viz. - map

How USA Really Voted on November 6

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 15:10:56 +0000

What a wonderful map! This IS the popular vote on November 6, 2012. John Nelson gave us this map, and we thank him for it. It's called a "pointillist map:" one blue dot for every 100 votes for President Obama, randomly distributed in the county in which the votes were cast. One red dot for every 100 votes for Mr. Romney. You've heard of purple states? Well here's our purple country. Click the link on the image credit to find a large and hi-def version of this map. Then meet me back here, won't you?

I'll be candid. There's an irrational part of me that wants the result of an election to match how much blue or red there is on the map. I know that's not how it works. This time, the state-level electoral college map came out pretty evenly red and blue. But take a look at the county-level map:

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As usual, it looks like a sea of red with a few islands of blue, and yet, as we all know, President Obama was elected for four more years. I realize that it's a question of population density not geographical space, but now, at long last and thanks to Mr. Nelson, I can see that.

Mr. Nelson tells us he was inspired to make this kind of map by his advisor, a Professor Kirk Goldsberry. Here's a pointillist map of the 2012 presidential election Professor Goldsberry did of the Dallas Fort Worth Area:

Image Credit: Kirk Goldsberry/KK Outlet

The top map shows red and blue dots for Mr. Romney and President Obama respectively. The bottom map shows voters by ethnicity. (Can you guess? Try and then click the link to find out.) What a revelation! Of course, pointillist maps are only one of the new mapping techniques to show election data, but they are a powerful one. Looking at John Nelson's map I find myself thinking: so this is who we are.

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

One thing we seem to be is country and city. Do you notice how there is a ring of red around the purple-blue cities? That seems to hold true around the nation.

Google Maps Assignment by Sean McCarthy

Lisa Gulesserian — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:49:17 +0000

Image Credit: billolen

For a handout, download the PDF document outlining this assignment.

Objectives:

In this assignment, students are asked to create a GoogleMap to map a topic.

GoogleMaps allows students to create their own journeys and annotate place markers with text and multimedia content; they can upload their own photos to their map, link to YouTube clips, write text and link to blogs and other kinds of websites. This free service encourages them to build maps that tell stories in a visually interesting, geographically situated way, and all sorts of people, from news agencies to public transportation services, are now using maps to create new kinds of content (commonly called 'mashups'). GoogleMaps shows how fun and creative writing on the web can really be. With no experience and lots of imagination students can join the most creative people currently delivering content on the web.

In this assignment students will literally "map" a topic of their own choosing that relates to globalization. In other words, they are going to use the multimedia environment of GoogleMaps to tell their story and present their research to the rest of the class (and the rest of the world, if they wish!).

Materials/Equipment:

Internet access and a Google Account.

Preparation:

Students need to be taught how to navigate GoogleMaps. Fortunately, GoogleMaps are really easy to use. These introductory videos will show you the basics. Here’s the page that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build your map. This YouTube video shows you how to create interactive place markers. Finally, Google Maps Mania is a great blog that shows how people are using GoogleMaps around the world. It provides links to hundreds of maps and is a great place to start thinking about your own map.

Procedure:

Midterm maps due: week 10/28

Final Map Due: 12/4

Accompanying Paper: due 12/4

Assignment Specifics:

The map will be evaluated as a Learning Record work sample. So, be sure to make observations about what you are learning as you are creating your map and use the work samples as a way of building your research. A draft of the map is due the week of 10/28, when we will spend the week on presentations of your maps. The ﬁnal map is due the last day of class as a work sample in your LR. In addition, you need to produce a two-page, single-spaced explanation of your choices for the map. In this short paper you will explain the idea behind the map—the intended audience, the choice of sources, why you chose that particular layout. etc.

My criteria for assessing your map are simple: how well do you use the map technology? How clear is the story you are trying to tell? How do you balance writing in the map with multimedia content? Will this map be useful and legible for your deﬁned audience? Will they understand what this map is about without having been in this class?

There are a number of ways you can ﬁll in your map. It must have at least 8 placemarkers that contain text, and some sort of reference to other multimedia resources (photos, hyperlinks, YouTube clips etc). The writing must by your own, though you obviously can use links to other text, audio and visual material to help tell your story. Part of the skill you will develop will be to decide what information to write into the placemarker and what you will leave to your hyperlinked sources. For example, how well can you tell the story within your map without forcing your audience to jump to other websites to ﬁll in the gaps? These are the kinds of important choices you must make. The success of your map will depend on the clarity of your writing, what sources you use and how you incorporate them, and the overall coherence of the project (in other words, can the reader easily understand the whole idea behind the map?).

You will need to do some research, but that research could include your own photographs (or photos you ﬁnd on the web); your own interview or podcast (or one you ﬁnd on the web), a really cool YouTube clip, or an informative website or blog. Remember, your GoogleMap and midterm paper can be on the same topic, so research for the map can count as an opportunity to develop your research for your midterm paper. The only real rules are that the map must in some way relate to the ideas we are talking about in class. It must be informative (in other words, it shows research) and there must be writing to assess. DON’T present me with just a bunch of photos or hyperlinks; it’s how you write about them that counts.

Presentations will be on the week of 10/28. The feedback you get from the class during these presentations you will be able to clarify your ideas and build a better map. After the presentations you will buddy with two other classmates. For the rest of the semester, you will be helping each other evaluate your maps using the map rating function built into GoogleMaps.

