randomosity

Eric Fisc­her has pos­ted a new series of visu­al­isa­tions ‘Loc­als and Tour­ists’ depict­ing the loc­a­tion of pho­tos taken in urban areas around the world. In this series he attempts to dis­tin­guish between those taken by tour­ists (people who seem to be a local of a dif­fer­ent city and who took pic­tures in this city for less than a month) and those by loc­als (people who have taken pic­tures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.

What imme­di­ately struck me was his ingeni­ous re-use of the exist­ing data to cre­ate new inform­a­tion. By explor­ing indi­vidu­als pos­ted pic­tures over time he was able to hypo­thes­ise as to whether they were vis­it­ing or resid­ing in a par­tic­u­lar area. This allowed for a means to com­pare the gaze of the two groups.

I imme­di­ately star­ted to explore his map of Dub­lin to see if any pat­terns emerged and then to try and sug­gest explan­a­tions for them. There is a healthy and reg­u­lar mix of pho­tos by both groups in the cent­ral core, but imme­di­ately to the east is a large blue box of pho­tos taken by loc­als. It appears to sur­round the new Aviva Lans­downe Sta­dium in Balls­bridge. Addi­tion­ally on the north­side the National Botan­ical Gar­dens have a heavy con­cen­tra­tion of pho­to­graphs by locals.

The most prac­tical applic­a­tion of Loc­als versus tour­ists is to con­sider how a vis­itor might use these visu­al­isa­tions to find the hid­den city known only to its inhab­it­ants — to find those secret spots worthy of cap­ture by loc­als, but seem­ingly missed in the tour­ist guides.

This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geot­ag­gers’ World Atlas’ look­ing at from where the pic­tures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.

Today’s gad­get du jour is the Roy­al­tek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and Data­log­ger. I have long wanted to exper­i­ment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS data­log­ger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that pro­jects your track on an LCD screen with the dif­fer­ence being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your pos­i­tion to flash memory at reg­u­lar inter­vals. You can then down­load the data­file to your com­puter and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.

It arrived this morn­ing and I popped the bat­ter­ies into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the soft­ware (Win­dows only unfor­tu­nately — Par­al­lels to the res­cue). The install was smooth and the device was recog­nized imme­di­ately. I access it and changed to log­ging inter­val to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a cur­rent mobile phone. It is powered by two AA bat­ter­ies which sup­posed allow it to fill the memory a few times.

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Faced with find­ing a place to live in Dub­lin, I decided to quickly attempt to cre­ate a mashup of poten­tial prop­er­ties mapped through­out the city. This is, I sense, an increas­ingly com­mon sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find any­thing that accom­plished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manu­ally in either the My Maps sec­tion of Google Maps or cre­ate a KML over­lay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated and cap­ture the list cur­rent to when I was look­ing at it. I would note that many sites have their own spa­tial dis­plays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dub­lin scene. The site I was using to look for rental oppor­tun­it­ies is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selec­tions on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) list­ings in the area of the list­ing you have chosen. You can addi­tion­ally select a par­tic­u­lar agency and have their list­ings plot­ted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My object­ive was to cre­ate a cus­tom search, take the detailed res­ults, identify the loc­a­tion, geo­code it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple — in prac­tise sub­ject to the vagar­ies of daft and the tools used.

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The HKL Helsinki’s Pub­lic Transit has a mov­ing, real time map of bus loc­a­tions avail­able via their web­site. Now that’s what the pub­lic wants to know. Where is my bus? Why its right there. That’s what real time GPS report­ing is for. I love this. You can even click on the bus icon/number and choose to dis­play its routes, the stops it makes and make the con­nec­tion you need. You can even choose to ‘fol­low’ the bus and have the map scroll with its pro­gress. It is most fun if you do this in satel­lite or hybrid view (note: the buses don’t run 24 hours, so if there are no buses on the map, they aren’t on the streets either, so check back later).
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Why are we fas­cin­ated with the inter­sec­tion of time and space??

