viz. - Googlemaps

Google's "Sea View" and Marine Metaphors for the Web

Calliope — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:31:25 +0000

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Google Maps has a remarkable new feature called Sea View that spotlights oceanic life and space. Sea View is essentially the marine version of Street View, a layer of Google Maps that allows users to navigate though 360-degree panoramic images of the Earth's surface. By extending the concept of Street View to the ocean floor, Google has added six coral reefs to the long list of cities, landmarks and parks users can currently explore remotely, from the comfort of their digital devices. The fascinating images captured so far by Google and its partner, Catlin Seaview Survey, bear out the imaginative quality of the overarching project. It's almost as if Sea View is Google's attempt to fulfill a common childhood fantasy: to experience what it would be like to live under the sea. With its zoomable and virtually traversable underwater imagery, Sea View enables adults and children alike to realize this wish (without having to worry about oxygen supply or the expense of travelling to distant coral reefs).

The look and purpose of these new images disinguish them markedly from the aerial and street views that we normally interact with in Google Maps. Catlin's director told CNN that the goal of the Sea View project is to generate interest in underwater ecosystems and spur the general public to preserve them. The public may have initially used the traditional Street View in a similar vein--out of a sense of curiosity or wonder. But since its debut, Street View's main purpose has shifted to utility; people use the tool because it helps them to recognize the destination they are trying to reach. How pictures of an underwater seascape could ever offer this kind of utility to the ordinary person is difficult to figure.

Image Credit: Google Maps

Thus the juxtaposition of the two environments--terra firma and the ocean floor--within the same, searchable platform (Google Maps) is both striking and a bit puzzling. The screenshot above, showing a bird's-eye view of downtown Austin with its traffic patterns highlighted and sushi restaurants pinpointed, contains a map that is deliberately designed to organize and communicate information. Every pixel is laden with navigational data which may ultimately be converted into cash via ads and sales. The networked surface of the place--stamped with symbols, labels and outlines of the city's infrastructure--looks nothing like the surface of the sea just off of Heron Island, a cay east of the Australian coast. The vista (below) overlooks the water surrounding the island, which is now penetrable to the online world thanks to Sea View. When compared with Google's land maps, the unmarked appearance of this stretch of blue suggests one or both of the following: that something about the ocean actually resists tidy quantification, or, that (at least so far) Google has nobly refused to parcel it up.

Image Credit: Google Maps

Much of the available underwater imagery supports the first conclusion, that marine worlds do not readily lend themselves to virtual mapping and, in general, are difficult to gain one's "footing" in. Take for instance the murky water (below) surrounding Lady Elliot Island, another reef-fringed habitat east of the Australian mainland. The navigational arrows at the center of the viewfinder denote a pathway through the haze, but they do not give the user a sense of where she is going, or even which cardinal direction she is facing. The lurching action that occurs between frames further displaces her in the fog. She feels a bit like Satan tumbling through Milton's Chaos, an "Illimitable ocean without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / and time and place are lost" (PL II. 892-94).

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Perhaps this is the point of the technology. It seems ironic, but Google might actually be encouraging us to get "lost at sea" through the unlikely medium of a mapping program. As it turns out, the underlying idea that Internet maps and browsers can facilitate tidal drift is not as new or outlandish as one would think. Recall, for instance, the mother of all Internet browsers, Netscape Navigator, whose trademark icon was the helm of a ship. The Netscape wheel was an apt synecdoche for a vessel-like piece of software that allowed users to rove freely around the web. (It was also a tribute to the company's founder, Jim Clark, whose obsession with computerizing a giant sail boat is wittily documented in The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.) Thus, it's possible that Google's dive beneath the waves is part of a bid to take us back to the good old days of internet surfing, which were arguably less about fixing our location--tagging and marking the virtual space around us--and more about exploration and immersion: floating weightlessly like a sea turtle through a vast expanse of images and texts.

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

The Image of the City, Revisited: MIT’s Place Pulse Project

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: MIT's Macro Connections Group

Last week, as my students in my Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums class presented their final movie projects, I was reminded of how we often judge a place after only a cursory glance. One group project especially got me thinking: “The Divide,” a student-made film that explored the differences between East and West Austin, included many images from East and West Austin along with candid interviews of residents from both sides of the divide. My students’ video reminded me of MIT’s Place Pulse project, which in turn reminded me of Kevin Lynch’s seminal urban planning book from 1960, The Image of the City. As a culmination of my time blogging about cities the last few months on viz., I’m going to talk about “imageability” and intimacy in Austin (and beyond).

