CogBlogged Tagged ‘maps’

There is a lot of new stuff happening with web technology every day, hour, minute, and then there ones that just make you stand back, like Neo, and say , “Woah” I just had that after playing with the BBC Dimensions site http://howbigreally.com/ – it describes itself well: Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are. Or more detail Dimensions is an experimental prototype for the BBC. We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street? Dimensions simply juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view of where you live. Certain “Dimensions” can be transformed into short walks, so you can get [...]

Stephen Downes highlighted today one of those wonderful simple ideas that can go (and has gone) a long way. In An Idea That Keeps Growing Doug Peterson shows how his simple idea took off– to use online maps to create a walking tour of the place he grew up. As Stephen suggested where he plotted his own tour of Metcalfe Ontario, this is a great simple activity one can do for some online storytelling- now with Google Street view, you can literally snap photos of your old neighborhood, and mix that with your memories, and shazam! Digital story. It’s something most every person could do, assuming they have a childhood they don’t mind recalling. But hee hee, it is not often one gets to say he did something way before Stephen, but (cough cough), I posted a memory map in flickr back in 2005 when a group started to collect [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps– Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I’m kind of a map nerd. I’ve done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don’t always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word “large” (rather than foo foo ‘venti’) has like 18,000 views! That’s insane. Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the [...]

Wow, the new interface for Google Maps Streetview is very slick! It fills the entire map frame, and you get a spinny controller (like in Google Earth) to rotate your view, plus drag and clicking the mouses gives a tilt-pan effect. So you can zoom down streets! I decided to pay a visit to the house I grew up at in Baltimore (I have blurred out the location and street name; the present occupants deserve some privacy). Fortunately they have painted my old room, but I did zoom in and see where I had carved my initials on the underside of the side steps (just kidding). I sure do not miss racking leaves or cutting grass, but there is where I lived until I was 18. I took a drive past my elementary school, and up through some old neighbor hoods, and did not really recognize much. Now the notion [...]

Sometimes it can take months to answer a question; Robert, a colleague I met in Shanghai who teaches at Fudan University asked if I knew of any tools that would make it easy for his journalism students to generate their own mashups of data and maps. I did not have an answer then; I talked about being able to easily annotate maps in Google MyMaps (bit this was a manual process) and other ways of connecting data and maps required a bit more technical chops. Much too late, I do have a better answer now, Geocommons which (sigh, why would any site put a description of their service as a freakin graphic! let me copy paste!): delivers visual analytics through maps; enabling non-technical professionals to view multiple datasets, draw conclusions, make decisions and solve problems without traditional GIS overhead More or less, by clicking, you can select from a library [...]