Tag Archive for 'Map'

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zoomandscale

Published on January 28, 2008 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Next weekend, as part of the Art and Cartography symposium, the exhibition “zoomandscale” will take place at the Academy of Fine Arts and Kunsthalle Wien project space karlsplatz.

We participate with 2 projects in the exhibition at Kunsthalle project space:

The opening is on Friday evening, celebrated with 4 hour presentation block of all participating art projects (no comment on that), and somehow reserved for symposium attendees – there is an entry fee for public visitors. Saturday and Sunday it’s open to the public, without entry fees.

Basically I’ll be there during the weekend, but not all the time. If you would like to meet and hear some details and backgrounds about the projects, please drop me a note (or comment) before and we figure something out.

Below is all the official information about the event:

art and cartography - zoomandscale

“zoomandscale”

The exhibition „zoomandscale“ in the context of the symposium „Art and Cartography – Cartography and Art“ shows a range of international artists concerned with maps in a wider sense. The exhibition presents a
variety of positions oscillating between artistic cartography and cartographic art which put into perspective the normative claim of strictly scientific cartography.
Knowing that the map is not the territory but its interpretation we allow different readings of territorial representations. In fact, artists´ maps may capture issues which cartographers´ “scientific” maps would never describe. Whereas the scientific attempt to describe the world makes a normative claim by using rational systems like longitude and latitude, artistic methods use opposite approaches by challenging or ignoring these coordinates. They may even take the liberty to shift points of reference to unexpected grounds. This is what makes maps so intriguing: they communicate different views of our world and help us understand its complexity.
The exhibition “zoomandscale” takes a closer look at the relation between objectivity and interpretation and presents works ranging from maps as reflection of the individual, up to studies of social fields and cityspaces. “zoomandspace” raises the question how to describe places as reference points for strategies of orientation and how maps as metaphors can describe spatial, social and psychological realities.

Thursday 31.01.2008
Academy of Fine Arts, Aula
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna
18:00h Gallery Opening

Peter Dykhuis [CA], Wolfgang Fiel [AT],
Gabu Heindl [AT], Christian Mayer [AT],
Manuela Mourao [US], Nasrine Seraji, [FR/AT],
Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch [AT], Ludo Slagmolen [NL],
Laurene Vaughan [AU], Ruth Watson [NZ]

Opening hours exhibtion [free entry]
Friday 01.02.2008 13-18:00h
Saturday 02.02.2008 13-21:00h
Sunday 03.02.2008 13-18:00h

Friday 01.02.2008
Kunsthalle Wien project space karlsplatz, Auditory
Treitlstraße 2, 1040 Vienna
18:00h Gallery Opening
Presentation / Discussion [entry: reduced fee]
Helen Chang / Stefan Gruber [AT], Wolfgang Fiel [AT],
Theresa Häfele [AT], Maria Holter [AT], Hosoya Schaefer
Architects [CH], Sabine Müller-Funk [AT], Waltraud Palme [AT],
probosics [UK], Christian Spanring [AT], Titusz Tarnai +
Students of IKA [AT], Evamaria Trischak [AT]

Opening hours exhibition [free entry]
Saturday 02.02.2008, 16-24:00h
Sunday 03.02.2008, 13-19:00h

Friday 01.02. + Saturday 02.02.2008
Vienna University of Technology
Main Building, 1st floor, Boecklsaal
Karlsplatz 13, 1040 Vienna

Symposium [language: english, entry: registration fee]
Friday 01.02.2008, 08:30-17:30h
Saturday 02.02.2008, 09.00-18:00h

http://cartography.tuwien.ac.at/artandcartography

Historical maps of Vienna

Published on January 9, 2008 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

… together with other maps of culture, archeology, architecture and art sites have been made available at the digital cultural artifact cadastre (in German language).

Bonifaz Wolmuet, Map of Vienna, 1547

One year later

Published on November 27, 2007 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

I totally missed that it’s allowed in OpenStreetMap to derive vector data from aerial imagery provided by Yahoo! Maps. Apparently already since December 2006.

Last weekend, when we checked Vienna on OSM, we started wondering how come that it’s suddenly so rich on details. Did we miss a local GPS boom or mapping party?

The last time, it was summer, I collected and edited some tracks in my neighborhood for OSM, Vienna was poorly covered. Some major roads showed up and only a few neighborhoods were mapped more detailed (including parks, cemeteries or water areas for instance).

I didn’t know then that I can actually use the aerial imagery to refine my tracks and relied on the data my GPS unit returned. Reception and therefore accuracy in dense urban areas and narrow streets isn’t the best as you can imagine. Some of my tracks were way off and it was quite a hassle to put them in JOSM to a valid street network together.

However, the boost the Yahoo! aerial imagery gave OSM is impressive. Most parts of the central Viennese districts are already well covered. No wonder, it’s very easy to edit without the need of previously generated GPS tracks, directly via the browser interface.

High resolution aerial imagery + collaborative mapping tools = the real public geodata!

(With some help of the good old Gründerzeit raster, which makes mapping this city pretty straightforward I guess)

Spanning words

Published on November 22, 2007 in Geomensch. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

What was wrong with the old Flickr map?

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the continent spanning words (tags) on the new Flickr map are a step backwards regarding usability, compared to the really nicely done photo-dots-generalization the previous version of the map had. The only interactivity on the new map is clicking tags, right? Or did I miss something? I really preferred the old version where I could zoom down to photo-dots and browse through photos directly on the location.

