Love this map! Thanks Brandon M. Anderson!
Concentration of People in the City of Syracuse
Archive for the ‘Visualization’ Category
I’m a Dot on This Map
Posted in Visualization, tagged census, GIS, mapping, maps, Syracuse on January 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Visualizing Public Information Can Be Life-Threatening?
Posted in Visualization, tagged controversy, GIS, mapping on January 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
A newspaper in the suburbs of New York City needs armed guards after editors published a map of pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties. Yes, this is a public database. A link from the AP story to the original publication by the Journal News reveals no maps currently. Perhaps they have been taken down or the server has been overloaded with the new interest? The December story by the Journal News had been developed in response to the Sandy Hook shootings. Details can be found here. The AP provides a screen shot:
Pistol Permits in the NYC Suburbs
Wow! 341,817,095 Dots!
Posted in Visualization, tagged census, GIS, mapping on January 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Great new interactive map created by Brandon M. Anderson at the MIT Media Lab. Check it out here.
Census Dotmap of North America
Art, Science, and Philosophy Become One
Posted in LA Education, Shoulders of Giants, Visualization, tagged art and science, design thinking, ecology and design, landscape architecture, paradigm shift, reflective practice on December 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Each year, I begin my course on Ecology and Design with quotes from astronauts who have seen Earth from space, and I remind my students of the first time humans were able to get this awe-inspiring view of Earth. After 40 years of Earth imagery, we take this perspective for granted, I’m afraid. The 40th anniversary of the Blue Marble image, shot by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, is celebrated in a short film by Planetary Collective.
The quotes that I use in my class are the following:
Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home. - Edgar Mitchell, USA
For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light – our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance. - Ulf Merbold, Federal Republic of Germany
The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space. - Aleksei Leonov, USSR
Before I flew I was already aware of how small and vulnerable our planet is; but only when I saw it from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that human kind’s most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations. - Sigmund Jähn, German Democratic Republic
A Map as Big as the World
Posted in Visualization, tagged Google Earth, high resolution imagery, imagery on September 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Carl Franzen, of Talking Points Memo, brings us up to date on the latest from Google Maps – high resolution imagery and new 45-degree angle imagery.
High-resolution image of the clock tower, Abraj Al Bait, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia from Google Maps
While You Were Out
Posted in Design Practice, Visualization, tagged landscape architecture on May 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »
How to re-engage after a month of few blog posts due to the rush of the academic year semester schedule? I’m checking back with some of my favorite blogs to see what I have missed. Notable posts below.
- Flowing Data’s posts, here and here, on the political threat to the American Community Survey.
- Interactive data visualization by Maya Lin on the global loss of biodiversity, also noted in a Flowing Data post.
- On the Landscape Visualization blog, there is news that Trimble is buying Sketchup from Google.
- Planetizen has only one article about bicycles on its main page! But plenty on transportation in general and the requisite Richard Florida take on cities.
- Planetizen references an interesting Globe and Mail article on what Planetizen describes as “peak people” and the call for policy to increase immigration. And there’s an article on Medellin, Columbia, the surprising turn-around city where the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) conference will be held in October.
- And, only one more for now (that Medellin article is distracting me) – the Pruned blog calls our attention to this:
Perhaps Designers Who Abhor Suburbs Cannot Address Their Problems?
Posted in Cities, Design Practice, Visualization, tagged architecture, cities, design, exhibition, foreclosure crisis, innovative planning, suburbia, urban design, urban planning on February 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Take a look at this Next American City review of the Museum of Modern Art’s Foreclosed exhibit.
Curated by Barry Bergdoll and produced in less than three years (lightning-fast for large museums like MoMA), Foreclosed presents five architectural projects that rethink the suburbs from their economic underpinnings to their aesthetic character. But while the exhibit’s thesis that sprawl is toxic jives with that of many urbanists, the architectural remedies on display seem almost as problematic.
And the crux of the criticism:
It was critically apparent that none of the architects participating in the exhibit actually live in the suburbs (a fact confirmed by the exhibit’s curator). …snip… This outsider perspective on the suburbs is the exhibit’s crucial flaw and inevitably influenced the architects to propose interventions in suburbia that have all the grace of a superblock in the middle of the city grid. Despite their good intentions, their efforts at sustainability and their smart alternatives to homeownership, the architects’ wrath for the suburbs has caused them to create projects that annihilate the suburbs rather than improve them.
Follow the link for the full review, and see some images from the exhibition here. And while you are at the Next American City site, check out the article titled, What Legos Can Teach Us About Civic Participation.
A ‘Breathing’ Map of Manhattan
Posted in Visualization, tagged data visualization, Manhattan, mapping, modeling, representation, visualization on February 10, 2012| 1 Comment »
Visualizations of large data sets are hot, hot, hot these days! As is everything else related to data crunching. In a New York Times article from 2009, Steve Lohr (and a Google exec) whispered the word statistics into the ears of new graduates. Today, there is new demand for statistics classes on college campuses everywhere. From the Times:
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data.
(Update: Steve Lohr’s article on Feb. 11, 2012 called The Age of Big Data, also in the NY Times.)
A class at Columbia University recently mapped trip data for 10,000 taxi rides in Manhattan in a 24 hour period. The result is what they call a ‘breathing’ map of Manhattan. The video is set to music by Rob Viola.
Fascinated by Place Names
Posted in Visualization, tagged data visualization, GIS, mapping, representation, streams data on February 1, 2012| 1 Comment »
Place names on USGS topographic quadrangles offer insights into local history, but I rarely see anyone making use of the information contained in the names. This map is an exception. I missed this last fall when it apparently made the blog rounds, but here it is in case you missed it too.
US Stream Names Map by D. Watkins
Read more about this map on Derek Watkins blog.
Love Those Quirky City Maps
Posted in Visualization, tagged cities, maps on August 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Like the Smells of New York City or the Sound Map of Toronto. Those maps that capture experiential qualities of places. Currently, the London Museum is featuring a small exhibition of hand-drawn maps solicited from Londoners in a call on the Londonist website in February of this year. There’s a nice blog post on it here.
Loos of London by Paula Simoes
Of the 11 maps in the exhibition, “Loos of London” has captured a lot of attention. There’s an extensive post on the map and its creator, Paula Simoes, here.
Praxis in Landscape Architecture 