophysical relationships between marine ecosystems and weather patterns.

We've just rolled out a new way for you to make atlases of the world, called Field Papers. Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, into the field. You can scribble on it, add features, or make notes about the area, all without a GPS or complicated GIS software... Once you've annotated your atlas, you can upload photographs of each page back into the system to transcribe your notes into digital form. Each atlas gets its own page on Field Papers, and a simple history of edits and activity which you can share with friends or colleagues, and download for later analysis.

There are 5,393 carceral facilities in the United States, places where people are held in local jails, state prisons, federal corrections facilities, immigration detention centers – “anywhere where an individual can be sort of confined and locked up,” explains Josh Begley, “and, in some of the bigger instances, warehoused in one place.” Begley is a master’s student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University. He wanted to graphically represent what all of this means, to communicate not just the sheer quantity of prisons in America (a number that has been booming for decades), but their volume on our landscape. As part of a class project, he created the oddly beautiful website Prison Map, which offers a mashed-up birds-eye view of all of these places, taken from Google Satellite images.... One group in particular, the Prison Policy Initiative, and its project Prisoners of the Census, has done much of the work of cataloging all of these facilities and their geographic locations. By translating that data into an almost artistic rendering, Begley’s project makes visible an element of our communities that’s seldom seen. Some of the most striking images are those of rural prisons, which project intricate patterns onto otherwise empty landscapes... “The takeaway, at least for me, is really about this notion of space,” he says. “The amount of sheer materials that have had to go into building these buildings for the purposes of essentially warehousing people is really impossible for me to wrap my head around. We’re used to aerial images of nation-states overseas, and we’ll see a diagram of some compound that is going to be bombed or something. But rarely do we look at these spaces in our backyard and think critically about them.”

As derived from its Latin source, forensics is the art of the forum; the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering.

Forensics includes not only the speech acts of humans, but also the interpreted speech of things, mediated by an expert or a set of technologies. The art of forensics thus includes both field-work and forum-work. Although forensics is generally understood as the application of science in service to the law, that is to say, as an investigative tool within the field, forensics is also a tool of persuasion that uses science rhetorically to speak within public and legal forums.

The project of Forensic Architecture brings different modes of technical modelling and analysis to bear upon violations of human rights and the laws of war as they are registered in and by space. We go on field studies to examine architectural, urban or infrastructure damage, but we also examine the remnants of violence as captured by different media – satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies, GPS mapping, photography, activist and media footage, ground penetrating radar, mobile phone videos, CCTV footage, maps, and eyewitness reports.

Through the synthesis of these acts of human and technological witnessing we seek to recreate a chain of events and elaborate upon their consequences; making legible the multiple forces at play within sites of violence. Once this data is compiled and cross-referenced it can be used by courts, tribunals, and human rights organisations — the multiple forums of international justice.

Chris Milk’s imagery and the Arcade Fire’s lyrics suggest a take on modernism and (sub)urbanism more ambivalent than Bachelard, whose critical bifurcation of nature and culture is either supported or (my preference) radically undermined by the video, depending on one’s interpretation.

But the film is also undeniably progressive. The project is enabled and inspired by a productive connection between modern technology and experiences of suburbia, the ultiamte meaning of which only emerges through their collaboration here. The interactive interface, like the suburbs, is partly about disconnection and the growing divide between people, spaces and time, between social interlocutors and participants in the creation of meaning. However, the content of the video, like Bachelard’s house, reconnects us temporally to the space and time of the past, a personal and subjective past enabled by the most communal of media.

Viewshare is a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections.

The basic challenge for humanists comes from adopting visualizations that don’t suit our fundamental epistemological values. Obviously humanism is not monolithic. But methods of statistical analysis and empirical observation are grafted onto the humanities, they were not created from within the traditions of textual analysis and study. Put simply, the distinction between humanistic and empirical methods is the difference between interpretation and scientific positivism. I have no quarrel with the latter, only with the ways visualization techniques from the natural and social sciences have been adopted for use in the humanities. The result is reductive, and in most instances, produces a reification of misinformation. Exceptions exist...

Nicolas Felton’s work is a performance, nearly parodic, of the process with which I take issue... what gives his work a humanistic spin is the way it activates the reader/viewer into consideration of how one is or is not like Felton. The gap of critical thought is the space for production of interpretation as an generative, recognized, substantive part of the activity of a text or image....

Yannis Loukassis, a designer/scholar I met recently, has produced some remarkable visualizations of urban geography in a course he developed on SurfaceCities. These maps are humanistic. They are built as an expression of spatial experience, rather than assuming space as a given that can be shown on a Google map. The difference between putting humanistic information into a pre-set convention – e.g. using a standard metric timeline to show experiential or relativistic records—and using these experiential foundations to build the basic model is enormous. I could cite other examples. Stuart Dunn’s work with modelling experience in prehistoric structures in Britain, Leif Isaksen’s work on Ptolemaic mapping, Chris Johansson’s work on point of view systems within the Roman Forum—each has engaged humanistic experience in the content model of their digital projects in interesting ways.

What’s at stake is the cultural authority of the humanities. If human beings matter, in their individual and collective existence, not as data points in the management of statistical information, but as persons living actual lives, then finding ways to represent them within the digital environment is important. If the value of interpretative approaches to epistemology matters, it is because it undoes the fundamental assumptions of univocal authority, singularity of point of view, and absolute values.

Visualizing locative and time based data on distorted maps...

Maps are normally based on a trustworthy and objective selection of public data. Thus, can a map visualizing personal information be considered as public? Let’s say we limit data to very basic and factual location-time coordinates of our movement in the city. Can a map built from private data be public?

In the first version of SubMap we present three print maps which show the city from 'our point of view'. We chose our homes as epicenters of these unique, spherical, perspectival distortions.

Our first intention was to draw a subjective map of Budapest that represents our preferred places or memories in the city. To achieve this, we considered to use perspective as analogy. The same way things look larger if they are closer to us, we wanted to literally enlarge areas on the map which we feel more connected with. At the same time, locations further away or of less importance loose focus and become smaller.

I explore the current fascination with locative media devices and applications — such as Google Maps software, the Star Walk augmented reality application, and the Blendr social networking platform — as a way to consider the technological and spatial mediation of desire, subjectivity, and cultural imagination. I show how human interaction with mobile spatial technologies enable and recuperate forms of belief and imagination that are enmeshed with affective states of wonder, mystery, or meaningful enchantment with the world. Locative media operate as “allegorical machines” where an imagined or informational otherspace is generated by a mediated encounter with physical space leading to the development of elaborate assemblages of material and ideal dimensions of culture.

In this way, contemporary locative media share significant antecedents with older spatial navigation and orientation technologies. I utilize a media archaeological approach that relies on scholarship from communication studies, geography, and continental philosophy to interrogate the armillary sphere, astrolabe, magnetic compass, and dowsing rod. My work suggests that the longstanding human relationship with forms of locative media extend far beyond modern “new” media.