A couple posts this morn­ing caused me to take a step back and con­sider this lar­ger ques­tion. I am fas­cin­ated with the visu­al­iz­a­tion of the rela­tion­ship between time and space. I used GIS tools kludged to allow for change over time in my MA work on hotels in late 19thC Guelph. Things have since evolved in won­der­fully new dir­ec­tions. Visu­al­iz­a­tions have become increas­ingly rich in anim­a­tion, detail, and cre­at­ive approaches to adding two non-flat, non-static dimen­sions to flat and static media
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One of the more intriguing social net­work­ing applic­a­tions that I have been enjoy­ing over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my ini­tial exper­i­ences with this spa­tial addi­tion to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyber­space IP to place you in phys­ical space. If you are at a pre­vi­ously defined Plaze, then you are pin­pointed. If you have dis­covered a new place, you sup­ply some info about the place, refine the loc­a­tion and it is stored for future ref­er­ence. You can dis­cover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recom­men­ded and you can also get a Traze (a spa­tial and tem­poral indic­a­tion of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze your­self or to find nearby plazes. The sys­tem works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog read­ers show­ing where you are in real time –-> see my own side­bar.
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This one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done. Flick­r­Vi­sion uses stream­ing photo posts from Flickr that have loc­a­tional ref­er­ences. It dis­plays geo-referenced popups of the images as they are pos­ted to Flickr. Hov­er­ing over a popup will dis­play a large image of that photo for appre­ci­ation. If you are look­ing for the kooky, eclectic, or for the occa­sional flash of bril­liance, check out the site. rather like StumbleUpon with a geo-twist.

I have men­tioned the Exhibit pro­ject out of the Semantic Inter­op­er­ab­il­ity of Metadata and Inform­a­tion in unLike Envir­o­ments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline pro­ject was one that I imme­di­ately was inter­ested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and cre­ates a graph­ical anim­ated chro­no­lo­gical timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napo­leon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the res­ults. A couple months back they intro­duced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and effi­ciently dis­play a JSON data­set in a vari­ety of flex­ible formats includ­ing search­able tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:

Exhibit is a light­weight struc­tured data pub­lish­ing frame­work that lets you cre­ate web pages with sup­port for sort­ing, fil­ter­ing, and rich visu­al­iz­a­tions by writ­ing only HTML and option­ally some CSS and Javas­cript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for struc­tured data nor­mally pub­lished through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essen­tially removes the need for a data­base or a server side web applic­a­tion. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for every­one who has a little bit of know­ledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people eas­ily inter­act with them.

The beauty of this scheme is that it is a cli­ent side frame­work and approach­able by any­one wish­ing to share their data and requires little know­ledge of javas­cript or the like. Its quite robust and extens­ible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scat­ter­charts to the mix and the frame­work con­tin­ues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soli­cit­ing com­ments on users needs for future devel­op­ment. There’s a very act­ive devel­op­ment com­munity grow­ing around this product.

Am try­ing out the Plazes ser­vice. I am still plug­ging away with it, but from what I can share, it has found me and I am here:

There you go. Have embed­ded same in my header, but like all the little baubles and doodads I have over­loaded the header a bit. I will tweak with this, but kind of like the little loc­at­ing ser­vice, as I am always very con­fused about where I am … now even I will know. What this pace for fur­ther mods.

Johan HolmbergThe Prob­ab­il­ist has a very inter­est­ing way of look­ing at one’s life­path. He describes a way in which we can <a href=“http://www.theprobabilist.com/topography-of-self-growth/ target=“_blank”>envision our self-improvement as a topo­graphic map, or as he pos­its a topo­graphy of exist­ence. His blog “links prob­ab­il­ity cal­cu­lus with per­sonal devel­op­ment,” and seems to do much more at times. The concept of see­ing one’s life­path from topo­graphic per­spect­ive imme­di­ately sug­gests that if you can adopt this per­spect­ive, you can be in a pos­i­tion to appre­ci­ate numer­ous pos­sible paths and tra­ject­or­ies rather than remain­ing focused and pos­sibly trapped on a single lin­ear route-based one. His example of envi­sion­ing one­self on a hill or plat­eau defined by cur­rent diet­ary or income-generating assump­tions, but able to scan adja­cent or even dis­tant hills with dif­fer­ing defin­i­tions is quite apt. I now have a cer­tain men­tal pic­ture of myself on this vast schem­atic terrain…I won­der how you see your world after read­ing his thought-provoking article.