Category Archives: Uncategorized
Mapping_The Invisible Soundtrack
If Mapping_The Invisible had a musical score, it would sound something like Phillip Glass’ Glassworks. Something that starts off in a familiar context but turns to the unexpected. Experimental and digestible. On second thought, perhaps Koyaanisqatsi (film score by Glass) is the more appropriate choice. I would argue that it is a cinematographic map. If you now have an abundant source of free-time and don’t know what to do with it, please watch it at your leisure:
Mind altering, no chemicals necessary.
That is, to me at least. I’d like to believe everyone has their own sonic interpretation of the course. What did it sound like to you? Anyone?
Anyone?
Hello?
M_TI
Over in Less Than a Second
Beautiful data mapping of events that happen in a split second.
http://signal-noise.co.uk/thinking/over-in-less-than-a-second
GOOGLE EARTH VR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCrkZOx5Q1M
Check out this promotional video for Google Earth VR, the next mapping tool from Google’s cartographic tool-kit that I took interest in exploring for today’s final presentation. This video does a great job to act as springboard in generating discussion as well as thought about VR and technology in general toward mapping today and for the future. Worth checking out!
City of Women: what if those streets were named after women?
In complement to Celia’s most recent post, this article explains well how over-representation of men in city street name constitute a privilege for the dominating gender: “I can’t imagine how I might have conceived of myself and my possibilities if, in my formative years, I had moved through a city where most things were named after women and many or most of the monuments were of powerful, successful, honored women.”
A short read, very eye opening.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/city-of-women
Mapping the Sexism of City Street Names
But there’s a glaring problem with how streets get named: few memorialize women. A new interactive map from Mapbox developer Aruna Sankaranarayanan and her colleagues shows just how scarce female streets are in major cities around the world.
Full Article: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/11/mapping-the-sexism-of-city-street-names/414094/
15 Subway Maps Compared to Their Actual Geography [GIF]
This is super interesting. Animated GIFs showing the comparison of subway maps to their actual geography.
Fun to check out here: http://twistedsifter.com/2017/05/subway-maps-compared-to-their-actual-geography/
Austin has the saddest subway line. Just one line.
Joanna Newsom’s “Sapokanikan”
Piotr Orlov from NPR asks “What the hell kind of word is ‘Sapokanikan‘?” He later answers, “when parsing the layers of lyrical meaning in Joanna Newsom’s new track wasn’t intriguing enough, there is first the matter of the title’s origin. ‘Sapokanikan‘ was the name of a Native American, Lenape village situated in lower Manhattan pre Dutch arrival, approximately where Greenwich Village now stands — which somewhat explains the accompanying Paul Thomas Anderson-directed video that finds Newsom wandering the streets and alleys of that New York neighborhood historically associated with cultural change.”
Director Paul Thomas Anderson is known for both his full length feature films (Magnolia (1999), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Inherent Vice (2014) – the latter of which features Newsom as a narrator and minor character) and for his music videos for artists including Radiohead, Fiona Apple, and Aimee Mann. The video gives the feeling of Anderson’s trademark long-takes (uninterrupted shots that track character movement without breaks or edits) without actually giving the shots themselves. Instead, a series of tracking shots follow Newsom around lower Manhattan and Central Park, through bodegas and bouts of unsuspecting crowds. The video can be read as a mobile exercise in mapping and layering the city, in which a history of the city is rewritten over and over again in both real-time (the filming of the video) and in subsequent viewings and performances.
There’s a nice moment at the end of the video in which a change of musical tone is matched by a modification in setting and visual tone, as Newsom – presumably by coincidence – encounters an emergency scene. In her words, “Sapokanikan is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality.” That certainly clears things up.
It’s also worth noting that Newsom often switches away from conventional musical notation in her songwriting process in favour of her own system of written icons and shapes, including half- and full-moons, stars, and other cosmic symbols.
Mapping rat bites in Detroit
Radical geographer Bill Bunge in the 1970’s studied Detroit in the attempt to reveal social inequalities within the city. This map shows the location of reported rat bites as a manifestation of poverty.
REAL-TIME LIGHTING MAP
This interesting website (above) follows lightning activity across regions. Looking closer at the map one will notice how the majority of the southern hemisphere is not recorded, which leaves some outstanding questions as to why aren’t there any weather recording apparatus in those regions, and what that tells us about the conditions (socio-economic, political) of those areas.