He chronicles his life choices and epiphanies, guides us through nature’s sonic treasures, makes interesting assertions about the musicianship of animals (human and nonhuman), and begs us to pay attention.

In Krause’s world, everything is seen through the lens of sound. He even maps by ear. In one fascinating passage, he surveys a Costa Rican jungle, dispensing with the “100-meter square grids,” which anyway “nonhuman animals don’t understand.” He ends up with “amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.” Yes, I thought, as irritable honks floated up Broadway and through the window of my apartment: we all live on mutating maps, in the land of the audible, whether we like it or not. Krause offers endless odes to sonic nuances: the timbres of waves crashing on the world’s beaches, the echo effects brought on by dew, the acoustics of night and day, the dry, hot rattles of deserts, the way baboons bounce their voices off granite outcroppings, to send them deep into the forest. But at the same time that he wants us to feel sound’s sensual pleasure, he wants us to respect it as an indispensable tool of knowledge. Krause records a forest, before and after environmentally sensitive, “selective” logging. Though the forest appears mostly unchanged to the eye, the soundscape is devastated; the true damage can only be heard.

The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia pre-dates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid expansion of the trade following the discovery of printing in Mainz, Germany around the middle of the fifteenth century is a topic of great importance to the history of European civilization. This website uses Flash to depict the spread of European printing in a manner that allows a user to control dates and other variables.

"The website offers users a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map in relation to a series of global issues. Users download data sets, maps and animations which can be shared across the Internet through websites, blogs and email.

SHOW® covers a wide scope of subjects based on data sets provided by the most authoritative sources in their respective fields."

Throughout graduate school I heard tales of the Denis Wood’s outrageous dissertation, curiously titled I Don’t Want To But I Will. Of particular interest are the scathing Acknowledgments, where Denis took his advisors to task. A worn copy of the Acknowledgments was passed among grad students as a bit of intellectual contraband.

But the content was what was most important. It’s a crazy dissertation. It’s about maps, mental maps, getting kicked off a bus, psychogeography, single element veridicality analysis, Europe, cartography, Kevin Lynch, passed-out subjects, Peter Gould, psychogeomorphology, the Shirelles, and the invention of “Environmental a” – a language for mapping. Among other things. It is driving the wrong way down the one-way-street of academia.

maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free.

There are three styles available: toner, terrain, watercolor:

Toner is about stripping online cartography down to its absolute essentials. It uses just black and white, describing a baseline that other kinds of data can be layered on. Stripping out any kind of color or image makes it easier to like focus on the interactive nature of online cartography: when do different labels show up for different cities? what should the thickness of freeways be at different zoom levels? and so forth. This project is the one that Nathaniel is hacking on at all hours, and it's great to be seeing Natural Earth data get more tightly integrated into the project over time.
Terrain occupies a middle ground: "shaded hills, nice big text, and green where it belongs." In keeping with City Tracking's mandate to make it easier for people to tell stories about cities, this is an open-source alternative to Google's terrain maps, and it uses all open-source software like Skeletron to improve on the base line cartographic experience. Mike has been heading up this design, with help from Gem Spear and Nelson Minar.
Watercolor pushes through to the other side of normal, bending the rules of traditional legibility in order to explore some new terrain. It incorporates hand-painted textures and algorithmic rule sets into a design that looks like it's been done by 10,000 slaves in the basement, but is rendered on the fly. Geraldine and Zach did the lion's share of the design and development on this one. This design is a mixed bag for me: I'm delighted to see it out in the world, but it's the thing that's pretty much kept me from looking at anything else for the last month and a half.

Many sites incorporate Google Maps into their own pages, whether to pinpoint real estate listings or pothole problems. Google was already charging the biggest users of the service fees that could run into six figures a year. But last October it announced that it would start charging smaller Web sites when their users started generating an average of 25,000 map views a day over a quarter. Many independent Web developers, upon whom Google relies to make its products popular, rebelled at the change.... In late February, Foursquare, the social media location service, said that on its Web site it would move from Google Maps to data from OpenStreetMap

David A. Bell: <<the great paper encyclopedias of the past had other, grander ambitions: They aspired to provide an overview of all human knowledge, and, still more boldly, to put that knowledge into a coherent, logical order. Even if they mostly organized their articles alphabetically, they also sought ways to link the material together thematically—all of it…. On Wikipedia, contributors do constantly try to update many different related articles to take account of new material they introduce. But Wikipedia, of course, has no plan, no system, no map of human knowledge.>> The problem, however, isn’t that we’ve grown complacent about the nature of knowledge, but that the nature of knowledge is changing in the context of networks. The vision of knowledge as paradigmatic, structured, ordered, like the hierarchy of the church and the deputations of sovereignty, was very much a product of encyclopedism’s golden age, the eighteenth century... But these means of ordering knowledge are thoroughly out of step in our own omnivalent age, which finds us suspicious of expertise, more comfortable with the iterative and approximate. The old sovereign paradigms of encyclopedic knowledge were on the wane long before Wikipedia. By the twentieth century, encyclopedism’s grand epistemological project had been blackboxed, dumbed down, and commodified for aspirant middlebrow readers... Wikipedia maps knowledge as ambitiously as the encyclopedia of old; only its cartography is different. Indeed, mapping is woven into the very structure and method of Wikipedia itself; it isn’t found in orderings and topics, but in the network-locative irruptions of facticity and assertion, citation and correction that make up the entries. Fully documented on the “talk page” of each Wikipedia entry, these records of individual edits and vettings comprise a map of knowledge as it lives in a networked world.

Bear 71 lived in Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies; radio-collared at the age of three, her maturation was captured by a series of remote cameras and rub traps scattered throughout the park’s rugged landscape. Unlike the subjects of classic natural-history films, then, Bear 71′s life is documented by a network of ubiquitous probes, nodes, and sensors. Sound familiar? In her worldly way, Bear 71 (voiced by actress Mia Kirshner) notes the similarity between the ancient, evolved sensory world of animals and the emergent connected networks of humankind.... Bear 71 tells her tale as you, the user of her story, roam the valley in an interactive, topographical interface. It’s geometric and highly abstract: the forest takes the form of rippling grids of green circumflexes; the watercourses, bubbles of blue that shoulder out of the way as your cursor ploughs through; the highway and the railway, black streams of flashing pixels. Throughout the space are interspersed links to various media—camera-trap footage and stills, images of native plants and fauna. You run into the avatars of wandering deer and wolverines—and those of your fellow visitors from the networked world as well, caught by the camera traps that are secreted in their laptops.

Paris, the Early 50s --> Paris, the Late 60s

"everyone felt the dead hand of the past lifting. It was a moment of rediscovering one's own history and our history together... The state was ignored for the first time in France... It was possible to be at home anywhere. The desire for real communication could be realized.... Theory was no longer obtuse language, but became tangible in anyone who felt for it in their slightest gesture of refusal. Our program was one only and always to transform our desires into reality. And without delay... The critique of everyday life began to modify the landscape of alienation.

it is my growing suspicion that we hold network visualizations to higher standards than we do to an equally abstract and complex class of knowledge representation: the traditional map. Despite the need for increased spatial literacy, it’s easy to see that there is a basic literacy in geographic visualization of information that should be expected in network visualizations. For instance, there is more information on display in the below than the two images above.

