What’s the cartography of your life? Google and many others want you to contribute to their mapping solutions. I won’t try to improve on Brady Forrest’s write up at O’Reilly Radar, except to say that if you haven’t checked out the Open Street Map yet, you should.
Tag Archives: maps
Tour de Earth
Got a few centuries under your belt? Think you could handle the Tour de France some day? You might want to check out the 2007 route on Google Earth before you get too cocky. Make sure you make the appropriate cheering noises as you zoom down the Champs Elysees for the finish. [wired]
Up To The Minute Cartography
Maps have always been more like portraits than portrayals. They are historical, sketching a place at a point in time, always in the past. The MIT Senseable City Lab aims to bring maps into the present tense. Real Time Rome is a proof of concept, a series of cartographic representations of the city, updated with real-time data from public transportation systems, cellular tower usage patterns, and much more.
This is fascinating stuff, especially when you start thinking about the relationship maps have to the place they portray. The map is not the territory. A map is not a map without abstraction. But what you choose to abstract changes when your instruments allow you to portray the dynamism of real places. [oreilly radar]