This is a great project on mapping the history and narratives of a journey/terrain. A sort of map that is more interesting than the territory that Houellebecq proposed.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=k&om=1&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&msa=0
Looking to use video and record data on a journey, much like Stephen Shore has done on his journey's across america but only through photography. Just multimedia and more forms of it. I'd like to merge the projects Poetry Atlas & History Pin and maybe this atlascine.org that I recently saw but not just Canada.
See http://artcarto.wordpress.com/cartography-narratives/ for more about Story Maps.
More about the project 'Jay Crim and Shekar Davarya spent the summer of 2002 driving across the country on Route 66, collecting interviews with the people who live, work and travel on the old road. The audio, video and images on this map are the result of that summer, and offer a glimpse into what life was like on the now-decommissioned highway and what remains for those who still travel the road. The America's Highway project was intended to create both a history lesson on America of the past as well as a travel guide for visitors on 66 today. The work was supervised by Professor Bill Leslie, History of Science Department and Mike Reese, Center for Educational Resources, The Johns Hopkins University.'
Route 66 Story Map
Memory Visual
I wanted to understand the difference between Kbps and Kb, memory and internet speeds.
Internet - data transfer speeds is - kbps = kilo bits per sec
Memory - file sizes/capacity is - KBps = Kilo Bytes per sec
8 bits = 1 byte
So on a 56 k... bits per sec modem (dial up) you can download 7 Kilo Bytes Per Sec. of a particular file.
Therefore if you follow the bottom with the icons you can see the file sizes/capacities of different hardware/software... could in future differentiate/seperate the 2 but most people are aware of what is hardware and which is software. Allows for contextualising the file sizes/capacities together, tufte would say seperate.
Suppose people have to remember that it increments in hundreds for KB, then increments in hundreds for MB, GB.... So there isnt the same amount measured. there is a new ratio.
tried to make this explicit with the MB ratio to B, i.e. 1 MB = 1,000,000 Bytes
I provide a table to give estimates of total secs for particular file sizes, linking the differentiated ratios to the KB, MB ratio's.
Well, creating this helped me realise the actual download file size/capacity of my broadband which isnt 2MBps (basic sky), it is 244KBps, slightly smaller.
I love how the isometric gives the non-physical data an abstract space, and make you associate file sizes, speeds with volume, area, capacity like its filling land creating measure of distance associated with time. Its no longer just stats & figures.
Memory sticks, ipods are now topographic landmarks that can be contrasted in their volume/file size capacity to each other.
There may be a better rendering, representation of the data, maybe an isometric '3d' treemap, or an isometric pyramid, but I think it is a pretty good attempt to simplify complex data with quite a few variables,
internet data speed - dial up 56kbps, broadband, wireless broadband
internet download times - i.e. not just per seconds... i give average totals
file sizes/capacity - B, KB, MB, GB
contemporary products/prices - their capacity in relation
well much help was from here with calculating data speeds/file size per sec
http://www.tamiltorrents.net/forums/showthread.php?t=30078
almost like for like table of estimate file/broadband times
http://www.broadband.co.uk/guide.jsp?section=3
wireless networks, speeds such as GPRS, HSCSD, EDGE (usa), GSM
http://www.mobile-phones-uk.org.uk/gprs.htm
plus other places, but these were the main.
Please feel free to comment, please do ask permission before reproducing i.e. printing, if on the internet please reference this post or http://chriswatsondesign.viviti.com/ .
See more of my work at http://chriswatsondesign.viviti.com/
Hope you like.
many thanks to arnaud velten - as map, claude achenbrenner - serial mapper
Life Map
He charts his life between ages 6 and 24 with a revealing honesty of family. Great work looking at the self with the varying rainbow colours changing in scale on the top in these warm vibrant colours of his creative side each colour representing a discipline Drawing, Reading, Singing and further progressing in his Academic studies to Graphic Design, 3d modelling, then to MFA Advertising, Print, Ambient Music.
Then the subtle gradaution creating sublime salience of light blue to dark in the 'Non Academic' of Mechanics, Physics progressing to Code Art probably influenced by John Maeda no doubt, Info Viz.
The very bottom has a good reflection of life mentioning joining Boy Scouts, School Captain, Troop Leader, Mothers Illness, Relationships.
The Very Top if all this wasnt enough he has room to slip in more info of his geographic location over these years. But dont forget there is still room on the right to add to his life from now onwards...
Brilliant Multiple Subjective Map.