...without my even mentioning what is on display, a typical scholarly or lay observer would already have a grasp of the subject matter. This despite the likelihood that the observer is neither a geographer nor an astronaut, and so has little experience with literally seeing Europe from space or creating and analyzing spatial data. This basic literacy required to understand the representation of knowledge is contrasted with the fluency necessary to create such objects in the hope that we can develop a similar divide in the realm of network representations, which I think will only grow in popularity and ubiquity in the coming years.

Even though these maps are networks (as I’ve so often referred to the Roman transportation network) and most of the maps that people are familiar with actually display network data. But maps have a few basic standards in display of information that network analysis might stand to adopt. Some concept of representation of space (and even, to a degree, projection) as well as very simple standards like displaying water traditionally with one class of colors, and roads with another class, and so on, so that we develop a general sense of standard symbols for standard features....

The point here, though, is not to focus on individual technical solutions but to emphasize the necessity for creators of network visualizations to open a dialogue about standards and practices as well as expectations of visual literacy of their audience. As the tools to represent and manipulate networks become more common, the level of fluency with network representation has begun to highlight the low level of visual literacy among typical observers who try to “read” such representations.

"A city is shape and form, but also politics and history—qualities hard to capture in a map. But with his paper sculptures of cities, artist Matthew Picton delves into not only the physical form of a city, but the historic, political and even cultural elements that give form and feeling to a city.

In his latest work, Picton creates accurate block-by-block sculptures of sections of cities out of paper. The roughly four-by-six foot sculptures are created with city-specific documents, such as the pages of novels or the headlines of a newspaper."

From collages made with maps, to maps made with paper, some of them anyway. British artist Matthew Picton, who presently lives and works in Oregon, creates map sculptures. His most recent works are made of paper; not just any paper, but texts or sheet music that is significant to each city in some way.

He showed several examples of streetscapes and building interiors that had been mapped via laser scanners and turned into—that is, printed as—3D holographs. Here, Klug used a military phrase—the Common Operating Picture (or Common Operational Picture)—as he showed us rendered slides of small combat teams attempting to understand an unfamiliar urban environment by way of detailed holographic prints. So this brings me to two points I want to mention:

1) At one point, Klug showed how a complete interior map of a laser-tag facility had been extracted from the movements of a SWAT team sent inside, in a kind of gonzo mapping exercise, to explore the building's layout. Their movements through space, and the equipment they wore, generated the data for the map. Specifically, if I remember this correctly, sensors mounted with the SWAT team's gear allowed a complete 3D representation to be created, producing manipulable point clouds of spatial data.... While this, in and of itself, is not technically mind-blowing, the strategy of sending small teams of expeditionary soldiers out into unknown cities and neighborhoods in order to map, from the ground up, any and all routes, anomalies, events, and short-cuts, seems to promise a kind of militarization of psychogeography... we might also look at SWAT teams wandering through laser-tag facilities in the name of 3D cartography as a strange new, technically advanced chapter in Situationist practice—what McKenzie Wark, in his recent book The Beach Beneath the Street, calls a "calculated drifting" through urban space. Situationism means, Wark writes, "not only understanding but living the city otherwise."... "ground environment déjà vu." This remarkable phrase refers to the feeling that one has already experienced a 3D ground environment—an entire landscape, not just visually but immersively—due to prior exposure via holographs.

A music video I made for Johnny Neon after my friend, Will asked me to look after his dog for the weekend.

Where would you place the historical beginnings of information graphics?
I would start with early cave paintings. Seen from today's perspective, they unify visual storytelling and artistic beauty. In other words, art and science originally belonged together, and their division is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although there aren't many examples of infographics remaining from the following centuries, I'd stop talking about the beginnings by the year 1350, when the French bishop Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) "invented" the bar chart. Then, in 1493, Hartmann Schedel printed his famous book Schedel'sche Weltchronik, which explained how God spent the first seven days creating the world. Leonardo da Vinci's technical drawings were tools to clear up thoughts and convey knowledge in a visual manner. In 1786 William Playfair made extensive use of infographics, explaining economic matters in his Commercial and Political Atlas. Finally, in 1869 Charles Joseph Minard created an impressive diagram about Napoleon's march to Moscow and back... A taxonomy cannot relate to the aspect of visualisation—pie charts, bar charts, explosion drawings—which could disappear from time to time, but rather to the information behind the visualisation. All visual means that try to explain something to you can be placed into one of three groups. The first group is based on numbers, statistics and relations between sizes (data graphics); the second group is made up of objects (group system graphics); and the third one consists of spatial data like maps (spatial graphics). As these fields often overlap, it's also important to consider the borders between information design and, for example, illustration. I always say that information graphics has a strong appeal in the way it can clear up stuff and convey knowledge. Compared to examples such as illustration, information graphics always seeks to increase the knowledge of the reader, like every design process... The idea behind system graphics is not to make things more concrete but to make them more abstract. So by transforming photographs of surgery or forensic entomology into a graphic, you make them consumable. A translation into a vector graphic helps to look at things that would otherwise shock you. Only drawing gives you the ability to modulate details within one image. When you take a photograph you have the possibility to bring one object into the centre, but with an infographic you can show how it works internally... In perspectives the presence of the viewer is very strong, while an axonometric view has no centre point at all. We could say it's more democratic. In axonometric maps you're above the scene, not part of it, and when you don't have a vanishing point everything looks "over-parallel": everything is clear, clean and in the same light. Perhaps it's more of a communistic than democratic view of a scene. Often axonometric maps look more beautiful than reality itself... Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes. Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

How did you decide that mapping was going to be a topic you wanted to address in the courses you offer?
Mapping’s increasing prevalence in our lives is not exclusively because of technological advances such as GIS or handheld devices. Geography and related work in the social sciences speak to me in meaningful ways. I was really drawn to the writing of Graham Burnett, Denis Cosgrove, Mark Monmonier and others.... Simply showing students the decisions that mappers made demonstrates how much information we accept uncritically, and how much images participate in forming our understanding of the world. How do we make sense of information and for what purposes? How do we promote or suppress ideas through representation?.... n the design world, we are so used to image production: plans, sections, elevations, aerial photographs. And yet we assume the neutrality of maps. I want students to understand what biases go into the production of an image, what is privileged, limited or excluded.... These days, it’s become sexy to talk about landscape. What I find positive about that change is the fact that architecture has opened itself up to larger and larger scales. I think the emphasis on landscape and transportation and systems is, again, a very positive development in architectural education... So is it important or irrelevant to you to draw a distinction between a map and a diagram? Is the visual language of architecture – plans, sections, axonometrics – something different than the kind of mapping you are talking about? I think that diagrams – which powerfully distill information – reside within our maps. Maps, for me, are a more inclusive category, a larger field of information. And I think maps make evident their own subjectivity.