Well, it must be my dot-fetish, but on the new user maps the generalized dots are gone too. Now you see the most recent (or interesting) photographs placed on the map, which is just another exploring approach. If you scroll through the pictures on the bar, the map changes too, unfortunately not vice versa. When you pan the map, the photos aren’t updated in the bar. Would be something nice to have too.

Whereas the new Places feature is awesome. One page per place, containing excellently chosen photographs, active groups and people on that location. Very well done. Even though I wish I could navigate to other places more easily. With some interactivity on the small map or links to popular neighboring places for instance. Currently I have to go up and down in regional hierarchy or use the location search.

Vienna on Flickr Places

Even Flickr’s “Safe Search” works in Places. Although there are some properly tagged photos (and a whole lot more!) for an unluckily named Austrian village on Flickr, it remains for some reasons banned in Places…

Interactive light map video

Published on November 5, 2007 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Emanuel posted a short video clip showing how the map projection we recently did works.

We used two vertical menus in our interface: one to show static indicators and one to see relations between selected countries. The static indicators are basically triggered by placing a token on a menu item, then an animation starts playing without much interactive features. On the other menu the user selects an indicator the same way and starts then placing two additional tokens on countries to do comparisons among each other (or moves one token around as it is shown in the clip). The first chosen country is 100% and the value of the following country relates to it, visualized by scaling circles.

We submitted this project to the upcoming Art and Cartography Symposium here in Vienna and are planning to set up the installation there again. I don’t know who else will be attending, call for papers just closed and the program isn’t released yet, but the title itself does already sound very interesting.

Interactive light map

Published on October 15, 2007 in Geomensch. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

The project that kept me awake over the last couple of weeks was a mapping installation we did for the 50th year anniversary of our institute.

Imagining Europe

I don’t want to brag, but I think this thing is pretty cool: it’s a horizontal map projection on a table, where users interact with the projection, with the light, itself by moving little backgammon tokens around. That way visitors can explore the map and selected spatial and regional indicators.

It’s based on a video tracking system, set up by Emanuel, together with a light-weighted mapping application responding to those incoming video signals by querying a database and visualizing geographic data. The concept is rather simple, but as so often, the devil is in the details. Proper handling of the video signals was pretty tricky in our case and made us stay late at the office. Even though we couldn’t implement every planned feature, it was the first time we used video tracking for user interaction, we are very satisfied with our first release. The response from our visitors was great and we definitely see potential and will keep on working on that project.

However, I observed one noteworthy point while watching some visitors interacting with the map: several people standing around the table started instantly talking about the map, the shown maps triggered communication and people started discussing the presented indicators. Unlike clean paper printouts or maps on screens, people could touch the map, grab the tokens, place the tokens, touch and point with their hands and fingers onto the map without fearing canapé-greasy finger prints. Although it was only light, it seemed like they had a tool in their hands they could play with.

One visitor told me that the installation reminds him of the old large plotted paper maps and plans.

Another point for this vivid communication is the distance to the screen I think. If the projection would be vertical, every visitor would be at another distance, standing on another level, to the image. While standing around a table, where the image is in the center, the distance from the image to every visitor is constant. Maybe that makes visitors feel more equal and makes it easier for them to join the discussion. Nobody is standing behind, everybody can access – view, grab, touch – the information the same way.

If I remember correctly Microsoft had a research project or something about making the virtual PC desktop real. After I’ve seen what you can achieve with “grabbing & touching” I definitely think that’s the future. The mouse is a 30 year old idea. Isn’t that almost ancient in the world of technology?

Minority map

Published on August 31, 2007 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , .

This is a great user-generated map, showing minority groups across Europe:


View Larger Map

Sadly enough some of our politicians see the diversity of this continent as threat rather than as potential and I bet they would love to ethnically “clean house” if only they could. [via Google LatLong]

Herold maps

Published on April 12, 2007 in Geomensch. View Comments Tags: , , , , .

MurinselWhat’s Yahoo! Local in the US or GoYellow in Germany is Herold in Austria. The Austria based company, specialized in Yellow Pages, business and marketing data (and locally famous for privacy violations), released a new mapping service for Austria: Herold Karte & Route.

Worth mentioning is the excellent high resolution imagery (by GlobeExplorer) in bigger cities, better than any other online imagery I’ve seen so far for this region, and in addition it seems quite up-to-date. At least I could get a glimpse at the roofs of some rather new (finished by the end of last year) residential zones in Vienna. Whereas in rural areas only rough imagery is available.

Other interface parts and features are similar to maps from Google, Yahoo, Virtual Earth, etc., nothing innovative like Ask City but proven usable: place search, business search, directions search.

Overall a well done, fast and useful application, and, since global players tend to ignore small countries, the only countrywide map-based search product.

GeoRSS in Google Maps

Published on March 22, 2007 in Geomensch. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This is great news for simple location encoding formats: Google announced today native support for GeoRSS in the Google Maps API.

So to view a GeoRSS flavored feed in Google maps just type the URL into the Google Maps search field or add it as query parameter like this.

What’s next? Maybe GeoRSS feeds getting indexed for searches within Google Earth? Just imagine for a moment the amount of content you could access out of Google Earth…

Twitter map mashup

Published on March 22, 2007 in Geomensch. View Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Well, I didn’t jump on the Twitter bandwagon – the last days my feed reader was quite cluttered with blog posts starting with t and ending in witter – but the twittervision map mashup nicely demonstrates visualization of rapidly changing geotagged content.

As far as I can tell, after having a quick look at the Twitter API, the map solely relies on geocoding services. There is only a <location> element containing place names in the Twitter data stream, no GeoRSS or any other geotagging method has been applied yet.