A recent project

pages.uoregon.edu/eslager/CulturalGeog

I made this map for a final project for a cultural geography course this spring, and it comes with a request for viewers to submit markers of their own content, so check it out.

The idea of the map is to share stories or artifacts about places that are a little rough around the edges but that still inspire affection and pride. It’s not a radical map; it’s not connected to any goals for social change or political progress; it’s just a very simple testament to the places we love.

I’ve been feeling a little guilty lately that so few (if any) of my maps actually have that kind of goal—and that I’m not involved in more of the activism that a good map could be useful for. How do I balance the expectations and responsibilities of my grad program for me to do work that will advance my career and their reputation with what I think is the actually important work of fighting for justice? Lately, I’ve been failing on the side of too little of the latter.

Lots of good things to think about after this weekend, though: http://amc.alliedmedia.org/

What the distance means

What is distance? What is distance when you’re on the last leg of a weekend climb to the top of a mountain? What is distance when the weather is miserable where you live in Western Washington but you have only three days of vacation? What is distance when you’ve got as much vacation time as you want but only $500 to spend?

In the first scenario, I might say distance is the 200 meters I have to keep walking before I reach the top; in the second, it’s as far south as I can get in 1.5 days; in the third, it’s a function of money—how far can I get on $500? It’s space, sure, but it’s also time and money.

A person with a stricter understanding of language would insist that distance is only ever the space between one place and another, but it’s hard to deny that the meaning of distance—how we experience distance—is much more. It’s time, and it’s money, and it’s how we use technology to change the relationship between space, time, and money. You remember the lesson on the transcontinental railroad from eighth grade history class don’t you? The opening of the railroad didn’t shorten the physical distance from New York to Sacramento, but it did dramatically cut the amount of time it took to travel that physical distance. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the West.

Traditional maps have been very good at helping us find the physical distance from place to place, and more recently, network-analysis based mapping services like Google Maps have acknowledged with options for car-travel, foot-travel, public transport, and biking that the ways we understand and use knowledge about distance is highly contingent on how we move from place to place.

A couple of recent mash-ups have developed the idea that the meaning of distance is not always so much about space as it is about how we experience space. Probably my favorite mash-up of the season is Mapnificent, featured a while ago on Flowing Data and also shown to me by AKC. For certain cities, it shows you where you can get from a central location in whatever amount of time you specify when you’re traveling on public transportation. This map shows me where I should look for apartments if I want to be able to get to class in Condon Hall at UO in 15 minutes or less:

The shape of my 15-minute bubble is influenced by physical geography (the river is a definite barrier) as well as the built environment (where are the major roads) and things like public policy (who determines the bus routes or the speed limits?). Beautiful isn’t it! Mapnificent also releases its API, which is kickass if you’re a developer.

A second mash-up that’s a little less cool but still worth a look is a flight-finder from the Hungarian airline Malev.

Enter your starting location and the amount of money you’re willing to spend on a ticket, and the map returns every city you can fly to for less than that price.

God bless creative minds in possession of sweet web programming skills!

To nod, to grin, to lend a hand

I realize blogging is no longer (was it ever?) the right platform for this, but in lieu of any real writing, it’s time to share some links.

First up, a great little article on FUME, the Fellowship of Unassimilated Manhattan Exiles in DC, that captures nicely the feelings of expatriotism. From the article:

If there were a Fellowship of Unassimilated Midwestern Exiles, it would have a waiting list for admission. Its members would congregate at the Olive Garden in Falls Church and wonder why you have to drive so far to find a good Dairy Queen and whether it’s really necessary for parking spaces to be so small or so expensive.

Every expat community has something it misses, something that stands for everything that is right about the place you came from and wrong about the place where you’ve arrived.

