The Map Room

Jeremy Wood has been creating maps from his GPS tracklogs for years. His latest project, a work commissioned by the Warwick Arts Centre’s Meade Gallery, is an intricate map of the University of Warwick’s 300-hectare campus, which he walked over 17 days, creating 383 kilometres (238 miles) of traces.

“I responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible,” Wood writes. “Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.”

At the bottom of the map, he paced out a title, scale, compass and his name — creating a virtual cartouche in open fields.

Via Gizmodo.

Previously: GPS Drawing Maps.

Eric Fischer won’t stop. Following up on his Geotaggers’ World Atlas (previously), he’s separated out the geodata generated by locals from that generated by tourists — locals being defined as people taking pictures of the same city over a period of greater than a month. The idea being to see whether locals (blue) and tourists (red) take pictures (which is to say, visit) different areas, which intuitively sounds right, but it’s interesting to see the hard data (at right, San Francisco). Via Burrito Justice and Flowing Data.

Previously: The Geotaggers’ World Atlas; Mapping the Muni.

The Geotaggers’ World Atlas is Eric Fischer at work again: this time he’s taken geographical data from Flickr photos, determined the speed at which the photographers were travelling based on their photos’ timestamps and geotags, and plotted them on an OpenStreetMap background layer. He’s done this for 50 cities. The colours are the same as with his map of San Francisco’s Muni: black is less than 7 mph (11 km/h), red is less than 19 mph (30 km/h), blue is less than 43 mph (69 km/h), and green is faster. Via Burrito Justice and Flickr Blog.

Previously: Mapping the Muni.

BBC News reports on an OpenStreetMap “mapathon” taking place this weekend, during which 200 or so volunteers will spread out and map the city. Via Maps-L.

On a similar note, have a look at this New York Times article from earlier this month, which talks about people who use their GPS units to create drawings from the traceroutes of the paths they take. For example:

Pedaling the rectangular city blocks in San Francisco, Vicente Montelongo, 32, a graphic artist, realized the street layout lent itself to the pixeled shapes of vintage 1980s video game characters like Pac-Man, Q*bert and Donkey Kong. Back home with a printed-out Google map and a pencil, he drew Pac-Man chasing a ghost over in the Sunset District and then set out on his bike, iPhone in tow, GPS mapping application on. After riding 8.6 miles in an unwavering line, he uploaded the GPS track data from his phone, and had his picture.

Via googlemaps.

Previously: GPS Drawing Maps.

Using a GPS, Toronto cyclist James Redekop has recorded his bike routes from 2004 to 2009 — more than 8,000 kilometres’ worth — and created a nifty time-lapse animated video. Torontoist has more. Via Richard….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jillian from Wolfram Research writes, “I thought you and your readers would find today’s post in the Wolfram Blog quite fascinating. It’s all about Mathematica’s capabilities for importing and analyzing geographic GPS data. It includes many fascinating examples — elevation…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Considerable buzz about an upcoming BBC series, Britain from Above. This preview (screen capture above; I wish I could have embedded the video here, it’s pretty good) uses GPS traceroutes to show sea, road and air traffic; it also…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other…  •  Continue reading this entry.

OpenStreetMap contributor Gregory Marler moved to Durham to begin a university degree, but the OpenStreetMap project does not have a lot of data for Durham. Marler has therefore hit upon the idea that he would not only contribute Durham data…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Richard has a review of the GlobalSat DG-100 GPS data logger, which can be used for geotagging (if the clocks on the data logger and camera are in sync). And presumably tracerouting. He also compares it to the Sony…  •  Continue reading this entry.

National Geographic News has a story about the OpenStreetMap project — useful for giving it some context. Part of a series on “digital places,” with more articles forthcoming. Via OpenGeoData. See previous entries: OpenStreetMap at Where 2.0; OpenStreetMap Animations; Ed…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Brady Forrest, covering FOSS4G2006 for O’Reilly Radar, links to some fascinating animations from the OpenStreetMap project. This one tracks two days’ worth of courier activity in London: There are also videos that track the growth in GPS traces for OpenStreetMap…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Having mapped approximately 90 per cent of the roads on the Isle of Wight last weekend (see previous entry), the OpenStreetMap project now turns to Manchester for its next workshop this coming weekend. Via Boing Boing. See previous entries:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Boing Boing, news that the OpenStreetMap project will attempt to map the entire Isle of Wight this coming weekend. OpenStreetMap’s goal is to produce freely available, copyright-free mapping data for Britain. Unlike the U.S., where government information is public…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cabspotting, which went live on Thursday, generates a real-time map of taxi movements by displaying the last four hours of trips by GPS-equipped taxicabs in San Francisco. (For some reason this reminds me of the cell phone map of Graz…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oskar Karlin: “Every day I document my movements by drawing them on a map. From that, patterns and images appear.” Select “Projects,” then “Never Ending Drawing.” Via Things Magazine….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Since 2002, Jeremy Wood has been recording his travels — by plane, car, bicycle, ferry and foot — with his GPS; the resulting maps, in incredible detail, are available here. Via MAKE: Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Noah Vawter’s project for a class at MIT was to map the bumpiness of Cambridge streets. Via MAKE: Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A GPS traceroute of a year’s worth of walking and biking in New York — mostly Manhattan and Brooklyn — by a single person. Beyond neat. Via Gadling….  •  Continue reading this entry.