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.
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.
Much of the research we do in UCL Geography and CASA relates to London. One of the most interesting aspects of the city is its growth and development (you can see changes in London’s population density here). I was therefore excited to stumble on a scanned copy of “Maps of Old London” by Geraldine Milton (1908) (pdf or archive.org link). The book contains some great maps of London dating from as far back as the 16th Century. I have included several maps from the book below.
Utilizing the same technique as the national election map, I have mapped the Local Election results for the Greater London Area at Ward level for 2006 and 2010. As before I have used RGB space to choose the final colours of each Ward based on the proportion of people voting Labour (coloured red), Other (incl. Liberal Democrats, Greens, UKIP etc) (coloured Green) and Conservative (coloured blue). So deep red Wards are strong Labour supporters, purple Wards are an even split between Labour and Conservative, grey Wards are split evenly between all three groups and greener colours suggest a decreasing dominance of the two largest parties. You can see there are subtle differences between the two years, with 2010 having colours closer to the centre of the colour triangle in many Wards, suggesting a more even split in the votes. As before I appreciate these maps are very generalised (especially if you are interested in the relative influence of the smaller parties) so Ollie O’Brien has produced a more detailed, interactive, breakdown (with the same colour scheme) here. The results were downloaded from the London Data Store.
The Royal Geographical Society is hosting its annual Explore Conference next weekend (13-15th November). It is an expedition and fieldwork planning weekend that attracts a range of people from well-known adventurers to academics and students. I have been a delegate and panellist for a number of years now and found it a really enjoyable conference. It is invaluable for people (especially undergraduates) wishing to access the many fieldwork funding opportunities that the RGS has to offer. I have always come away inspired and with plenty of ideas for fieldwork and travel. This year I am a panellist on one of the Sunday morning sessions and I would be more than happy to meet up with anyone interested in GIS and conducting fieldwork in cold environments. Full details can be found here.
Editors, one of my favourite bands, have come up with a great way (for those interested in maps at least) of promoting their latest album “In this light and on this evening”. They are streaming tracks from the new album through Google Street View. Fans can also click on the placemarks they have included at various locations throughout London and use the “radar” and helpful red arrows to locate some nice nightime 360 deg. photos of the band and some fans. The coordinates of their location are also included somewhere in the photos. I think this is great use of some of the technology triggered by the Google revolution in the availabilty of spatial data. I am sure Editors will not be the last to exploit this technology. To give it a go see below. For full size version click here.
It is amazing that every day we view maps and rarely think twice about the amount of information they show, or consider them abstractions of reality representing the map maker’s view of the world. This is one of the major criticisms of GIS and spatial science as many believe it is impossible to represent the world effectively, and impartially, within the confines of current map making technology. It is therefore interesting that two relatively minor changes to the London Tube Map have caused such controversy. The intention is to de-clutter the maps as the London transport network becomes more extensive. I accept that the removal of the travel zones can be misleading for people as they will struggle to judge the correct cost of their tickets. It is the removal of the River Thames, however, that has generated the most interest. The Evening Standard quotes Caroline Pidgeon of the London Assembly who is keen to see it as a political issue pointing out that removing the Thames is one of the first revisions under a Tory mayor. Of course, maps are used as political statements all the time but people tend not to notice as they rarely become so integral to daily life. The comments attached to the Evening Standard article are also interesting, with one stating that removal of the Thames will be responsible for “destroying the city’s north-south character.” The suggestion here is that a map can go beyond representation and actually influence the real world. If there is any truth in this it makes maps extremely powerful. For example poorly thought out crime maps may give the wrong impression of high crime in an area, driving down house prices as people choose to live elsewhere. I therefore hope that when we consume maps we subject them to the same scrutiny and scepticism as we have the new London Tube Map.
