Tag Archives: maps

21st century mapmaking, Google style

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Here is a fascinating look into how Google has developed its mapping abilities. It takes a few steps:

“So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”

This is what they started out with, the TIGER data from the US Census Bureau (though the base layer could and does come from a variety of sources in different countries)…

And that’s just from comparing the map to the satellite imagery. But there are also a variety of other tools at Google’s disposal. One is bringing in data from other sources, say the US Geological Survey. But Google’s Ground Truthers can also bring another exclusive asset to bear on the maps problem: the Street View cars’ tracks and imagery. In keeping with Google’s more data is better data mantra, the maps team, largely driven by Street View, is publishing more imagery data every two weeks than Google possessed total in 2006.

One cartographic historian thinks this is a big deal:

It’s probably better not to think of Google Maps as a thing like a paper map. Geographic information systems are a jump like the abacus to the computer. “I honestly think we’re seeing a more profound change, for map-making, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance,” University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton told the Sydney Morning Herald. “That was huge. But this is bigger.”

Perhaps this is one of those technological advances that seems normal or inevitable now but with some historical perspective years later, we might see it as a major improvement.

I’d be interested in seeing studies that examine how this new technology changes the way people view space and maps. Has it improved our spatial capacities and perceptions? Do we read maps differently? Does it significantly impact our social life?

Mapping Walmart’s rise

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I’ve seen this before but it is still a cool set of maps: watch Walmart expand across the United States.

Several things I like about this:

1. The flowing data is a nice touch as you can see changes over time. Maps can sometimes appear to be static but merging them into a time-series presentation makes it more dynamic.

2. This is a reminder that Walmart began as a Southern regional retailer who then expanded greatly. Though it is hard to remember a time when Walmarts were not located pretty much everywhere, its rise was not inevitable and it was relatively recent.

3. I remember the first Walmart that opened in our area in the Chicago suburbs. It did seem like an oddity as it had such a range of products and low prices. For example, I bought many of my first CDs there as it was significantly cheaper than the local music stores like Tower Records or Sam Goody. Of course, that initial store looks paltry compared to the more recent editions that feature even more products including a full grocery section.

4. I wonder if this couldn’t be enhanced with some other layers of data. Perhaps color shadings for each state that would show Walmart’s share of the retail market. Or the sales figures for each state. Or the number of Walmart employees per state. For critics, perhaps the number of local businesses that were forced out of business by Walmart (though this would probably be difficult to quantify).

Seeing urban growth from the Landsat satellite system

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Among other things, the Landsat satellites took pictures of big cities over time. Here are images of 11 of these big cities with roughly 30-40 years between each picture. A few thoughts:

1. I find several of the desert city images, such as Dubai and Las Vegas, to be most fascinating.

2. I’ve always liked overhead or satellite pictures of cities as I think it gives a helpful perspective where one can see the big picture rather than just the nearby area.

3. I’ve wondered several times how difficult it might have been for city dwellers who lived before the 19th century to truly adopt or imagine an overhead view of their city. Clearly, it could be done but it is one thing to imagine and another to see it from an airplane (or hot air balloon or dirigible) or really tall building.

4. I would be interested in spending some time with these images to see if there are discernible patterns. I assume the first thing people would notice is the expansion of development but I assume there are some other things in here such as important transportation corridors (highways and trains) and different kinds of development located in different places.

Bonus: here are some pairs/series of images from American locations.

 

Google adding more and more indoor maps of buildings

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Google continues to expand its Maps program by adding more and more indoor maps:

10,000 indoor maps. You can consider this proof-positive that Google is making headway in its effort to chart every nook and cranny of navigable terrain, even if this includes carpet and linoleum.

Even more noteworthy: A great many of these floor plans weren’t created in partnership with Google. Instead, they were uploaded by users — business owners and institutional leaders who were motivated to make their properties just a bit more open to all. A steakhouse in Massachusetts. A camera store in New York. Even the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. More and more pioneering spirits are using Google’s self-service tool to upload their building layouts for everyone to see.

But there’s a caveat: It’s nearly impossible to find most of these indoor maps, unless you happen to stumble upon one during your day-to-day use of the Maps app. Or unless you read Wired.