Critical Cartography: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Google Maps is a godsend—in our daily lives, we use the site to find a new place to live, track the settings of a public controversy, catch lawbreakers in the act, and claim land that’s been long-contested. Border scuffles and all, Google Maps is helping us reimagine the terrains, cities, and spaces of the real world. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed the melding of Google Maps virtual and Real World spatial. That time is now: Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has spent the last five years working on a project that brings Google Maps’ digital location markers into real city spaces. His installations in different cities in Europe and Asia—all entitled “Map”—ask us to question the lines between real and virtual, center and periphery.

Known for his work with “Dead Drops,” the USB sticks that were installed in bricks of urban buildings to encourage free and anonymous sharing, Bartholl has long been toying with the false dichotomy between digitized and lived experience. His art is a reminder that digital environments have their own spatial representations, and that these spaces have ramifications in our lived lives.

With “Map,” Bartholl makes us question real and digital, center and periphery, through an installation involving a massive 600x350x35 cm wood sculpture of the iconic red location markers in Google Maps. With the help of a tow truck and a crane, the location marker was placed in the center of the city (two example locations for the installation were Taipei and Berlin).

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

From the pictures on Bartholl’s website, the markers are hard to distinguish from their digital counterparts. Both the digital markers and the “real” markers cast shadows. Both are perky punctuations in urban environments. Which of the markers is more real? Bartholl seems to nudge us in the direction of wondering whether this question matters anymore.

To further drive home how much effect Google Maps has on our ideas about places, Bartholl’s city center is the one that Google Maps provides when you search for the city. That center could be in an intersection, in a verdant wooded area, or in a dilapidated housing complex. Whatever the case, Bartholl’s installation asks us to question our ideas of center and periphery. What if your idea of the center of Berlin is different than the center of Berlin in Google Maps? What does the “center” of the city even mean in a digitized world?

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Bartholl’s work with the icons of Google Maps reminds us that maps are political productions. With maps, borders are drawn, districts are re-zoned, centers are marked. As geographers Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier argue in their “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” geographic knowledge is power, and hence, is political. With his cartographic installations, Aram Bartholl’s message is a political one; his work makes us rethink the boundaries that we have created when mapping digital and real, center and periphery, Google Maps or mental maps.

Many Ways to Map: The David Rumsey Map Collection Database

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:08:22 +0000

(Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

Frances A. Henshaw, a student at the Middlebury Female Academy, created geographical diagrams like the one above to accompany her hand-drawn maps in her Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy April 29, 1828. According to the David Rumsey Map Collection Database, Henshaw’s Book of Penmanship went far beyond penmanship, including not only maps of 19 U.S. States with accompanying original diagrams (like the above), but also astronomical maps, charts of Coperican and Ptolemaic celestial systems, as well as maps of other prominent cartographic features such as equator, meridian, polar circles, latitude and longitude. Henshaw’s geographical diagrams seem to serve to illustrate or amplify the geographical data conveyed through her maps: reading in a diamond pattern (from the left and right upper diagonals, inward, then from the right and left lower diagonals, outward), the diagram reads:

Ohio. The number of old forts in Kentucky county are the admiration of the curious and a matter of Speculation. Columbia is the seat of government… The Ohio river…… nearly half surrounds the state. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

According to the Rumsey Collection, students commonly drew maps as part of their geography lessons, but Henshaw’s is a rare, extant example of this accompanying compositional and artistic activity. Interestingly, the figures that resemble ellipses and x’s in the diagram suggest the running stitches and cross-stitches native to a needlework sampler; in this way, the geographical diagram (included in a book of penmanship) seems to evoke the needlework samplers also frequently used to teach letters, spelling, and reading in early American schools.

Henshaw’s diagrams, rare finds, are among the 20,000 cartographic artifacts collected, preserved, and made readily, digitally available through the David Rumsey Map Collection Database, another one of the exceptional image archives we’d like to draw attention to in preparation for our upcoming workshop on “Best Practices for Digital Images,” coming up this Friday, March 26th at 1 pm. The full Rumsey Collection, including all non-digitized items, includes over 150,000 items. The Collection has particularly strong holdings in rare 18^th and 19^th century maps of North and South America, but it has vast resources in many other areas as well. While the Collection began 25 years ago, digitization began in 1996. Information about the Collections’ newest acquisitions and features is available on the regularly updated blog.

One of the strongest features of the David Rumsey Map Collection Database is the range of ways it allows viewers to view and download maps. All digitized resources are available for download in six to eight sizes, from small thumbnails to extra large, high-resolution files up to 12288 pixels. But the Rumsey Collection is perhaps especially astute in the methods it offers for viewing or browsing the Collection: the primary way to view the Collection is through the robust LUNA browser. (LUNA Imaging is also one of Rumsey’s projects.) The LUNA browser gives the researcher tremendous control of the browsing and searching experience, allowing her to select the size (small, medium, large) and number (50, 100, 250) of thumbnails that will be tiled on a page for browsing. Basic searches are allowed by resource type, map area, map creator, and map date, and advanced search functionality is also available. The Collection has also partnered with Google, Second Life, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to make Rumsey Historical Maps viewable in 3-D through Google Maps, Google Earth, and GIS maps.

(Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

Lastly, the maps are viewable through a “Collections Ticker” that presents an ongoing horizontal stream of randomized map thumbnails. The ticker is a free-standing, thin horizontal bar that launches separately from the Map Collection and can stay on your screen while you work in other applications. It takes roughly eight hours for the entire Rumsey Database to scroll across the ticker.