Place names redux

As Nestoria Australia grows up, we see more unusual search queries coming in.

Last week's highlight was Gum Scrub.

But this week along comes Jackass Flat to trump its dental sounding predecessor.

How close the past

The last blog post was about buildings of the future, but this one is about maps from the past.  And how well old fashioned cartography stacks up to today's technology, actually.

There are plenty of places where you can find old and unusual maps (Strange Maps is an in house favourite at Nestoria), but the collection put together by David Rumsay and Co.  is possibly one of the largest offline – he has about 150,000 – just a selection of which he also makes available online as well.  His site offers not just the ability to browse old maps, it also layers some of them over Google Maps maps and Google Earth maps, allowing you to see just how closely the old, hand drawn maps match up to the satellite versions. 

In order to position the maps properly they go though a process called geo-referencing, where the main cities and landmarks are all lined up, and the older maps are, only if necessary, skewed slightly so that they can be laid on top, but the four available for Australia are all quite close to spot on – when it comes to the coastline at least.  It's still worth twiddling with the transparency though so you can get a better look at the differences.  And taking a moment to consider how big and abstract a task this must have seen to the early cartographers.

The first Australian map is of NSW and south eastern Australian, drawn by John Arrowsmith in 1844, and is based on the latest accounts from returning explorers.  This was one of the most accurate maps of its time:

There's also a 1840 map of maritime Adelaide, which shows tide conditions:

And a 1843 map of Western Australia showing the new settlements and the very square way the region was broken up:

The last map is of the whole country, drawn in 1842, and coming with extensive notes regarding recent discoveries:

There are about 17,000 maps online at  www.davidrumsey.com, and about 120 that have been overlaid onto the Google Maps maps.  Her'es where you can find them:

Only in America

People say all sorts of things.  And hearing a snippet of someone's conversation out of context can leave you wondering what they were talking about for the rest of the day.  Well, imagine how much background thought processing it would take for you to deal with a website where someone had gathered together a whole lot of one liners from a town known for its colourful characters – like New York for example.

Brace yourself because you know what's coming next.

It's called Overplot and is a grid of one liners.  This one's from Greenwich Village:

This one is from Grand Central Station:

And this one gem is from Central Park:
If you know that this is the kind of thing you could easily spend days sifting though and mulling over then consider yourself warned.  But if you feel like checking out the convergence of one of the world's oldest pleasures with all the modern wonder GPS and other mapping technology can do when placed in the hands of a creative developer then this one is for you. 

If I could contribute to it I would.

Nestoria Interview – Mark Graham

Mark, your work seems to be at a point of convergence between mapping, society and technology, can you tell us what kind of projects you're interested in at the moment.

I'm interested in two main areas of work really. The first involves the use of the Internet as a tool of development. I've spent a few years doing research in Thailand on this theme: looking at the ways in which silk weavers might benefit from selling their crafts online and potentially bypassing intermediaries. I'm also very interested in the difference that the new fibre-optic broadband cables are making in East Africa. On a more practical level, I am interested in how ICTs can potentially foster a more open type of development and benefit poorer people and communities around the world by simply facilitating more flows of knowledge. I've set up a project called Wikichains.com to attempt to make a contribution in this space. The site is essentially a Wikipedia of commodity chains and aims to let people know more about the things they buy (the ultimate idea being that many people will then buy products and things produced with better environmental/labour/health etc. standards).

The other type of work that I'm interested in relates to the geographies of the Internet. Any work that sets out to ground and map these often invisible flows of information that swirl around us fascinates me.

I first came across you because of a map and article you wrote for The Guardian about Wikipedia's terra incognitos, and I know you've since made a lot of similar maps for floatingsheep.  When did you come up with the idea of mapping search terms?

Much of what is done on the floatingsheep.org blog maps the ways in which Google sees the world. For example, we ask questions such as: does Google index more references to "robbery" in London or Liverpool? The idea to do this actually originated from my PhD advisor Matthew Zook at the University of Kentucky in the US. I can't really remember what the first map we made was. I think it was the bible-belt map:

What are some of your favourites?

Probably some of the mappings of virtual references to religion that we've done:

I also like visualising the geographies of Wikipedia. I never expected the encyclopedia to be so geographically uneven. e.g.

Pre-16th Century biographies

Work in progress that I'm looking forward to will be a detailed map of virtual references to every Premiership football team in the UK, and some maps made from geotagged Twitter data.

And what interesting and or disturbing discoveries have you made usingthis method of analysis?  I've read in a couple of your posts a concern about class and access still playing a role in preventing an equal spread of information and content.