Google launched its indoor mapping initiative and its Google Maps Floor Plans self-publishing tool in November 2011. But right now, if you look at the Google Maps support site, you’ll find a bare-bones list of some 80 available indoor maps inside the U.S. This list only includes major museums, airports, and business locations that Google has partnered with.

Much more interesting to Wired are the individual businesses and organizations that have made their own indoor-mapping leaps of faith. We were smitten with the idea that so many people willingly uploaded their floorplans to the mapping database, so we asked Google to share a sampling of user-submitted examples. As you can see from the images above, some of the maps are most noteworthy for their sheer, well, normal-ness. But this, in part, reflects the limitations that Google puts on people who voluntarily opt into the service.

While the last uncharted area of the Earth may be deep under the oceans, providing widely available maps of public indoor spaces (Google is not yet accepting private buildings) is also pretty cool. These maps could be really helpful to visitors who don’t realize what may be turn around the corner or corridor inside a nearby building.

So when can I start getting turn-by-turn directions on my smartphone from the entrance to the Field Museum in Chicago to my favorite exhibits?

Culture affects how one gives directions

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A new study suggests that Europeans and Americans have different ways to give directions:

The researchers brought test participants into a lab and presented them with a map of a small district containing 17 landmarks and 29 streets. These wayfinders were then assigned a starting point and a destination and asked to provide directions to someone navigating the area. Half the time they were told the navigator was driving; the other half they were told the navigator was just looking at a map.The different navigator conditions were meant to encourage different types of directions. Hund and colleagues believed wayfinders would offer drivers more first-person descriptions (including landmarks) and would offer map-readers more third-person descriptions (including street names and cardinal directions).

These conditions did have some impact, but what really influenced the type of directions was the culture of the wayfinder. Americans were far more likely, across all tests, to give navigators a street name or a cardinal direction (i.e. north, east, south, or west). Dutch wayfinders, on the other hand, provided far more landmarks and left-right turn-descriptors…

The researchers note that many of the Dutch wayfinders became frustrated when asked to give map-readers directions. “They realized there might be a more effective way of describing the route on the map, but never came up with the idea to switch from left-right descriptors to cardinal terms,” Hund and company write. They suppose the Dutch would have improved considerably if given enough time to convert cardinal directions into relative terms — equating “east” with “right,” for instance.

I’ve wondered if it isn’t the culture that matters but rather the spatial arrangement of the places of which someone is familiar. For example, a good number of major Americans cities are laid out in grids. Think of Manhattan: the avenues are north-south, the numbered streets are east-west, and this makes it easy to find a lot of different routes to the same place. In contrast, some older settlements such as some older sections of European cities and several American cities like Boston are more prone to have winding streets that are more aligned to the topography. If you are from a grid area, you are used to giving cardinal directions because they are easy to follow. If operating in a less grid-like format, landmarks matter more as one can remain oriented even if the streets don’t seem to be headed in that direction.

I’ve also wondered how this changes in the suburbs. Are landmarks as easy to identify and utilize? Without as many tall buildings plus a landscape that contains more repetitive features (even if the strip malls and big box stores look different, they are not as distinctive), noteworthy landmarks can be hard to find.

A third option: are Americans used to traveling longer distances for each trip, making it more difficult to use verbal turn-by-turn directions?

 

Nearly six thousand hours to make the best map of the United States

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Here is some insight into what it takes to create maps and particularly the hard work needed to create the “best American wall map”:

So what makes this map different from the Rand McNally version you can buy at a bookstore? Or from the dusty National Geographic pull-down mounted in your child’s elementary school classroom? Can one paper wall map really outshine all others—so definitively that it becomes award-worthy?…

According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

A few of his more significant design decisions: Your standard wall map will often paint the U.S. states different colors so their shapes are easily grasped. But Imus’ map uses thick lines to indicate state borders and reserves the color for more important purposes—green for denser forestation, yellow for population centers. Instead of hypsometric tinting (darker colors for lower elevations, lighter colors for higher altitudes), Imus uses relief shading for a more natural portrait of U.S. terrain.

I’ve always loved maps but I can’t imagine spending this much time on hand-crafting a map of the United States. It would be interesting to hear why Imus pursued this: a hobby? Is he a professional cartographer? Did he want to win a prize? Is there money in this? Was he simply irritated with existing maps?

