Posted in art, maps, tagged art, bogus, Centre Pompidou, François Morellet, meaninglessmaps on March 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
A Bogus Art Map of the Lower 48 states inspired by the style of François Morellet. I have to admit that I’ve been daydreaming a bit lately about Paris in July (yep, ICC 2011). One of yesterday’s daydreams landed me on the Centre Pompidou website, where I discovered that there will be a François Morellet exhibit ending on July 4. I guess that settles it. First item on my Paris to-do list: Centre Pompidou.
Posted in art, maps, tagged banksy, bogus art maps, graffiti, meaninglessmaps on March 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Posted in maps, tagged fcc, meaninglessmaps, tv on March 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Ok. Let me get this out of the way up front. This map does NOT reveal any shocking spatial trend. We don’t look at it and think, “Oh, wow! I never would have expected there to be more TV stations in major cities!”… er, unless we have some seriously sarcastic thoughts. Loads of maps get tossed around the web these days showing some kind of single phenomenon on a national scale (McDonald’s or Roads, for example). These can generally be considered population density maps by proxy. The symbol used to represent the population density is what has changed. Where are people closest to McDonald’s franchises? This happens where people live in the greatest numbers. Where are most of the roads in the United States? Why, that happens where people live in the greatest numbers too! Please don’t get me wrong though. These maps can be beautiful. Ben Fry’s “All Streets” is breathtaking. I just don’t want anyone saying “duh” when I’m not trying to reveal any kind of spatial trend.
That said… look at this! This map shows all TV station broadcast areas in the contiguous United States as of August, 2010. The data come from the FCC. Broadcast areas are semi-transparent and of the same hue. Darker areas show locations and regions with many over-lapping signals. Lighter areas therefore reveal locations and regions with little or no TV reception. It’s just a graphic. There’s no analysis. But it’s still decently interesting to peruse.
Where do people watch TV? Where they live. Duh.
Posted in maps, tagged algorithmic web, bizarre, coffeyville, geolocation, google maps, neogeography on March 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Here’s an odd discovery. If you search Google’s geolocator for “New York”, it will give you the following coordinates: Latitude: 40.7143528 Longitude: -74.0059731. If you search for “Boston”, it responds with: Latitude: 42.3584308, Longitude: -71.0597732. Chicago: Latitude: 41.8781136, Longitude: -87.6297982. These locations look a little something like this.
Not bad, right? I mean, Google pretty much nailed it. Those are indeed New York, Boston and Chicago.
But’s let’s say you want to know the street address of these locations. I’ll admit it, I’m curious enough to wonder about these types of things. For years now, we’ve known that—for whatever reason—Coffeyville, Kansas is located in the exact center of the United States on Google Maps. Just load Google Maps and zoom in: Coffeyville. Let’s take this a step further. Say you want to verify that the coordinates Google has just given you are indeed located within the city you have specified. Say you want to know the places Google considers to be the exact center of New York, Boston & Chicago. Google allows you to do this via the “reverse” option in their Geolocation API.
Before I go any further, I’ll give a little background to provide some context (why would I even have stumbled upon this, anyway?). About a year ago, I was mid-semester in a cartography seminar here at UW-Madison. Our goal: create a series of animated maps showing global Twitter trends. It was—in some ways—a shameless attempt to go viral via two extremely hot forms of media. I mean, let’s face it, in the realm of place-based data derived from social media, what’s hotter than Twitter? And in cartography—regardless of data quality or clarity of message—what gets more attention than animated maps? Maps we tend to see most tweeted are things like Alexander Chen’s Conductor: MTA.ME and the OpenStreetMap 2008: A Year of Edits.
Our seminar was a mild success, creating three animations that more or less went unnoticed on the blogosphere (continue not noticing them here). Ironically, the only thing to go viral that had anything to do with our seminar was a static map. Daniel Huffman, with the aid of Jeremy White’s Twitter Hitter application (created for the seminar), received a bit of press for his map which was used as cover art for Cartographic Perspectives.
But I digress. The point of this post is to bring attention to something bizarre I just noticed about the Google Maps Geolocation API. One of my tasks during this seminar was to investigate the feasibility of geolocating non-geolocated tweets. Gosh, that sounds like gibberish. What I mean is this: some folks have fancy phones which attach coordinates to their tweets; others do not. The vast majority of tweets (nowadays, anyway) do not have coordinates attached to them. They do, however, have user-specified place names (Oella, Maryland, for example). So, my task was to see if it was possible to geolocate (get coordinates for) tweets that did not have user-specified coordinates. To be frank, the whole thing was a debacle. My findings: geolocating tweets via a non-coordinate-based system was not possible (or at least not advisable). Feel free to read about it here and here.
Nevertheless, some decently useful tools were born of my geolocation frustrations. Specifically, I wrote a handy little Python script that did the following:
A year ago, when I wrote this script, the search terms “New York”, “Boston” and “Chicago” would yield the same coordinates as above. But, when I dug out this script yesterday, blew the dust off of it and took it for a spin, I noticed that something fundamental had changed about the reverse geolocator. Last year, it would yield a little something like this:
But now, these search terms yield:
What!? So… the reverse geolocator does not give you an address any more? It gives you a business? Is the reverse geolocator telling us, “If you are at Lat 40.714 and Long -74.005 and you have a tummy ache, give Dr. Suneeta a call!”? Hmm… I wonder if the parameters are all wonky in my script. I mean, surely not all places are centered around a business, right? Think of how quaint and cute it is that little Coffeyville, Kansas is the center of the United States. Uh-oh, hold the presses…
D’oh. That’s a business… and it’s not even in Kansas!
Posted in art, maps, tagged art, bogus art maps, cy twombly, maps, meaninglessmaps on March 2, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Posted in art, maps, tagged art, bogus, jackson pollock, meaninglessmaps on February 27, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Posted in art, maps, tagged art, hans hofman, map, meaninglessmaps on February 24, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Posted in art, maps, tagged art, eva hesse, maps, meaninglessmaps on February 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Posted in art, maps, tagged art, bogus, map, meaninglessmaps, pablo picasso on February 22, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Posted in art, maps, tagged art, maps, meaninglessmaps, robert swain on February 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