As coined by Kevin Lynch, “imageability” is “that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.” An “imageable” city is one that is readily identifiable by its landmarks and landscape. Connecting “imageability” to our daily lives, we make decisions on where to go if we’re unfamiliar with a city by judging what we see in the moment we see it.

East Austin Fence — Image Credit: karenjeanette's flickr

In their video, my students interviewed West Campus residents about their views on East Austin. Many of the interview subjects mentioned “chain-link fences” and “refuse” as they were describing East Austin. My students then asked their interviewees if they’d spent much time in East Austin—their answers were often phrased as “No, because it’s unsafe.” Seeing chain-link fences and trash was a deterrent for these West Campus students to venture across I-35 (no matter that the city’s most dangerous areas—in terms of the highest occurrence of murders, aggravated assaults, and rapes—aren’t even on the east side of town!).

Image Credit: Screenshot of Place Pulse

But are these visual cues universal? A group of researchers at MIT’s Macro Connections Group has made it their goal to find out with Place Pulse. The group describes the project as “an attempt to generate quantitative data on aspects of cities that are hard to quantify, such as the effect that urban looks have on our perception of a city’s safety or our own perceived level of prosperity. To answer these questions we crowdsource the comparison of pairs of images that show randomly chosen urban landscapes.” When you visit the site, you see two images side by side, then are asked questions like “Which place looks more safe?” or “Which place looks more touristy?” or “Which place looks more livable?” The site is meant to emulate our experiences in unfamiliar places. A chain-link fence on an unknown city street might make us vote for the other place as “more safe.” Or an outcropping of flowers in someone’s front lawn might make us deem it “more livable” than its partner picture. An initial visual cue affects our opinion of a place, and Place Pulse helps track what kinds of cues stimulate specific reactions in urban environments.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Place Pulse

The researchers at Place Pulse have been collecting visual cue data for a little less than a year now. They’ve even started to open up their data set (and their site’s visitors) to independent researchers around the world. Now, you can set up a question, along with the types and locations of Google Maps images, to get answered by anyone on the internet.

Image Credit: Corbo E. on yelp

I’m curious to see what would happen if I were to ask “Which place looks more safe?” for two images of Austin—one of the Drag in West Campus, one of East Sixth Street on the East Side. To those not as intimately familiar with the wonderful trailers, bars, and artists’ studios on Austin’s East Side, the chain-link fence might signal “danger.” To me, that same chain-link fence signals “a perfect place to lock my bike (if the bike racks are already full) while I eat beet fries at the Liberty Bar.” The images of a city are key, but so are our intimate experiences of a place. As Kevin Lynch says: “We are not simply observers of this spectacle [of the city], but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with the other participants. Most often, our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.” At first glance, “image is everything.” But with a closer look, it’s not the whole story.

What would Proust do with Google Maps?

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

In David Sasake's blog post, "How to read Google Earth like Proust," he notes that Marcel Proust liked to read train timetables before bed. According to Alain de Botton, "[T]he mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust's imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields." Place names can float up in our subconsciousness, rekindling memories long forgotten like rabbits pulled out of a magician's hat. So what would Proust make of Google Maps, and especially Google's massive, ongoing "Street View" function, where an ever-expanding swath of the globe is mapped, photographed, and instantly accessible? What happens when you can view almost anyplace, anytime?

Screenshot from Google Maps

I'm asking because I spent the afternoon visiting places from my past, not in reality, but through Google Maps. That house above, appropriately blurry, is the house I lived in as a small child. Though hazy, as with memory, I can visit it anytime online; though I'm now some eight hundred miles and twenty years away from it. I can retake my morning walk to serve 6 am mass at the Catholic church, if I want. Or, as below, I can recreate the drives into the country that I--and every other underage smoker with a car--took on summer days a decade ago.

Screenshot from Google Maps

Or I can, if I want, stand at the very street corner where I said goodbye for the last time to my first college girlfriend (on a day when the shadows of the trees stretched out across the street in just the same way as below). But Google Street view is fickle: though I can wave goodbye forever, I can't (yet) stand at the streetcorner where I first met my wife.

Screenshot from Google Maps

And though I can stare down the street above forever--where, while being mugged at gunpoint, once upon a time I thought that empty billboard might be the last thing I would ever see--I can't at the moment recreate the view from my Catholic school's parking lot, or see the park my teenage friends and I would sneak out to after curfew.