The second half of the article goes on to talk about the continued need for large maps even in an era where many people have maps in their phones and computers. I tend to agree with this view: as a kid, I would spend a lot of time simply browsing through an atlas or looking at a wall map because it is interesting to know where everything is in relation to everywhere else. A close view of the world, say with Google Maps on my phone, has difficulty displaying this interconnectedness. Several features of Imus’ map also add to the imaginative possibilities of maps: the topography and cultural attractions.

One question I have: supposedly map-making companies include little mistakes so that they can tell if someone has simply copied them. Did Imus do something similar or does he even have these same mistakes (this gets at where he got his geographical knowledge from)?

Bonus: Imus responds in the comments section. Here is one interesting comment: “If a map doesn’t depict the uniqueness of the places on it, to me that map is merely a spatial arrangement of data. I wanted to give my readers more than data. I wanted to give them the sense of place that has been missing from our maps. The USA is a place, not a space.”

McMansions and sprawl in New Jersey

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Humorous maps seem to be all the rage (does it all go back to the Jesusland map of 2004)? A new map of New Jersey has an interesting label for Central Jersey:

A colorful map of New Jersey that went viral on Facebook on Tuesday has offended some while amusing others. It labels some areas of the state with racial stereotypes, but designates the Hudson County area as “HIPSTERS.” South of Hudson, the label is “POOR MINORITIES.” Central Jersey gets labels like “MCMANSIONS” and “LAWYERS DRIVING HYBRIDS.”…

An article on a Westfield news website credits the design to a 22-year-old Rutgers graduate who says he works for the state Department of Environmental Protection and also “works with the Geographic Information Systems, making maps of preserves and researching resource conservation.”

He says that he’s talked to people all over the state, so he has the experience to know what’s what.

To be clear, there are actually two areas in central New Jersey that involve McMansions: one is labeled “executives living in McMansions driving Mercedes-Benzes” and other is labeled “McMansions!!” Is this the best kind of exposure for a government employee these days? I wonder if anyone will object to the McMansion label – would even the people who live there object?

New Jersey is often equated with McMansions. However, I do think that the blanket reference doesn’t necessarily refer to the particular homes but rather refers to a larger process of sprawl that many people associate with New Jersey. This spread of sprawl is summarized in this October 2010 story:

A report released in July by Rowan and Rutgers Universities found that, after comparing aerial photos of the state, the years from 1986 to 2007 were New Jersey’s most sprawling period, when unprotected land was developed most rapidly.

When development ground to a halt in mid-2007 as the housing market collapsed, New Jersey had more acres of subdivisions and shopping malls than it had of upland forests and was down to its last million acres of developable land, according to the report, called “Changing Landscapes in the Garden State.”

Two-thirds of the land developed in New Jersey from 2002 to 2007 became “low-density, large-lot” residential properties, swallowing farmland, wetlands and unprotected forest, the report found. Preservationists and some developers say that the building of large single-family homes on oversize lots cannot continue at that rate, even if the housing market recovers.

This sounds like the challenge many built-out suburbs are facing: how does one do development when there is very little or no remaining open land? Redevelopment and building up might become popular options.

Using mapping to help students understand the racial dimension of their world

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A sociologist describes a mapping project that helps students connect their everyday experiences to larger racial patterns:

Theresa Suarez, an associate professor of sociology at San Marcos, has taught partially online courses on racial and ethnic identity for years. But Suarez found it was difficult to enable her students, many of whom are people of color, to connect the theoretical material she taught in class and their own narratives, she explained during a session here on Tuesday at the Emerging Technologies in Online Learning conference, hosted by MERLOT and the Sloan Consortium…

Suarez, who describes herself as late-adopter (her presentation here was a rare foray for her into teaching with PowerPoint) and an occasional techno-skeptic, resolved to find a technological solution that would not require a lot of complexity or jargon. So she turned to online software that uses geographic information systems to let students superimpose demographic data about race and ethnicity onto maps of their local communities.

Suarez instructed her students to place digital pushpins on places that shape their own experiences of where they live. “Where do you shop?” she said, by way of example. “Where do you surf? Where does your girlfriend or boyfriend live? What schools did you attend? Where do you work? Where don’t you go?”