I worry that the uneven patterns of representation that we see will ultimately become entrenched and reinforced as we increasingly rely on the Internet for our understandings of reality. E.g. if Wikipedia entries are more dense in wealthier parts of the world, those parts of the world inevitably become more visible. The question is will this cultural capital ultimately entrench and reinforce privileged positions occupied by these visible places?

What sort of programs/ products/ applications have you seen recently that have impressed you?  I'm talking about people combining mapping and technology in interesting ways to do interesting things in the form of articles, mashups, products or apps etc. and what kind of ideas or technology are you getting excited about that might result in even more interesting applications in the future?  (A lot of the mapping people I've spoken to seem to be interested in augmented reality and twitter feeds...?)

The whole augmented reality movement fascinates me too. The idea that we can mash together material space and virtual information is exciting, inspiring and also somewhat terrifying. The apps that allow us to tap into these hybrid spaces or augmented realities only really scratch the surface of what will be possible once the cloud of geocoded data grows increasingly dense (at least in some parts of the world). I suppose I'm most interested in the meta-mapping of these augmented realities. So, I am working on research projects and academic papers that ask questions like:

What kind of information is being provided?

Who is writing this information?

How accurate/reliable is this information?

What sort of power relationships are embedded into it?

How do we get access to it?

How is filtered and ranked?

Do you have any blue sky ideas for new ways of looking at mapping information that you'd love to see but that technology hasn't quite caught up with yet?

Although I am worried about the privacy implications, I would like to see a lot more geographic metadata on physical things. This could be done either through an Internet of Things sort of framework: i.e. embedded into barcodes and Rfid chips, or through more of a Web 2.0/Web Squared framework with millions of contributors chipping in so that we can construct detailed understandings of the material objects the flow around our planet. Apologies for plugging my Wikichains.com project again here, but I think that it is a useful first step in this direction.

Part of my work at nestoria has involved getting hold of geospatial data - mostly from government agencies - and this has been quite challenging in some cases.  Is the freeing up of this kind of data something you've ever had a problem with?

Absolutely! Moving from the US to the UK I was shocked about the availability of geographic data here. I had an incredibly difficult time getting even simple datasets. The OS seems to have opened up a lot quite recently though, so things should certainly be a lot easier now.

And finally do you do anything map-geeky, and I mean that in the nicest possibly way, aside from floatingsheep, in your spare time that you'd like to confide in us?

Well, I am quite obsessed with frequent flyer programs and airline route networks. I love the challenge of being able to figure out obscure routes that I can use miles on to get from point A to B.

Thanks very much for answering our questions, Mark.  I'll look forward to seeing your Premiership football map th - and maybe a map of air mile routes...

Answering an Age Old Question

We say capsicum instead of pepper, snow peas instead of mange tout, zucchini instead of courgette and eggplant instead of aubergine, but we also say soccer instead of football: these are the subtle differences of language 'down under', and I've been coaching Ed Freyfogle for his upcoming trip so he won't need a translator. And ever on the look out for people doing interesting things with maps, I found that the guys at floatingsheep have mapped out instances of uses of both words as placemark keywords in an attempt to pass a defining verdict on which is the more correct name for that game with the black and white ball and the off-side-rule. On Wikipedia there are 21 pages worth of argument over this, so it's obviously a pressing issue for quite a few people...

What they haven't fully taken into account is that in Australia football means something else – it's the one with the men in the short shorts who kick the ball a lot isn't it? So while their map is quite interesting as far as the over all linguistic debate it also serves to suggest that in Australia at least it's not the name of the game that we're in two minds about, it's which one we prefer – and apparently its the one with the shorts and kicking. Unless it's people miss-naming the one with the big men and the running with the ball, or people adopting the name Association Football to mean soccer.

Taking it one step further they've then taken into account for what the 'beautiful game' is referred to in other languages:

And interestingly they've found a reference to German fussball in Victoria... So I'm just going to tell Ed that if people don't understand him just to use hand signals or point – or else to lapse into German...

If you're interested in meeting Ed he's going to be visiting both Syndey and Melbourne, so get in touch if you're in either city.  

Nestoria Interview: Luis Cipriani

Luis Cipriani is the man behind the recently blogged about "If I dig a very deep hole where will I end up". After seeing his site I started to wonder if he had ideas for any similar practical applications to answer these kinds of pressing questions, so I go in touch with him to ask him and asked him some other questions in the process.