Wireless Brain Mapping thoughts
notebook4 - wireless thoughts
Originally uploaded by visual think map
Technology will be there one day... to boldy go where no one has gone before! Well... its there. What I imagined would be a great way to externalise thoughts, is almost a reality.
'Mapping brain could translate thoughts into speech
Forty-one neurons is a drop in the ocean compared with the hundred billion or so cells that are present in our brains. But those few neurons could help Eric Ramsey talk again. It is eight years since a car accident left Ramsey "locked-in" - aware but paralysed and unable to communicate other than through eye movements. By listening in on a tiny population of cells in his brain, neuroscientists hope to give him back his "voice" - a first for someone with his problems.
Ramsey had a wireless electrode implanted 6 millimetres or so below the surface of his brain in 2004 (see Diagram). The electrode records the electronic pulses sent by 41 neurons that surround it in an area of the brain involved in generating speech. By analysing the signals created when Ramsey imagines speaking, the team has developed software that may one day turn his thoughts into ...' from the New Scientist - access to full article needs subsciption.
PS if somone is subscribed could they send me the diagram featured in the article.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19626304.000-mapping-brain-cells-could-translate-thoughts-into-speech.html?feedId=health_rss20
Web Trend Map 2008 Beta
Not all visual maps are prescribed to geographic content. Moving away from the past 3 maps of geography but continuing the theme of technology, there is this wonderful map from the Information Architects mapping popular internet websites.
In its second version they've 'taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. By popular demand, we enlarged the poster size from A3 to A0' (greber, 2008, web-trend-map-2008-beta).
In the popular style of train/underground maps, first started by Harry Beck’s London Underground map, which he developed from 1931 onwards, they are being subverted into alternative content, like here of websites map. Their clear, clean white space [1] is highly effective for organisation of information.
It is a type of
concept map
that is similar to brainstorms where it connects ideas and to that of mind maps. They are ‘graphical representation[s] where nodes (points or vertices) represent concepts (defined by [Joseph .D] Novak[2] as perceived regularities in objects and events), and links (arcs or lines) represent the relationships between concepts’. These objects and events are the common features which we abstract from our experience. The events form Wordsworth’s childhood memories that are ‘“sources of adult confidence and creativity”’ and helped him when writing Daffodils, or the visual memories in Barcelona of Picasso that inspired the painting of ‘Les Demoiselles of D’avignon’ and the objects could be the Iberian sculpture, or the Monet painting that also inspired him (Coffey, Hoffman, Cañas, & Ford, 2002, p. 2), (Sharples, 1999, p. 48).‘Concept maps are used to form knowledge models by placing them in a hierarchical organization and appending elaborating media onto the nodes within each map’ (Montello, 2002, p.2). An excellent example of this is the search engine KartOO. The elaborate media stated are the hyperlinks, animations that are activated when you click on one of the nodes (website names).
Overall it is an excellant map utilising white space & framing knowledge beautifully, brilliant balance of form/function. More articles will come featuring projects mapping the internet.
Online Clickable links version - excellant concept map
http://informationarchitects.jp/webtrendmap3/trendmap2008.html
[1] ‘white space is, perhaps, the most important, [...] aspect of writing as visual design. According to James Hartley, a psychologist who studied the visual design of text, good use of white space can help a reader to: See redundancies in the text & thus faster reading; See more easily which bits of text are personally relevant for them, See the structure of the document as a whole; Grasp its organisation’ (Sharples, 1999, p.141).
[2] Joseph D. Novak studied the concept mapping technique in the 60’s at Cornell University.
mini bibliography
gerber, matt. (2008). Web trend map. http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-2008-beta/ Friday, January 25th, 2008
Sharples, Mike. (1999). How We Write: writing as creative design. Routledge, London
Google. (2007). Search – Cognitive Mapping
http://intraspec.ca/12montello.pdf. Montello, David. (2002). Cognitive Map-Design Research in the Twentieth Century: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches. Cartographic and Geographic Information Sciences, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.283-304
Google. (2007). Search – Cognitive Mapping
http://intraspec.ca/cogmap.php. John W. Coffey, Robert R. Hoffman, Alberto J. Cañas & Kenneth M. Ford. (2002). A Concept Map-Based Knowledge Modelling Approach to Expert Knowledge Sharing*, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola Fl, 32502, viewed 30 June 2007, http://www.ihmc.us/users/acanas/Publications/IKS2002/IKS.htm