The street view function of Google Maps seems tailor made for such Proustian reveries. Like memories, it's full of gaps. Places that you ought to be able to find aren't there. Places you never thought you'd see again are suddenly at your fingertips. What fascinates me is the power to recreate: to walk down streets you'd long forgotten and to recognize the incongruous, some detail that brings the past flooding back to you. Like so much on the internet today, there are whole communities dedicated to this kind of recovery of the past, though my favorite is Ogle Earth. I found it through Sasaki's aforementioned blog, and it's well worth checking out. Using Google Maps, Stefan Geens has mapped out one of the Hippie Trail routes through Afghanistan--a virtual recreation of a (now seemingly-impossible) past. Similarly, the website What Was There overlays historical information--particularly photography-- onto current Google Maps, allowing the user to "see" the past.

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

Though not yet a part of history, Jon Rafman's sometimes haunting (see the photograph at the top of this piece), sometimes comic, sometimes somewhere-between-the-two (see the photograph above) cullings from Google Street View seem a fitting place to end this post. Rafman's work, the best of which is featured here along with an excellent essay here, collapses the distinctions between the utilitarian and social value of Google's project and the "street photography" movement that flourished in Cartier-Bresson's wake. Rafman's images seem pulled from a collective (Proustian?) unconscious that also happens to be the obhjective world around us. He winnows out of the omnidirectional impassive cameras attached to Google's vehicles images that provoke social consciousness, laughter, even an occasional mystical awe at the world around us. Strangely enough, the seemingly quixotic, because practical, goal of Google Maps--the ability to plan routes in any part of the globe--has become a repository for half-a-decade's worth of what Cartier-Bresson would refer to as "decisive moments."

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.

Street View Art

catherine_c — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:10:20 +0000

Image Credit: Apres Garde, by way of Google Maps Mania

The above image is the Saturday, November 13th entry from the Tumblr photo blog of local writer Matt Bucher, Apres Garde, where he collects picturesque images from Google Street View. Apres Garde is one of several Google Street View art sites featured on Tuesday by the Google Maps Mania blog along with Montreal-based artist Jon Rafman's 9 Eyes Tumblr which presents a mixture of scenic views and interesting or suggestive situations captured by the Google Street View Camera alongside Lehel Kovács Google Street View inspired cityscapes and Bill Guffrey's Virtual Paintout. All of these blogs use the images captured by Google Maps street view as (or for inspiring) their work.

In exploring this body of street view (inspired) art, I was particularly struck by the question posed in the title of the Google Maps Mania post, "It's Street View but is it Art?" The selection and recontextualization that shape Bucher's and Rafman's collections particularly intrigued me. The images that they select are essentially random, taken by the nine cameras on a pole attached to the roofs of Google's hybrid vehicles.

Image Credit: 9 Eyes Tumblr logo

Bucher and Rafman have both given recent interviews on other art and Google Sightseeing blogs. Bucher describes the origins of Apres Garde in an image of the Texas coast with an directional arrow pointing off into nowhere. Other such transcendent or subliminal experiences like the trip to inferno posted on Reddit and reposted on Gizmodo last year have been made possible by the nature of Google's image capturing. For Bucher, this image from Port Lavaca, TX was the spark that culminated in Apres Garde:

Image Credit: Matt Bucher, by way of Google Sightseeing

Bucher writes off the aesthetic interest of the image in his post on Google Sightseeing, claiming that it is a "throwaway image" and an example, like the inferno, of the not uncommon "idiosyncrasies" of Google imagery (Google Sightseeing). However, it led him to post screenshots like the following while asking a question similar to that posed by Google Maps Mania -- "is this just cool or could it be art?"

Image Credit: Apres Garde

In his entry on Google Sightseeing, Bucher justifies his decision not to "link to the map of the location or embed a zoomable map" because he finds Street View to be a tool for "exploring the world" and he chooses to simply report back. Bucher finds static images taken "out of context" to be "more powerful than the embedded map" where instant locatability "takes some of the fun out" of exploring.

Image Credit: Apres Garde

Similarly, Rafman writes in an essay on his Street View collections that the presentation of images (for which he also, at least on 9 eyes, does not provide locations) that Street View "reflect[s] the excitement of exploring this new virtual world" which seems "more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality" and "the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording" as well as "vastness" of the Street View project (AFC).

Image Credit: Rafman's The Nine Eyes of Street View Essay at AFC

Rafman explains the artistic qualities of the Street View images themselves, as well as the act of recontextualizing when he describes them as "a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering" (AFC).