In Metrography [looksgood.de], interaction design student Benedikt Groß presents us with an alternative view on London. What if the street map was reshaped according to the positions of the tube stations as placed on the Tube map?
The result is a 'warped' or 'morphed' map of London, that highlights the discrepancy between the stylized metro map and the geographically correct depiction. The resulting high-resolution prints can be viewed online in all detail.

The images below come from a Harvard Library exhibition from last year called: 'Going for Baroque - The Iconography of the Ornamental Map:

The ornamental features that may now seem little more than decorative embellishments once acted as richly nuanced symbols, analogies, and coded commentaries. This exhibit explores how decorative cartographic devices - cartouches, vignettes, figural borders, title pages, and frontispieces—could provide narrative underpinnings for the geospatial content of maps."

Milgram is a publication that concerns digital infrastructure, urbanism, and politics. It is designed to document an on-gong series of short workshops that investigate the capacity for digital infrastructure to generate political imaginaries through different means. It is not a refined document but meant to be a snapshot of each workshop and a way to raise questions. It is based on an underlying assumption that new forms of infrastructure produce new forms of material and social organization. In turn, these new forms of infrastructure demand new forms of understanding and visualization. While we make no claims to authority here, we do hope that this could be a platform to generate meaningful discussion about the city. In pursuit of this, the single broadsheet is connected to a series of web pages through a series of two-dimensional bar codes. The codes can be used to connect to a growing amount of content and especially those media not easily contained in traditional print format. These pages will be archives of material related to each of the terms here. We encourage you to check back frequently.

The first issue of Milgram attempts to better understand digital infrastructure through a series of site visits. Our first concern was to examine how territory has been made searchable and recombinable, i.e. informatic. To address this question we used the case study of Google and its mapping and earth platforms The main site of interaction with Google Earth is on the computer screen but that screen is a display of data that are stored in various remote locations and translated through a series of algorithms. This schematic of interface, archive, and algorithm was used to organize investigations at different addresses including Google’s New York offices (111 8th Avenue), a new data center in Lower Manhattan (375 Pearl Street), and the homepage of the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org). Each spread of this small document corresponds roughly to these three sites.

A combination of the old art of mapping with the relatively new art of crowdsourcing — the open calls for action via the Web — offers the potential to open up a new path for the developing world: helping citizens map their own country’s facilities and thereby have a greater say in charting the future... Or take Dar es Salaam, where the local authorities engaged students to map roads, drains and streetlights in anticipation of an urban upgrading project, not only generating transparent planning data but also providing a platform for community consultation and a space for dialogue on development between citizens and leaders... Lack of knowledge of social infrastructure like schools and hospitals makes it more costly when natural disasters strike, setting back recovery efforts, sometimes by months. And lack of data, in general, makes it harder — both in government and in the community — to argue for improved services or increased funding. The answer? A good start would be scaling up the use of modern mapping technology with crowdsourcing. It’s just this potential that’s been the driving force behind a new partnership between the World Bank and Google... Where once charts were vital to guide mariners to safe harbors, today's interactive maps can guide development to the places it is needed most. Crowdsourced mapping platforms can serve as a foundation allowing citizens not just to map but to give feedback on the reach and quality of the services in their community. And that information can be used to improve service delivery, fight corruption and track resources. Citizen cartographers, yes, but also citizen monitors, citizen evaluators, citizen-driven development.

Citizen cartographers can be a powerful force. In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, rescue workers used real-time data uploads on Open Street Map, via text and cellphone messages, to help create up-to-date maps of Haiti and find the injured.

[Broadbandmap.gov] collects internet connection data across the US. Funded by the FCC, the project lets viewers compare [connection type], [actual speeds versus those advertised], [availability compared to demographics], and other aspects of their broadband coverage. We designed the cartography and the interactive framework that hangs the site together... We started off with Foodspotting data; investigating where people had posted food reviews. The project took a brief detour into replacing the names of places with the names of the most popular foods in those places—so "The Mission" became "Secret Breakfast Ice," and that was fun. Not every restaurant (or even city) has reviews, though and we started angling more towards images that showed where the data was instead of what the data was. This turned into an interesting problem in its own right, and we ended up with maps of [where the buildings are, and only where the buildings are]... We developed artography designed specifically for Trip Advisors' apps for mobile devices, whose small size and high screen resolutions provide their own opportunities and challenges... Live web analytics provider [MixPanel] asked us to provide visual design direction and implementation for a new product, User Activity Streams or Streams for short... Our first [iPad app], for National Geographic; an [interactive globe] of the world draped with NGS' iconic cartography.. The CItyTracking project is in mid-swing, with http://dotspotting.org seeing active use. This year we're going to pull the pieces together that we originally [started the project with]: Walking Papers v2, Crimespotting v2 (in particular tying Dotspotting to Crimespotting), Tile Farm (which is already live in [stealth mode] and has some [new tiles available on Mike's blog]), and continuing work on Dotspotting... A data visualization for [One.org], tracking the G8 and EU's spending commitments to Africa... The [OneBayArea Travel Map] shows you approximately how far you can get from any point in the Bay Area by car, public transit, bike, or on foot, at [particular times of the day]... [Mondo Window], a site for in-flight wifi-enabled travelers, lets you look out the window of a plane and know what you're seeing on the ground... SoftCities pulls open data together with fashion design and lets people buy blankets and napkins based on Open Street Map data.

“The map user has now become the map creator,” is how Fraser Taylor put it to me in an interview... He describes what’s going on as an enormous cultural shift from a previous era when the mapping of our cities (or countries, or world, for that matter) was placed mainly in the hands of government mapping authorities. But even more importantly, Taylor says, we are also mapping new things—intangibles like social phenomena, feelings, impacts, and more... The democratization of mapmaking is the result of a potent mixture of digital revolutions.

Combine the phenomenon of governments opening their data to the public with the new ability to crowdsource information. Then add the introduction of open-source mapping tools like OpenStreetMap, and the fact that within just around five years nearly every one of us has equipped ourselves with a mobile device with GPS technology.

Suddenly—boom—we’re seeing our cities laid out in front of us in an entirely new way... But at some point, as with any technological revolution, it warrants taking a step back from the excitement and asking ourselves: what is it all good for?... Rogers says the key to making data maps work lies in layering. While one set of data on a map is interesting, two or more tell a story that really teaches us something. Much like rioters’ addresses spread atop a poverty map illuminates a potential factor in criminal behavior, perhaps Torontonians’ kisses laid over a map of traffic congestion, open public space, or concentration of trees would tell us not only where we experience moments of intimacy, but why... “Government-released information is brilliant. But at the same time the government is not going to analyze it for us."... the biggest hurdle yet will be finding a way to convince governments and mapping agencies of the data’s reliability... Taylor himself is currently working to develop a crowdsourcing framework that automatically creates metadata (data about the data), thus enabling the merging of crowdsourced data with that of authorities and hard science.

