Here’s an update from MIT, and The Future of News and Civic Media Conference. I attended the conference to participate in a barcamp session on mapping tools, and how they are can be used for different types of projects. This conference was really intriguing. Coming from a GIS background, I was struck by how often maps and geography are used to tell a story.
(some cool geodata visualizations after the jump)
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So why does the International Date Line (IDL) cause so many headaches? It seems like a really simple problem, but it ends up touching a bunch of mapping concepts, none of which are easily dealt with. I ran across this when working on the Sourcemap project, when we wanted to relatively realistic travel paths. When I say “relatively”, I mean, don’t travel from Japan to California via France.
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Azavea is a rare company. One of the benefits that we (full-time employees) earn is the ability to define our own research project after 6 months. There is a list of active research projects here. My personal interests took me to working with C. Dana Tomlin, and implementing a radial propagation tool for ArcToolbox. In addition, I wanted to collaborate with the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group on the project http://www.sourcemap.org/.
I won’t get into what sourcemap is (that’s already been done), but I thought it would be cool to mention some of the technical challenges that the project was/is facing, and what we’re doing about it.
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I want to send a shout out to anyone working on the Simile Timeline project. Born out of the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL, they are part of a suite of tools that enable visualization of seemingly massive datasets. We are implementing an in-house solution for planning, and the timeline is fast, slick, and solid.
I was rockin’ the maps with a version of timeline integrated with OpenLayers, appropriately named maptimeline. Abandoning all grasp of reality, I then added a Simile Timeplot to the interface, too. I would have liked to be able to integrate the time plot and the timeline tighter, but at this point, that integration is still a bit clunky.
Coming back down to earth, I dropped the map and the timeplot, as they didn’t add value to an already cluttered interface. Nonetheless, I am really impressed with how well all of these tools perform.
