As I have mentioned before I have really enjoyed my trips to Iceland andInspired by Iceland is a great project to promote the wonders of the country. It has a great website with excellent quality webcams that enable full screen viewing of three of Iceland’s landmarks: Reykjavik, Gullfoss and Jökulsárlón. My favourite is Jökulsárlón, often known as Iceland’s glacier lagoon. Just for fun I set about creating a time-lapse using screen shots from the webcam. The video below is the outcome of this (best viewed full-screen or on Vimeo). I took a screen shot of the webcam image every minute for 24hours (starting at 1900 hours). The images were then processed to convert them from colour to black and white and I also added some blurring around the top and bottom of each frame to create a tilt-shift effect. William Cheshire kindly provided the music.
Sound maps are nothing new but they are becoming increasingly popular as technology (such as Google Maps and Audioboo) are making their creation much easier. My interest in these stems from the Sounds Like Leigh-On-Sea project my brother is creating of our hometown (map below).
View Sounds Like Leigh-on-Sea in a larger map
There are several other larger-scale projects that have caught my eye recently. The London Sound Survey is one of the most mature projects with sounds from most of London, and recent plans to expand east along the Thames Estuary.
On a National Scale the Noise Futures Network and British Library have teamed up to create the UK Soundmap with the intention of creating a crowd-sourced soundscape of the UK. It has only recently been launched so there is space for many more contributions!
One of my favorite maps is from sonicwonders.org with its “travel guide to sonic wonders‘. Sounds can be rated as ‘worth a journey’, ‘worth a detour’ and ‘interesting’ and it can certainly add another dimension to holiday plans.
Worthy of a final mention is the BBC’s Audio Map of the World because it is the most extensive I have seen (it even has recordings from Antarctica!).
I think sound maps are yet to come of age. It would be nice to see the large scale creation of georeferenced sound recordings uploaded online in a similar way that photos are on Flickr. I think they could make for a really interesting data source and could produce some great maps and applications.
When I was digging around some back-up files on my computer I came across this “How to…” published by the Guardian Newspaper in 2007. With many new geography students starting their respective courses in the coming weeks and many potential students considering applications to the subject in the coming months this may prove a useful guide. It’s a pretty good summary of the discipline (although I don’t know many human geographers interested in trams and of course there is no mention of GIS). Click here, or image, for full size.
In case you were wondering, to my knowledge, geographers still haven’t worked out why the sea fits so snugly around the coastline…
Before I dust down my corduroy jacket in preparation for the geography conference season, the article reminds me of the “what is geography?” question I prepared an answer for when applying for my undergrad. degree. If only I had thought of an answer as concise as Starbucks…
As part of my PhD research I recently produced the map below (high res. version) that shows the diversity of surnames in Great Britain. I wanted to demonstrate that surname diversity is not uniform across Great Britain. For example towns and cities (especially London) have relatively high surname diversities compared with rural areas because more migrants and single people live in them. Wales has a very low surname diversity due to its past naming conventions. The measure used is calculated by dividing the number of surnames by the total population of each Output Area (OA). There are over 200,000 OAs in Britain. Urban OAs are very small despite accounting for a large proportion of the total population, so I have scaled the size of each OA by their population (the map is therefore a cartogram). This creates the somewhat bloated appearance of Great Britain, but serves to emphasise the increased surname diversity (due to more single people and migrants) in towns and cities. The correct shape of Great Britain is shown in the inset. For more technical info please see below.
To create this map I used ArcGIS 10 and the Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool. The nice thing about the tool is that it is not dependent on VBA and therefore worked straight off in ArcGIS 10. There are over 220,000 spatial units in this map and the tool had no problems processing them. I have not found any alternatives that work for this volume of data.
Last week I heard that the London School of Economics Geography Department was disposing of its maps and that anyone interested was free to rescue them. My first reaction was one of surprise as maps are one of the few things geographers are associated with, so it doesn’t seem right to have a geography department without a map room. My more rational side, however, understands that a change of research priorities within geography, combined with the fact that all up to date maps are now stored digitally probably means that the map room drawers have remained shut for a number of years. As universities expand there is an increasing demand for space and the “use it or lose it” policy is likely to apply.
So it fell to a number of enthusiasts to save the maps. I think the majority have been rescued and will be given new life as posters, artworks or simply keepsakes to be pulled out and admired on a rainy day. Rifling through the maps was a bit like going through an old photo album. Snapshots from the past, such as maps showing the narrow air corridor in 1970s Germany
For something closer to home, I picked up some really nice maps from the “Phillips Series of Comparative Wall Atlases” (dated 1956) that show the summer and winter temperatures across the British Isles. I suspect that today we can add a couple of degrees to many of the contour lines drawn on the maps.
My favorite find is a couple of Ordnance Survey maps of the Greenwich Area dated 1917, though some lucky person had made off with the rest of London! Highlights from the maps include the “Thames Soap and Candle Works”
and detailed outlines of the housing.
If anyone knows what the colours mean I would be interested in hearing from them…
I think it is a real shame that such a great collection of maps has had to be broken up and I suspect LSE Geography will not be the last to send its maps to recycling. Still every cloud has a sliver lining and I am now trying to find the wall space to hang my newly acquired maps!
Thanks to Ollie O’Brien for the tip off about the map room giveaway.
This past week I have come across a few original interpretations of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground Map. The Threadless clothing website has thrown up a couple. The first is of my favorites and is a Middle Earth Metro map.
The second from threadless is a map of the Metropolitan Cardiac Authority Transport Routes:
Continuing the biology them I stumbled across the entire human body represented as a tube map on the Creativelabs blog.
I will end on a nice visualization of the London Tube map produced by colleagues over at DigitalUrban:
For the past few days I have been taking screen shots of Oliver O’Brien’s hugely popular London Cycle Hire Status Map. How the map works is explained on Ollie’s blog. I have picked 24 hours (from midnight Tuesday 10th to midnight Wednesday 11th) to demonstrate the flows of people in and out of London. Nothing much happens in the early hours, then the dots come alive in the centre as people start to flood in and fill up the stations. Things stay reasonably constant throughout the day until rush hour in the afternoon when the red stations in the centre of London become blue as people use the bikes to get home. Each second of the video= 1 hour in the day.
I have had a look through this year’s Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference programme to pick out my recommendations for those with interests in GIS and Spatial Analysis. I have included the session titles (in no particular order), their days and locations and also links to who is presenting and what they are talking about.