To give you some background Luis has been developing web applications and mashups for 5 years. His first mashup was done in 2005 just after Google Maps API was released. After some years working as consultant in a bank with software engineering, he decided to focus only on Web development and joined a Brazilian Startup to work in a social Question and Answer website and Blogblogs, the largest blog search engine in Brazil. Later, this Startup was joined with Editora Abril, a publishing company, and started to work as software engineer for a Research and Development area. Beyond mashups using data exposed in APIs, Luis' interests includes Real time web, RESTful with hypermedia, natural language processing, dynamic programming languages, XMPP and several other Web technologies.

Hi Luis, I came across you because of your cool map based site 'If I dig a hole". When did you come up with the idea?  How much interest has it received and was it unexpected?

Just after Google Maps launched their API, I started trying to think of some simple application to test it. Then I remembered those TV cartoons that show a character digging or falling down in a hole and arriving on the other side of the world, with Chinese people, and so on. And I thought that would be great to be able to know the exactly place that I would end up if I dig a hole through Earth. The idea is completely nonsense, but I thought that everybody spends at least one day pondering this, and finally I could answer it for them, thanks to the API.

I coded for half an hour and created a poorly designed, but functional website (not the current one) and sent to some friends. One of them was Mike Pegg, author of Google Maps Mania, a blog that tracks Maps mashups and I ask him if he could publish something about my website (the email subject at the time was "Stupid application for Google Maps" :-)), and I put a Google Maps Mania link on my site. I forgot about the website for some days when I received an email from him (copied and pasted below):

"I suspect you must be getting some pretty serious traffic to your digging tool?  A majority of my visits are coming from your site if you can believe it.  Wow!  :)  Great job!  :)"

I decided to take a look at the statistics and I was getting 30,000 visits a day, a lot of blogs were writing reviews (even a blog from a research group at Stanford University), the website was chosen one of the "55 ways to have fun with Google" in Philipp Lenssen's book, published in 2006. It was all pretty unexpected. I had to change the hosting, fix English typos, add Adsense, I had a lot of fun. Nowadays, the website doesn't get that kind of load, but it might have been the most profitable half hour of work that I've ever done :-)

Did you try and repeat your succes on other, similarly inquisitive sites?

Trying to repeat the success of the "digging" website, I came up with another one that answers the question: "If I walk in a straight line around the world, where will I pass?"  Basically, the user chooses the coordinates, direction (or two coordinates) and the mashup will draw the path that he'd pass along if he was capable of walking huge distances. To improve the visualization, I used another API that shows interesting places around this path. It's quite fun to search for funny or interesting places along the path, but this site didn't have the success of the previous one.

In 2008 I worked in a project to map Brazilians Twitters users (www.tuitersfera.com.br), offering population distribution, state distribution statistics, all drawn in a Google Map. But this project was discontinued.

My last project using maps was a simple mashup combining Yahoo Query language and Yahoo Pipes with open public data to plot addresses of fruit markets in certain days of the weeks in my city, Sao Paulo.

And do you have any more ideas, or sites that you'd like to create but that there's not quite the technology for yet?

I don't think the possibility of not having the technology to build a specific map application is a limitation today. We face far more difficulties trying to source data from the Web than whilst creating an application that uses an obscure technology, because not all websites are designed to work as data providers, to offer APIs, or to be consumed externally by a robot. Sometimes they don't even offer a valid HTML for us to at least scrape the page. Another important question to answer before we use data is how reliable it is.

The main challenge when building a map visualization comes from mining and filtering the data so you can find the results you want to present. To improve this it would be great to see initiatives such as Linked Data, Semantic Web, RESTful with hypermedia becoming more successful. Or for APIs to be must-have functionality on all websites that manage data.

I'm very interested in the place where mapping and technology are converging, can you recommend to me any other mashups, sites or applications that explore this field that you have seen and loved?

I haven't kept a list of the map mashups or applications that I've seen and liked... As a web developer, I prefer to look for my inspiration in experiments with Google Maps, on the Programmable Web, on the Google Maps Mania blog and I also keep updated in new map APIs or new features in existent APIs.

What kinds of non-map based projects are you interested in?

I'm currently involved in the development of an open source RESTful with hypermedia library called Restfulie. I'm also very interested in Real Time Web applications, specially the ones that uses XMPP as message protocol. And any kind of sports related applications that improve the way an audience sees a game, with statistics, visualization, etc.

That sounds like another project that will keep a lot of people entertained.  Thanks very much for speaking to us Luis, and Nestoria's sports fans will no doubt be keen to wish you well on any sports related endevours.