Here's the current subway map overlaid with eleven subway lines that were planned but never built. Cursoring over the map will bold the unbuilt lines, revealing a vision of an extensive New York transit system lost to expediencies like tightened budgets and the need to upgrade the first generation of lines.

The map also shows seven stations or platforms that were built and later put out of service. That includes the South 4th Street station in Williamsburg, which was constructed as an underground concrete shell but not opened. These stations are highlighted with thick lines around them.

"[J]ust outside Washington," authors Dana Priest and William Arkin explain, in the exurbs of depopulated office parks and "huge buildings with row after row of opaque, blast-resistant windows," there can be found what the authors describe as "the capital of an alternative geography of the United States, one defined by the concentration of top-secret government organizations and the companies that do work for them."

One such complex, called Fort Meade, "is the largest of a dozen such clusters across the United States."

And it is cleverly camouflaged:

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don't realize when they're nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade's, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals.

uncovering metropolitan infrastructures

Google Street View stop motion animation short made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins.

Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

Long before the emergence of critical cartography in the 1980s (at the hands of Fels and Wood, Harley, Rundstrom, Pickles, etc.), artists had been critiquing the map from every conceivable perspective. In 1929, for example, Paul Éluard edited the world map to better conform to notions of Surrealist desire; in 1943 Joaquín Torres-García turned it upside down to make it better accord with South American points of view; in 1960 Jasper Johns slathered oil paint all over the map’s pretensions to accuracy and precision; in 1966 Claes Oldenburg blew the map off the page by stuffing it with kapok; in 1969 John Baldessari literalized map type by photographing on the ground the letters C, A, L, I F, O, R, N, I, and A where they appeared on a state map; in 1971 Alighiero Boetti embroidered the map’s servitude to the state in national flags, again and again. Artists attacked the map, mocked it, contested it, made fun of it, turned it into a joke, emptied it of meaning, erased it, distorted it, reconstructed it, and in the process revealed it for what it was, a human artifact – like a magazine advertisement for Cadillac or a billboard for Luck Strikes – albeit one with legal pretensions in the domain of borders (from national borders all the way down to those of private property).

By the time the 1980s rolled around map art was a rapidly growing phenomenon. One index to this was the ever-growing numbers of group shows devoted to map art and what follows is a catalogue of the 2010-2011 map art shows that have come to our attention (thanks to the sharp eyes of Lize Mogel and kanarinka especially). We’re certain there were more and beg you to note them in the comments. We’ll make certain to update the list.

During the period Nato Thompson’s Experimental Geography exhibition continued to travel, as did Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat’s Atlas of Radical Cartography; and the intense activity finally drew the attention of Artnews which devoted two pages in its October, 2010 issue to map art. The piece not only covered Experimental Geography and the Atlas of Radical Cartography, but drew attention to Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Solnit and Denis Wood appeared together at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with her Infinite City and his Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (with an introduction by Ira Glass). A casual survey of the data suggests that Joyce Kozloff remains the most widely exhibited map artist but, especially with the continued travelling of Experimental Geography and the Atlas of Radical Cartography, Lize Mogel and Trevor Paglen are giving her a run for the money (artists whose work is more varied would be hard to imagine).

Projection mapping [the practice of sculpting video content to match the surface geometry it’s being projected on] is not necessarily a new technique, though it’s rapidly increasing in both popularity and complexity among the masses...making it more difficult for companies producing the content to stay competitive in the craft. Leviathan worked with frequent collaborator and renowned VJ Vello Virkhaus on groundbreaking performance visuals for electronic musician Amon Tobin, creating ethereal CG narratives and engineering the geometry maps for an entire stage of stacked cube-like structures. Taking the performance further, the Leviathan team also developed a proprietary projection alignment tool to ensure quick and accurate setup for the show, along with custom Kinect control & visualization utilities for Amon to command. The results for all have been outstanding: after the show debuted, it was featured in such publications as Fast Company and Wired.

Global capitalism has exploded urban/rural distinction -- category of the city is now "ideological" "After 80 years of existence, the field of urban studies has not succeeded in defining a coherent research object." "The major attempts to define the 'object' of urban studies have been grounded up on a 'Wirthian' legacy: an understanding of the urban as a distinctive settlement type, which is contrasted to other settlement types, purportedly located 'outside' the urban realm." "Today the concept of the 'city' (and the 'rural') is pure ideology. The proper object of urban studies is not settlement types as such, but the churning of settlement patterns -- the contradictory, creatively destructive process of capitalist urbanization on a worldwide scale." "Contemporary understandings of urbanization rest upon concentric, predominantly demographic foundations." "Urban effects continue to be produced." "The urbanization question contains two key 'moments' - concentration (implosion) and extension (explosion)"

Diagrammatica offers a collection of graphic images that present theoretical arguments via their visual and spatial structure. Each diagram is presented along with its concept (name tag), the name of its designer, the year and title of its original publication, and a brief selection of written text in order to aid its navigation.

‘The Babylonian World Map, the earliest surviving map of the world (c. 600 BCE), is a symbolic, not a literal representation. It deliberately omits peoples such as the Persians and Egyptians, who were well known to the Babylonians. The area shown is depicted as a circular shape surrounded by water, which fits the religious image of the world in which the Babylonians believed.’

Critical geographic information systems is an area of research positioned at the intersection of critical geography and geographic information science, drawing together technical capabilities for geographic representation and analysis with the critical capacities of social theory, more-than-human geographies, and the digital humanities. Critical GIS scholarship is particularly influenced by the work of participatory action researchers, the histories of cartography and geographic information technologies, and the inclusion of alternative (radical, local, everyday) knowledges. It inherits a focused attention to the social implications of geospatial technologies from the GIS and Society tradition while being cognizant of the technical debates and intricacies of GIScience. In this presentation, I sketch the present history of critical GIS. That is, I reflect upon specific engagements in Geography that currently situate critical GIS, and outline the more pressing aspects of its research agenda. I then introduce critical mapping efforts at the University of Kentucky, including work around public engagement, the mapping of user-generated content, and open data advocacy in local government.

I knew that my father was something called a “ civil engineer ” and that it was different from being an engineer on a train. I was told that he was a special kind of engineer and that his specialty was photogrammetry. I couldn’t actually say the word, or explain what photogrammetry was, until I was an adult. A photogrammetric engineer studies the science of cameras. My father worked on aerial photography in the mapping division of the U.S. Geological Survey... Today, for example, the technology that powers Google Maps would be impossible without the ability to correct the distortions in aerial photography using devices like stereo templates. Yet distortions always exist, and you can always find them in places you know well: the mistaken curve, an odd foreshortening, something disappearing into shadow. Someone has decided what information should be put in or left out. Someone has determined the hierarchy of the information. And when you don’t know the place very well, you forget about the distortions; you suspend belief, even though you know the maps lie. You believe them as literal fact.

