As I have mentioned before I have really enjoyed my trips to Iceland and Inspired 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.
Archive for the 'Interests' category
Sound Maps
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.
How to…do geography
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…
Photo from Isla Johns
Tales from the (former) LSE Geography Map Room
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
or the size of the Haut Glacier d’Arolla glacier and famously retreating Unterer Grindelwladgletscher 75 years ago cast insights into a world before my time.
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.
Harry Beck Inspired Maps
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:
Second Movie of the ‘Growing’ London Underground Network from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Iceland Trip
I have recently returned from a trip to Iceland. Myself and two friends camped and hiked for four days (3 nights) on the Hornstrandir Peninsular before a couple of us hired a car and explored the south of Iceland. It was an amazing trip and I would recommend people visit Iceland at least once. I have embedded a few of my favourite pictures from the trip below.
For those yet to be Inspired by Iceland, this video should help:
Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.
The Ultimate Car License Plate for GIS
I spotted this car license plate in a recent trip to Iceland. A must have for any Geographic Information Systems/ Science enthusiast!
World Transport Links and US Climate from The National Geographic over a Century ago
Following my previous post I have been digging around archive.org for interesting spatial/ geographical related resources. A search for “geographic” yielded a number of back issues of the National Geographic Magazine. They date back as far as 1888 and contain some great images and maps. There are some real gems to be had, such as the “Scenes from every land” series (link to one here) that contain century-old photographs from every continent. I was also amused to see an article titled “Notes about ants and their resemblance to man“. I have shared a few of my highlights here.
The top map is taken from the 1907 edition of “Scenes from Every Land”. It shows a map of the world with its key trade routes. I suspect today’s equivalent would be much more complex such is the nature of contemporary global transport.
My final two favourites are taken from the 1894 edition of the National Geographic Magazine and illustrate climatic variables for the USA. The top shows the mean temperature for the hottest 6 weeks of the year, and the lower map shows the sum of daily mean temperatures above 6 degrees. Despite their age I really like the clarity and detail in these maps.
The Juneau Icefield Research Program
Back in 2007 I participated in the Juneau Icefield Research Program. It is one of the world’s longest running glacier monitoring projects and has educated hundreds of undergraduates (such as I was at the time) in glaciology, climatology and GPS surveying. It also provides invaluable training in how to live and work in an extreme environment. Many of the program’s alumni go on to work in Antarctica or the glacial environments above the Arctic circle. The Juneau Icefield Research Program provided one of the most enjoyable and educational experiences I have ever had. The purpose of the short presentation below was to inform delegates at last week’s International Polar Year Olso Science Conference about the benefits of the program by providing a few “case studies” from past participants.