There is statriotism—that defensive instinct to start listing off stereotypically awesome things about your home town when some snobby east coaster questions its cred (see the opening clip of Season 4 Episode 15 of 30 Rock for an example)—and then there’s expatriotism, that longing for homeland of a small community in exile that makes ordinarily bagel-refraining New Yorkers talk at length about circles of dough when in DC. And while we’re at it, you know what I miss about the midwest, what I talk about with almost every Michigander I meet out here? Rain, the kind that smells good and is nice. And thunder! So all you Facebookers can please stop talking about the storms you’ve been having. (Via SC on the FB)

Next, we’re a bit beyond graduation season, but that means we’re in the thick of the season of figuring out what’s next in life. Map of the Week posted a great reference map for hipsters searching for a new city to live in.

Click for a larger image. Of course I felt particularly guilty reading the description of Detroit: “Something vague about hopeful post-apocalyptic urban gardening.” (Not sure of the original source, via MotW)

Finally, this goes out to all you alumni of the Calvin semester in Budapest, from any year, as well as any of our Hungarian pals. I need some help with a mapping project. I’m building a guide map to Budapest, and I don’t have the time, the memory, or the comprehensive experience to do it alone. Here’s the start of the map:

Follow the link for full sized map, and if you’ve got places to contribute, send me a message or an email and I’ll make you a contributor and send you instructions. I’m trying to put together blurbs on places to see, to eat, to drink, to experience, to go running, etc., and I hope to finish it before the new crop of students gets there in the fall. Köszönöm szépen!

Big Maps

Here’s a reblogged blog from my pal RG:

Big Map Blog

Today’s post (linked above) is one my pops will particularly like.

I’ve been on a rather rocky adventure these past few days. Lots of driving and breaking down and doubling back, and now I’m back in the midwest for a couple of days for an interview for a fellowship. It’s hard to believe I’ve gone so far only to end up near where I started. Oh well, I think I’ll make it to Washington eventually, and I’ve been collecting some great maps along the way. More on those when I make it to Snohomish.

Eyes on Japan

I’ve been listening to the radio all weekend while working frustratedly on a mash-up map of Budapest. The news, of course, is sobering, and it puts my frustration with Java Script and HTML into perspective.

The radio coverage has been good, but there are some things that words fail to communicate.

The image above is from an interactive feature on the New York Times website that you can check out here. It shows before and after satellite images of the affected areas with a slider that lets you change the image and see the landscape transformed.

The Times’ mash-up map also does a nice job showing the extent of the shaking along with geotagged photos and information markers.

Mapping food deserts

Michigan Radio recently ran a story about a project from Michigan State University’s AgBio Research center that included mapping access to fresh food in Lansing, MI. The map from the project is above (click on the map for a larger image). It’s a beautifully designed map, but in terms of communication, I think this is one for Cartastrophe.

We used it in Intro GIS today as an example of the limitations of dot density mapping, in which dots represent a certain quantity of a phenomenon (in this case, 50 residents) but aren’t necessarily spatially correlated with the actual distribution of the phenomenon. For instance, note the dots representing residents that are placed in the middle of highways. That can be problematic, especially when you’re dealing with a relatively small area in which specific location is exactly what you’re trying to communicate.

Other problems with the MSU map are an unclear legend (what are the items it refers to?) and lack of explanatory text to answer that question and others. For example, why are the areas of accessibility so irregularly shaped? My guess is that they were made using raster analysis of the road network, but without the road network being visualized (and without labels on the roads that are shown), it’s just confusing. A bit of explanatory text would be very helpful.

Furthermore, since transportation is vital to access to food, a map that incorporates statistics on car ownership would be awesome. Witness this map from one of last semester’s Intro GIS students (sorry I can’t insert a picture because it’s a PDF). The design could be improved (this is from a sophomore intro student), but in my opinion this is a much more useful map. The interpolated surface is a much clearer way of communicating proximity to grocery stores, and the incorporation of car-ownership shows that the places where we most need grocery stores to be located are exactly the areas where food is least accessible.

Anyway, I’m very glad for the research going on at MSU, but that map could be greatly improved. I’m also glad that Calvin students are doing similar work at the undergraduate level, and the whole thing has given me an idea for a lab I’m going to try to create around food accessibility.