Where the F**k Was I? is a book of maps I made from the 35,801 location records stored on my phone between April 2011 and June 2010. These were the records that created a mini-scandal around the iPhone earlier this year, when it was revealed that the device was storing this data, unencrypted, without the user's knowledge or permission. This data represents not my actual or remembered location, but the device's own perceptions, cross-referencing me with digital infrastructure, with cell towers and wireless networks, with points created by others in its database. An atlas drawn by robots...So, to some extent, the machine-readable world, where the tools of that reading are senses that we share (vision and hearing, primarily), is one that we inhabit, too. But reading is not mere apprehension, but a cognitive process acting on that apprehension, and computers think very differently to us. So aspects of this world may be perceived very differently. Google Street View's images alone are meaningless when they sit unexamined in a database, but when we look at them we create meaning. Somewhere, an algorithm is doing the same thing, to different ends.

"Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space, few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology... exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International" -- Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies: "The participants’ brief outlined two themes. The first was the visible and symbolic city where participants were asked to investigate the influence of the urban environment on the behaviours and sensations of its inhabitants, and to research and collect signifiers of traditional and modern worlds. The invisible city brief asked participants to consider the latent environment and link it to human behaviour—in this case electromagnetic radiation linked to the cities telecommunications and media infrastructure was to be specifically investigated."

As they mapped the nearby neighborhoods — Cameron Village, Cameron Park, Deveraux, Brooklyn Heights and Boylan Heights — the streets seemed to be the irreducible subject, the what-it-was that made neighborhoods neighborhoods. If you’re laying out subdivisions, as many of these students would end up doing professionally, streets really are all you have to play with, which is exactly why I was all the more eager to get rid of them. The streets seemed to inhibit the other qualities to which I was trying to draw their attention. The streets always emerged in the foreground no matter how far into the background you intended them to recede.... we began paring away the inessential, the map crap (the neat line, the scale, the north arrow), the neighborhood boundaries, the topography, finally the streets: first the scaled streets, then a schematic grid of the streets, and finally, even a hint of a grid of the streets. Daylight went too — that default daylight that most maps take for granted — so that we were fooling around with circles of white on a black background. It became clear that the map wasn’t about the lamp posts, but about the lamp light, and light was something we weren’t sure how to deal with... You could think about it as a neighborhood, that is, as some sort of community, or as a marriage of community and place, or as those people in that place, their relationships, and their ways in the world; and thus, less a place than a process, a life process, a metabolic one. That would take an atlas to unravel: what a neighborhood is, what a neighborhood does, how a neighborhood works.

whereas a lot of Cultural and Media Studies for instance in the Anglo-American world brought with it a suspicion of ontology as something that still smells like the old library books of metaphysics, and a focus on epistemology (preferably linguistically determined, representational, or at least empirical), the emphasis on knowledge and epistemology that one finds in cultural techniques is slightly different. Epistemology is indeed embedded in a range of practices from the body to science (obviously), but at the same time Siegert insists that part of the work of analysis of cultural techniques is to investigate how cultural practices are everywhere – to take his example, for instance no time outside techniques of time. And yet, Siegert does not turn his back on ontology.

The Submarine Cable Map is a free resource from TeleGeography. Data contained in this map is drawn from Global Bandwidth Research Service and is updated on a regular basis.

On-Net Market, Fiber Network, On-Net Market with Metro Network, Landing Point, Leased Network

"The Submarine Cable Map is a free resource from TeleGeography. Data contained in this map is drawn from Global Bandwidth Research Service and is updated on a regular basis."

"Since 1963, Jerry Gretzinger has been mapping an entire world that exists only in his mind. Part folk art project, part flight of fancy, Gretzinger's maps have enchanted art aficionados and urban design geeks alike. Using an approach that brings to mind Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, Gretzinger modified a deck of playing cards to include detailed rules for his world-building exercises, and picks one card each morning to dictate what he'll work on that day. Sample cards include a directive to work on a 1/16th scaled map inset, or to begin mapping new territory. Unlike many folk artists who spent their lives toiling in obscurity, Gretzinger's work has been exhibited at museums and bars in the Grand Rapids area, and he sells panels of "real estate" at the shows and online. Gregory Whitmore shot a fascinating short documentary about Gretzinger and his map:"

"For architects drawings are a source of ambiguity....We rely on them for accuracy in surveys and dimensioned plans..., but we also manipulate them for our own ends...No one ever actually sees an elevation, because orthographic projection takes no account of the way that objects recede in perspective or the specific POV of the observer. The global view afforded by orthographic projection leads architects to focus on issues of proportion and composition that make more sense on the page than in reality. A beautiful/elegant plan is only really experienced through its representation in drawing....Perhaps, for a novelist, drawings are more reliable than words...Speculate on what the history of architecture might have looked like had words been the primary means by which architects described buildings. In the the construction sequence of a building, drawings tend to come first and words after. Architects describe buildings through drawings which critics then re-describe with words."

"Earth has had a geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere for a few billion years. Only within the last several thousand years has earth gained a global noosphere, the intangible ‘sphere’ of human thought and communication on earth. Now, anthropologist Félix Pharand has mapped an even newer addition to the Anthropocene’s profusion of next natural spheres.

The utilisphere consists of the planet’s utilities and transportation networks: highways, railroads, pipelines and fiber optic cables. By making his animation without labels or city names, Pharand invites us to view the spiderweb shape of the utilisphere as something more organic, approaching the freshwater hydrosphere in complexity."

"The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014. 1st Iteration (2005): The Power of Maps; 2nd Iteration (2006): The Power of Reference Systems; 3rd Iteration (2007): The Power of Forecasts; 4th Iteration (2008): Science Maps for Economic Decision Makers; 5th Iteration (2009): Science Maps for Science Policy Makers; 6th Iteration (2010): Science Maps for Scholars; 7th Iteration (2011): Science Maps as Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries; 8th Iteration (2012): Science Maps for Kids; 9th Iteration (2013): Science Maps for Daily Science Forecasts; 10th Iteration (2014): Science Mapping Standards"

"This visualization shows how formal US territorial control expanded in North America from 1700 to 1900, as seen through changes in the spatial distribution of post offices. A few months ago, I scraped post office location information from the USPS Postmaster Finder, and then extracted lat/long coordinates by correlating placenames to the USGS GNIS. Recently I remembered I had this data sitting around. I’ve been experimenting with Processing a lot lately as a tool for geographic visualization, and decided this would be an interesting dataset to use as a first stab at animation/dynamic mapping. I used parts of zipdecode from Ben Fry’s excellent book Visualizing Data as a foundation for my code."

