viz. - cartography

Check Out this Imaginative Map of Renaissance Venice

Jay Voss — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

I was reading Galileo the other day when I became interested in Renaissance Venice (the place had sublime music, visual arts, and all the culture that comes with the great flowerings of these things), and a few Google searches later I found myself staring at the map above for about 20 minutes. (Click here for a larger copy.) The map was drawn by Bolognino Zaltieri in 1565. Now, it’s already allergy season here in central Texas and I admit that I feel as though I’m on allergy meds without having even taken any, so my fascination with the map could be due to various things beyond my own intellect, however, you’ve got to admit – this map is awesome. It’s just crazy to imagine living amongst one of those waterways several hundred years ago. How about all the bridges? And do you notice that a pedestrian going from one mini-island to another might have to plan their trip in advance, as not every mini-island is connected to its peers? And then, of course, you wonder how it was all built without the aid of gasoline-powered construction tools. I thought I’d share it all with you. It’s just mesmerizing how a city built upon a marsh contains so many things, and how a mapmaker was able to portray segmented happenings and city life.

(Image credit: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

I think my favorite aspect of this map is detailed above. This is presumably the section of Venice that was preserved for shipbuilding and maintenance. Venice did have a good navy back in the day, and seeing this image of Renaissance Italy makes me think of those space stations in Star Trek where you sometimes see spacecraft under construction. Like those space stations in Star Trek, where the docks are just extensions of man-made machine out onto space, here the city takes advantage of the fact that it’s inundated by water. Elsewhere, it’s fun to notice all the churches. It’s almost as if every few houses has their own church. St. Mark’s Square is largely as it looks today. It’s fun to look south at the Dorsoduro and see all the small vegetable plots – not what you’ll find there today.

(Image credit: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Galileo’s biggest contribution to the history of thought was his realization that the conditions found in a system tend to work irrespective of the conditions of that system. So, in other words, just because the Earth might be speeding around the Sun doesn’t mean that we on Earth will feel the effects of that movement. Einstein obviously built upon this later in his Theory of Relativity. Looking at this map of Renaissance Italy, it kind of makes sense that someone living there would have come up with such an “inertial system”. In the map waters and time pass throughout Venice, and unmoved, Venice goes on being a cultural capital. Obviously, Galileo’s thoughts and discoveries owe much to technological innovation, new communications technologies (the post!), and the general mingling of ideas, but looking at this map of Venice, one can easily see how he might have been able to develop an aesthetic in such a place.

It sure is an interesting map to look at and daydream at for a bit, with or without allergies.

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."

From Sea to Shining McDonald's, and Other Americas: Critical Cartography II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image by Stephen von Worley

Last week, I wrote about the power of cold-war era maps when it comes to visualizing Western attitudes towards the Soviet bloc, and, in the work of William Bunge, visualizing themselves. This week I want to continue my trip down critical cartography's rabbit-hole with an overview of maps that attempt to locate forms of the "American experience." How can aspects of daily life in America be represented visually? The following maps try to answer that question, in playful, political, and subversive ways.

The image above, Stephen von Worley recounts on his website, is one attempt to answer the question, "How far away can you get from the world of generic convenience?" Transforming each McDonald's in the contiguous 48 states into one dot, von Worley redraws the US as an enormous network of lights. (The answer to the question, by the way, is 145 miles, by car, in southwestern South Dakota.) The map makes a compelling, if simple, statement about the prevalence of corporate experience throughout America.

Image: New York Times

Jumping from the corporate to the political, this 2008 map from the New York Times charts a single voter's relative political influence in the US. States have been resized based on a comparison of state population with the number of electoral votes allotted (it should be noted that the state population does not accurately reflect the number of acutal voters). The larger the state, the larger the influence. The size of Wyoming and the Dakotas should come as no surprise to anyone, but one thing the map handily reveals is the relative power of voters in Washington, D.C., Vermont, and Rhode Island. As the commentary that accompanies the map suggests, visuals like these help reveal the "one-person one-vote" myth that's prevalently held on both sides of the ideological divide; the truth, as always, is much more complicated.

Image: The Big Picture

The map above comes from Frank Jacobs's Strange Maps blog, an excellent web resource for all maps non-traditional (you'll note several maps from this post there). It breaks down the American Gross Domestic Product (GDP) into the GDPs of each individual state, and then renames each state with the name of a country with a similar GDP. The result is a fascinating international picture. This map is rough, of course, and doesn't take into account a per capita GDP, but, as Jacobs explains it, "this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states' economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico's and Russia's economies are about equal size, Ireland's is twice as big as New Zealand's)." What emerges is a truly unique view of the American economy (check his website for a more detailed account of the map).

Image by Matthew Zook

By contrast, the maps above and below, created by the folks over at FloatingSheep, reveal a very different American experience. According to their website, the cartographers at Floating Sheep are "dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks." While this can sound drily academic, the maps they generate are often anything but. As they note, Google Maps documents users "memories, feelings, biases, and reactions to places," and though the site is powered by serious analytic and academic work, the maps capture the "collective intelligence"--or maybe better yet the collective unconscious--of internet users. Above, the group has mapped Google Map references to bars versus Google Map references to grocery stores. More references to bars generates a red dot. More grocery stores, a yellow. Who knew that Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota would be bar central? (Actually, as someone who grew up smack dab in one patch of red and went to college in another, I did...) In the map below, data from the PriceofWeed website (sorry, it's an academic post, no link; I imagine you can find it if you want) is mapped onto the US, creating an interesting picture of high-productivity growing and import areas.