The students then had to reflect, in essay form, on the points of reference marked by the pushpins, describing how each of those places plays a role in their identities — particularly in light of what they learned by seeing demographic data mapped on to their communities.

Perhaps this project is not all that innovative but I like it for several reasons:

1. This seems to be a microcosm of a sociological perspective: providing a structural context for our individual actions. This project would help students see how their daily activities and identities are shaped by demographic patterns, even if they hadn’t noticed them before. Instead of seeing these activities as individual choices, students can see how racial patterns influence their behavior.

2. Students can use their personal experiences as “data” and then work to provide sociological explanations.

3. These mapping abilities and software are fairly easy to obtain and they would be useful for future work.

4. I’ve always liked maps as they provide an overhead view of the world (just like sociology).

I’ve thought about doing some sort of mapping project in my Introduction to Sociology class and this may just be a good springboard.

Seeing the Chicago area’s “pre-European settlement vegetation”

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Here is a website that offers a look at the vegetation in the Chicago area before settlers really transformed the land. According to this article, the maps were created by looking at surveyor’s notes:

Nearly 200 years ago, long before global positioning systems, the land was surveyed with little more than a compass, a 66-foot-long metal chain and an ax to mark trees, said McBride. Luckily, surveyors also brought notebooks.

Surveyors’ notes slowly outlined gorgeous, ecologically diverse landscapes now largely lost. “As they divided each township into 36-square-mile sections, surveyors marked up to four ‘bearing’ trees near each section corner. They jotted down the trees’ species and other notes describing the landscape,” said McBride.

From these records, McBride painstakingly reconstructed the landscape: 65 percent prairie, 30 percent wooded, and at least 2.8 percent wetland. Trees flourished in northern townships; prairie dominated southern ones.

Things I think of when looking at this map:

1. Some of the first settlers in the Naperville area settled around the “Big Woods” area which I would guess is the big forested section on the map between Batavia and Aurora and east of the Fox River.

2. In the days before trains (with the first train line running out of Chicago through what is now Wheaton and West Chicago in 1849), the prairie land between southwestern DuPage County and Chicago could turn quite soggy. Hence, there was quite a network of plank roads in the Chicago region so that people could traverse the prairie.

3. There was quite a bit of prairie. How long did it take for most of that prairie land to disappear and be converted into farm land?

4. There was a lot of trees north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. I don’t know how much of that timber was cut down and ended up in Chicago but there were a number of timber/logging communities around Lake Michigan including in western Michigan and in Wisconsin. Perhaps the most famous of these communities is Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which suffered a tragic fire on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

5. In the area I am most familiar with, western DuPage County, it seems like the DuPage County Forest Preserve has grabbed some of the original timber areas. I wonder if these areas were harvested and then grew again.

6. It would be an added bonus if there was an overlay to this map of current development and vegetation. This would provide insights into how much has changed.

The limits of GPS in the West

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Technology can be a good thing but it can also lead people astray. Hence, a warning out West regarding using GPS in certain areas:

Travelers in the western U.S. should not rely solely on technology such as GPS for navigation, authorities said, after a Canadian couple were lost in the Nevada wilderness for 48 days.

Albert Chretien, 59, and his wife Rita Chretien, 56, sought a shorter route between Boise, Idaho and Jackpot, Nevada during a road trip from British Columbia to Las Vegas…

Sheriff’s offices in remote, high-elevation parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming report the past two years have brought a rise in the number of GPS-guided travelers driving off marked and paved highways and into trouble.

The spike has prompted Death Valley National Park in California to caution on its web site that “GPS navigation to sites to remote locations like Death Valley are notoriously unreliable.”

When two roads diverge in Western lands, take the one more traveled, authorities said.

Perhaps this could be read as a warning about over-reliance on technology: it is not infallible.You can occasionally find stories of people driving into retention ponds or crashing into things because the GPS told them to turn. At the same time, how bad are these GPS maps that people can get lost so easily? This would seem to be bad news for GPS makers if they don’t cover certain areas very well. Could a GPS maker ever have any liability for any of these unpleasant occurrences? Additionally, I wonder how many GPS owners also carry around a map of some kind in their vehicle or on their person.

More broadly, this is a reminder that one doesn’t have to travel very far to leave the comforts of the modern world and get lost in nature.