"ongoing tradition, a whole sort of hieroglyphic, textual system of markings: where to find food, where dangers are. Historically, markings have long been left for other travelers along trails, train paths, and in other spaces....The desire and need to augment spaces is as old as cities themselves+ beyond. The cave paintings of Lascaux were pictographic annotations as well as stylized data recorded in a space....The ruins of many ancient civilizations such as ancient Rome + Greece have included graffiti tags of groups of youth as well as dissent...The markings placed on the rails that formulated the hobo alphabet (“hobo code” or hobo marks”) included notes/signs/symbols of danger, shelter, food and commentary that are a direct lineage to geotagging, and AR. Iconography quite similar to a system of hieroglyphs was marked by others near railroads as an added layer of infor and icons as indicators of both options and hazards to consider before moving on from that place.

"Most online maps are designed to help you get around in a car. This generally means displaying: roads, businesses, buildings, on-ramps, parks, oceans and traffic congestion. Nothing wrong with that! Designers get handed a tool kit that has as many tools as a good swiss army knife, and the maps reflect these tools. Millions of people use them to make appointments across town, find restaurants, and drive home for the holidays.

But what if, instead of a swiss army knife, we used a box of crayons? Or charcoal and newsprint? Or play-doh? What would those maps look like? What could they tell us about the world?

"map=yes" is a collaboration between MapQuest Open and Stamen Design, using data from the OpenStreetMap project. The project is an exploration of new frontiers in online cartography and the mapping of open data."

"arquitectos, programadores y artistas proyectando en la convergencia de espacio físico y digital -- cartografía crítica, media-arquitectura, software libre & redes, heterotopias"

2000: GPS for civilian + commercial use, geocaching, MapQuest; 2005: GoogleMaps; OpenStreetMaps, Dodgeball, 4square; "whether well-mapped geographic data can reveal trends and truths more convincingly than the rows and columns of a spreadsheet is a moot point, a more interesting question is: now that these accessible, open source tools are out there, what will people use them for?"; "transference of the means of cartographic production from states (who used them to assert sovereignty), to web-startups (who conducted platform and protocol r&d in order to offer monetized services) into the hands of citizens"; “democratization of mapping”; Haiti mapping; "how mapping can be deployed (and crowdsourced) to create public resources as well as function as a means of schematizing how less visible flows and trajectories play out spatially"; "increasingly possible to articulate distinctly personal points of view that reflect specific interests or modes of engagement with the city."

"To call the laudatio a speech alone, and to classify it within the realm of oratory without qualification is to misunderstand much of the purpose and the choreography of the event. In this presentation, I will put the event in its proper place: the Forum. Through the use of textual analysis, experiential investigation, and geo-temporal argumentation, I will demonstrate that the laudatio funebris was a multivariate theatrical event, comprising two discrete elements targeted at two distinct audiences. Geo-temporal argumentation presents an innovative and more robust method of idea dissemination...When the experience and creation of kinetic transitions are fundamental to an understanding of an argument the reader must, quite simply, walk in the footsteps of the authors in order to participate in the debate, critique the result. I aim to demonstrate that, for space- and time-centric, phenomenological investigations, geo-temporal argumentation is a superior form of scholarly comm."

"foreground a unique aspect of the Pleiades effort: its “un-GIS” approach to historical geography. Where conventional Geographic Information System (GIS) data models privilege geometry – requiring a point, line or polygon with which to associate such “attribute data” as toponyms, time periods and the like – Pleiades embraces the inevitable sparseness, ambiguity, and contingency of historical knowledge. Pleiades models historical geography as a graph of relationships between conceptual places/spaces, names, locations, and time periods rather than as layered views of tables containing measured locations with associated descriptive data fields. "

"In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Manhattan Grid, Mapping the Cityscape focuses on the ways in which mapping influences our perception of the environment. Historically, cartographers created maps to document the built environment to ease navigation and ensure the safety of both city dwellers and travelers" -- New technology => more "diagrammatic and interpretive maps that conveyed more layers of information" -- "pure documentation" => "more holistic understanding of place"

Technological advances (GIS, Google maps, smart phones) have further expanded the scope of the medium to embrace user-generated input. This has also enabled the juxtaposition of more complex datasets, resulting in more publicly accessible information.

Mapping the Cityscape addresses the state of mapmaking by showing some of the most provocative maps of Manhattan from 1609 – 2011, including ecological, historic, transportation, planning, cultural, civic data and aerial maps. "

"John Tauranac's first published maps were New York Magazine's Undercover Maps, which showed how to stay dry in the wet and warm in the cold by navigating passageways through and under buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. Maintaining his mole's eye perspective, he was the design chief of the official New York City Subway Map in 1979, and dozens of other transportation maps for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He has designed maps for Historic Battery Park, Avenue Magazine, the Parks Council, both the 42nd Street and Lincoln Square Business Improvement Districts, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, etc.

Under the Tauranac imprint are Manhattan Block By Block: A Street Atlas, and several different takes on mapping public transportation in New York City, including a subway system map that is schematic, or diagrammatic, on one side, and geographic on the other."

"The Center for Urban Research (CUR) engages in independent research projects and client-oriented data analysis services primarily within the areas of demographics, immigration, housing, economic development, crime, and political participation as they impact neighborhood change -- especially in the New York region but also in other major urban centers. Our research is supported by foundations, public agencies, and corporate sponsors.

Within this context, CUR specializes in analyzing large data sets, especially the Census data sets, visualizing spatial patterns through maps, synthesizing this information through reports and other written materials, and developing online applications to provide access to our results. CUR integrates the skills and experience of its component parts -- the CUNY Data Service, CUNY Mapping Service, and NYC Labor Market Information Service -- with scholars and students at the CUNY Graduate Center."

"Jack Schulze, of BERG, describes this difference in what the map is as animation: a digital map is an animation on pause, redrawn quickly in the browser and slowly in the air, by Landranger aircraft and satellites. Wikistyle maps like Open Street Map redraw the map in time; the plane extends in four dimensions.

It is 65 years since Buckminster Fuller patented the Dymaxion Map, designed to show, and only show, the whole earth. Fuller’s map forced less distortion than contemporary projections; it also, having no ‘right way up’, embodied his idea that the only directions in the universe were ‘in’ and ‘out’.

The plane of Google Maps has an up and a down; it also has an in and an out: the zoom between tile layers, the moment of transference, of refocussing and resolution. What if we could fold digital maps like the dymaxion, go truly into them?"

"Sullivan's maps "explore new boundaries for municipalities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," he explained. "They range from a John Wesley Powell-inspired watershed map to a Voronoi-driven Dunkin' Donuts township map." The project began with a series of questions: What if the official internal boundaries of Massachusetts were entirely erased? "How would we redraw them? And how could new municipal boundaries better align government with our needs today?""

"Google Earth, MapQuest, GPS have made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists are using GIS to re-examine real + fictional places ...Like the crew on the starship Enterprise, humanists are exploring a new frontier of the scholarly universe: space. “Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t know...It enables you to see patterns + information that are literally invisible.” It adds layers of information to a map that can be added or taken off in various combinations... By the mid-2000s tech developments enabled scholars to break out of the strict map format and add photos and texts to create “deep maps,” which can capture more than one perspective...[T]he humanities had become too abstract + neglected physical space. The value of “the spatial turn” is that “it allows you to ask new questions.""