Image: FloatingSheep

Image: Strange Maps

To conclude, two maps that zoom in geographically, taking a closer look at America. The first map, above, was produced by Paramount in the late 1930's (several different dates are floating around on the internet) by a seemingly unknown cartographer. It's a map of studio locations and where they've stood in for--a geography of fantasy, or good ol' Hollywood wish fulfillment. It's sort of boggling to see Spain next to San Diego, or Sherwood Forest just north of the Red Sea. I find it a charming representation of global geography, and perhaps more proof that--as my Northern Californian friends would say--SoCal residents think they're at the center of the world.

I've saved my favorite map for last, a particularly evocative image from Denis Wood's ongoing Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights. Long a kind of mythic cartographic project, Wood has been making creative, non-traditional maps of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, NC for over four decades. Parts of that project were recently published as Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which is well worth looking into if maps interest you in the slightest. Wood, whose work has been featured on This American Life, makes maps of jack-o-lanterns, locations referenced in local papers, graffiti, and other non-standard ways of visualizing space. At their best, his maps challenge you to reconceptualize the world around you. The map below, simply entitled "Stars Map", is an attempt to situate Boylan Heights "in everything, that is, in the universe" according to Wood. I think there's something simple and evocative captured in the image, something I won't spoil with continued analysis. You can get a taste of some of Wood's other work here, and (as mentioned above) many of these maps have now been published.

Image by Denis Wood

The Octopus of Antwerp and Other Cold War Maps: Critical Cartographies I

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Life Magazine via Newberry Library

This is not the post I meant to write. My graduate research has increasingly involved reference to Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, a magisterial attempt to combine statistical data and cartography into an analysis of late-nineteenth century urban London experience. I had intended to post on Booth's groundbreaking "poverty maps", and the updated maps created by the London School of Economics (you can see their side-by-side comparison here). In my research for the post, though, I came across John Krygier's Making Maps blog, and I've become fascinated (and sidetracked) by the surprising power of cartography. Inspired to think about how maps and mapmaking critically constructs the world, what follows is a subjective and fairly non-rigorous tour of Western cartography during the Cold War era.

Take that oil-pump / octopus above, from January 26, 1953. The polemical intent is fairly obvious--as the Newberry website points out, the ostensible purpose of the map is to display the flow of goods from "independently-minded Western Europeans" behind the Iron Curtain. But the over-the-top representation of Antwerp as somehow both an organism and machine adds powerful ideological content. And the sheer clutter of stuff depicted on the map--food, oil and ships falling from the tentacles, clusters of spies, communist soldiers, and factories in Berlin--creates an sense of overwhelming profusion. The map inverts our expectations, crowding the Communist Bloc with Western goods while leaving the rest of Europe almost blank. It's a sublime example of Krygier and Wood's argument about the purpose of mapping.

Image: C' est ne pas le monde, Krygier and Wood

In "This is Not the World," a comic book-cum-manifesto, Krygier and Wood argue that far from neutrally or even ideally indexing or "representing" the world, maps are arguments, propositions about the organization of the world. This is the central axiom of critical cartography--that each map represents an explicit set of choices that add up to argumentation. Like any other text, then, maps are open to reading, porous, and require critical distance.

Image: Time Magazine via Newberry Library

Undoing traditional expectations, R. M. Chapin's map, made for Time's October 2, 1950 issue, positions the viewer's eyeline from just behind Moscow. As the Newberry Library notes, the "progressively diminishing color intensities on the map suggest" blood "seeping downhill" from the USSR. It effectively repositions the viewer's gaze and, in its delirious shift in perspective--east faces up on the map--provokes anxiety. "Reading" the map forces us to recognize the distortions, even as we appreciate the skill, utilized by the cartographer.

Image: Saturday Evening Post

The above map, from the Saturday Evening Post, March 23, 1963, depicts presumed radioactive fallout from a hypothetical enemy attack. The (recent) map below, designed by Richard Miller, shows actual radioactive fallout in the US, dispersed by wind patterns, from nuclear tests in the American Southwest 1951-1962. In this case the Defense Department's propaganda tool disguised as "public safety" bulletin eerily mirrors the elegant argument produced by 21st century environmental and liberal narratives. Miller, however, replaces the shades of crayon-scribbles of red with provacatively neutral black, creating a beautiful inkblot of radiation across the US.

Image: Richard Miller via Making Maps

Finally, two images from my new favorite cartographer (how many times in life does one get to say that?), William Bunge. The more I learn about Bunge the more interesting his life seems--pioneering cartographer, radical Marxist (later Stalinist), environmentalist, beloved teacher, anti-academic, and all-around provocateur. The interested are highly recommended to read an excellent blog post by Zachary Forest Johnson that includes a fairly thorough mini-biography and lots of images, here. The following two images need little more comment than Bunge provides. They come from his pioneering Nuclear War Atlas (1988), a book committed to demonstrating how geography could become "the queen of the peace sciences." As Forest Johnson notes, the book suffered from poor timing, coming out just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism in East Europe, but nonetheless its images are startlingly compact and elegant.

Image: William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas, via Indiemaps

Though our society today faces radically different challenges than Bunge's late-Eighties western world, his conception of the liberating, peaceful power of geography remains essential. Especially as computers make cartography available to a much wider spectrum of users, understanding the critical power of maps becomes paramount. Next week I hope to examine how a few of Bunge's followers and admirers have taken up that task.

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.

Baghdad bombings map

John Jones — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:43:51 +0000

The BBC has created an interactive graphic that displays Baghdad’s shifting ethnic population as well as the date and location of bombings in the city. Using the slider at the bottom of the graphic, the user can see small points appear and fade away at the bombing locations. Moving through time, the bombings become more frequent. Not only is this a well-made graphic, it is a disarmingly simple demonstration of the rising violence in Iraq’s capital city.