Soup weather approaches

This is more than a little cheesy, but it’s snowing hard out there—and besides, I like this map’s projection.

From the Onion:

Hearth Heart

Sorry for slacking on the landform of the week posts. I’ve been busy celebrating national Earth Science Week—and taking midterms. Just now I’m studying for an urban geography exam, but I had to take a study break to share this.

Ur is one of the oldest cities in the world. From 2300 to 2180 BC it was the capital city of the Sumerian Empire and at its largest had a population of 35,000 enclosed within the city walls, with as many as 250,000 including those who lived outside the walls. The Euphrates flowed just to the west, meaning that Ur is in the Mesopotamian hearth, the birthplace of agriculture and urbanization. Here’s a map from my textbook, Urban Geography by Michael Pacione (Routledge, 2009):

That compound in the center is the temenos, or religious precinct, and the building that’s black is still standing. You can see it on Google Maps. The path from X to X is a processional path which likely connected to the temenos, and point D indicates a densely built residential area. Points A and B indicate harbors which, from my understanding, were connected to the river by canals—or, as I like to call them, veins and arteries. Maybe you’ve had the same thought I had when I saw this map; Ur is shaped almost exactly like a human heart. Check it:

Isn’t that awesome?? I overlayed a picture of a heart model that I found on Wiki Commons and erased the background on the photo, but otherwise, I did not transform the picture at all other than resizing it, maintaining scale.

What do you think? Did the Sumerians know what they were doing or is it a coincidence?

Downsize me

Before summer started and the job that accounts for my posting hiatus began, I finished my project for Advanced GIS. It’s called “Downsizing Flint: Spatial alternatives for a shrinking city.” Basically, my goal was to analyze the density of empty properties in the city of Flint to identify what parts of the city might be best for planned downsizing [read: demolition]. The .pdf below is the final result.

Final_Map

So, obviously, this is pretty simplistic and conceptual. I have a more detailed report, and if you’re interested in method, specific conclusions or the like, email me and I’d be happy to send it your way. But the short version is this: Flint’s population is less than a third of what the built environment can accommodate; this is a problem. Despite our nostalgia for places of past glory, it’s time to rethink, and probably, to demolish. Not that demolition is straightforward (or cheap) either. One thing we shouldn’t do is glorify decay. I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this (see links below), but I wanted to do an analysis that would help me think more concretely about downsizing in a specific place and not just in the abstract.

This project was also a lesson in data acquisition, but the city of Flint came through in the end. My thanks to the wonderful, if overworked, city employees I talked to for that.

Some resources about downsizing in the Rustbelt:

“An Effort to Save Flint, Mich. by shrinking it,” NY Times, 21 April 2009.

Genesee County Land Bank

Youngstown, Ohio

Ideography

My history professor posted this on Facebook today, and I couldn’t resist reblogging it.

“PEOPLE who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could,” begins the story in The Economist. “Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.” (Click the image to see the whole story at Economist.com.)

As a geography (and history) student, I both love and—well, not hate, but—mildly dislike the idea. I love that as serious and sometime surely of a publication as The Economist can loosen its tie enough actually reference the make-believe country of Vulgaria, the setting of the movie “Chittty Chitty Bang Bang,” and I’m extremely pleased that it’s used the medium of mapping to do so.

But I think it’s telling that instead of sending Western countries in to fill the space vacated by migrating Eastern countries, the magazine put imaginary nations into Eastern Europe. Sure, says the West, we’ll let a lucky few of you join us over here if you’ll assimilate, but don’t expect us to head your way. But who can we Other now? Oh, where’s that Child Catcher from that old Dick Van Dyke movie? He’s sufficiently backwards to fit our stereotypes. Yes, he and Dracula will get along well!

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a scene from a movie I once thought was Truly Scrumptious. Listen closely when they discover the trap door and tell me you don’t here the Catcher cackle, “The feminists will have your teeth for a necklace and your eyeballs for earrings!” Mom and Dad, how did you ever let me watch this?

For the sake of fairness, he actually says baroness, not feminists.