"Today's intelligent maps don't just represent spatial relationships, they reveal conditions in the city previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases. It's not just a new representation of the city that emerges out of this data; its a new hybrid city, part physical texture + part data-driven map. As maps have become more complex, they've become our native medium for analyzing environments + societies, essential parts of the decision-making process in policy making...Map designers must challenge the boundaries of what, how, + by whom data can be created, accessed, + mapped. They must challenge our notions of how maps can represent existing conditions while presenting alternatives. They must think about how their datasets, maps, + interfaces can interact with other parts of an increasingly networked, geospatial world, not just imprison them in one-off interfaces. They must challenge the medium of maps, questioning their role in our lives, while challenging the city itself to change."

"Cognitive maps...are representational tools that span between the physical, material, + organizational expressions of the city + its social structures, economies, + power dynamics... The use of mapping as a design tool is not especially unique in urban design + planning, nor is it unfamiliar within architecture (e.g., GIS). These are systems that are used to great effect to identify patterns and logics that become visible once data is reconciled against geography. ...The direct association of generative design logics with dynamic data sets creates a scale of intelligent feedback that is useful within the design process, and simultaneously highly suggestive of conditions that might be installed as operational systems for more intelligent modes of infrastructure, monitoring and regulatory regimes, aid scenarios, and social movements."

"sending a pigeon aloft with a small video camera to perform a kind of animal surveillance of the urban landscape far below.

As Michel Banabila, who composed the music for de Ruijter's film, explains, "the exhibition Loslaten (Letting Go) is showing two linear video shots made with a small video camera attached to a pigeon. The pigeon is flying over the city of Delft and flies home, following the A13 highway towards Rotterdam." The bird thus reveals its own geography: tracking artificial landmarks of human infrastructure—the A13—and piecing together its own optical environment in the process... de Ruijter's work reveals as much about the pigeon holding the camera as it does about the urban forms passing by in a blur below. The pigeon here offers its own kind of autobiography, documenting its own passage through the landscape as it produces this ersatz documentary"

"Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects, and how designers write the initial script that enables the two parties to communicate effectively and elegantly.The exhibition hinges on an important development in the culture of design (and in culture at large), a shift from the centrality of function to that of meaning. From this perspective, all objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance. In some cases, objects exist to provide us with access to complex systems and networks, behaving as gateways and interpreters. Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers help us develop and improvise the dialogue. Talk to Me will focus on objects that involve a direct interaction, such as interfaces, information systems, visualization design, communication devices, and projects that establish an emotional, sensual, or intellectual connection with their users."

"Urbanflow is the “operating system for cities”...This Helsinki instantiation of Urbanflow is inspired by the twenty fully touch-capable HD screens that have been deployed around the city for the last several years, and which to date have displayed nothing but advertising and a rather forlorn, static map. Our initial question was simple, even obvious: what might the city do with those screens that would be more productive (for itself, its citizens and visitors) given the wealth of information it has available?...Urbanflow supports our contention that whether municipal, commercial or citizen-generated, data only becomes understandable and usefully actionable when it’s been designed: when it’s been couched in carefully-considered cartography, iconography, typography and language.... The design desiderata we’ve worked from: Journey planning and wayfinding/wayshowing; Service discovery; Reads on ambient data; Citizen responsiveness"

"A group of activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers now known as Public Laboratory came together to organize the Gulf Oil Mapping project. Since May 2010, we have been working with New Orleans-based Louisiana Bucket Brigade to get Gulf Coast residents out on boats and along beaches to produce high-resolution aerial imagery of the spill’s effects. All the imagery from this project is being released into the public domain"

"MapBox makes it easy to design beautiful custom maps, and fast to integrate them into websites and mobile applications. Whether you want to visualize census data in Chicago, monitor seismic activity in the aftermath of the Japan earthquake, plot drone strikes in Pakistan, or analyze election results in Afghanistan, MapBox will help you make more sense of your data.

MapBox radically lowers the barrier to entry for making custom base maps and overlays. Now data analysts can become mapmakers without GIS expertise, and GIS experts can become cartographers without first mastering design."

"The Connected States of America illustrates the emerging communities based on the social interactions through the use of anonymized mobile phone data. Investigating the interaction network of people reveals interesting facets on how people utilize space. Cities attract their citizens from all walks of life, from nearby and from distant areas across the country. This constant flux of people commuting, migrating, and travelling across the country establishes connections which are dominated by large cities. The social connections woven across the United States can be used to define communities, where the glue that holds a community together is a stronger relationship with other members of the same community compared to members of other communities."

"The History of Cartography; Cartography in Prehistoric Europe + the Mediterranean; Prehistoric Maps + History of Cartography; The Origins of Cartography; Cartography in the Prehistoric Period in the Old World: Europe, the Middle East + North Africa; Cartography in Ancient Europe + the Mediterranean; Cartography in the Ancient World; Cartography in the Ancient Near East; Egyptian Cartography; The Foundations of Theoretical Cartography in Archaic + Classical Greece; The Growth of an Empirical Cartography in Hellenistic Greece; Greek Cartography in the Early Roman World; The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy; Maps in the Service of the State: Roman Cartography...; Roman Large-Scale Mapping in the Early Empire; Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman Empires; Cartography in the Byzantine Empire; Medieval Maps; Medieval Mappaemundi; Portolan Charts from the Late 13th Century to 1500; Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe"

"This article maps Gmaps historical influences in order to locate its arbitrary and ethnocentric Prime Meridian or ‘centre of the earth.’ Moving out from the centre, I examine some troublesome elements of the Gmaps image of the world: its use of symbols, scale and commercial orientation, as well as a space of resistance provided by its interactivity. " -- projections, prime lines, "holy centers," plotting commercial sites, scaling -- "I argue that it maps Google's corporate digital-empire: it is their vision of globalisation. This world-image, which is as much an image of social order as it is a representation of the physical Earth, is presented to an audience of unprecedented size where it serves to increases Google’s corporate-political power. "

"Ever since Google started updating its mapping software with satellite data, the conspiracy theorists have found a lot to talk about. Why were there missing chunks of map, like puzzle pieces accidentally kicked under the table? Why were some sites less focused than others? (Are you hiding something?) "

"enterprise that aspires to make its mark iconic — projecting meaning at a glance, even in unlikely contexts, an all-purpose visual stand-in for an entity or an idea, or both. What’s really funny is that some symbols achieve this status without, evidently, having been designed to do so. The Google Maps “pin” is an example. It’s iconic by accident — or at least by stealth.

One way to judge stealth-icon status is to pay attention to a symbol’s appropriation into unexpected settings: To note when a graphic object is borrowed by unaffiliated third parties, who evidently feel certain enough it will carry visual meaning right into whatever idea they are looking to express. In fact what they might be looking to express is a point of view about, or at least inviting scrutiny of, the symbol."