And so it was nice to run across this map of every building footprint in Montgomery County (Dayton), Ohio while idly browsing the “Maps” folder on my computer. I cranked it out from GIS data some six years ago. Give it a click for a large version.

Granted this map is more interesting if you know the area, but nonetheless it’s fascinating how much something like this can indicate about the patterns of human settlement in a typical American city. It’s not too difficult to see where settlement has followed or been bounded by highways and rivers. Industrial areas are discernible from residential areas, and city from suburb from rural. (By the way, this map only shows a sliver of Greene County—including my hometown of Beavercreek—where a good chunk of additional suburbia is located.) Owing to its simplicity, I believe this map shows urban patterns much more clearly than a satellite image or a road map.

If you’re familiar with the Dayton area, check out the patterns that probably confirm what you already know. See how to the north, settlement extends in spokes between the Mad, Stillwater, and Miami Rivers. Notice how immediately south of west Dayton, there’s hardly anything on the west side of the river. And look at the difference in suburban density on the west and east sides of Far Hills Avenue through Oakwood and Kettering.

If you’re not familiar with the Dayton area, the wonderful thing is that despite being nothing more than polygons, this map can probably teach you a bit about it.

Remember, the sweetest sentiment today and forever is:

The same goes for Terra Australis, but it is customary to retain an “Antarctica” label as a joke.

Seen at Franklin Park Conservatory, Columbus, Ohio.

In the past I have mentioned here an ongoing project to trace my every movement on a map, using memory and mouse-clicking rather than technology that costs money. Well, the advent of 2010 marks a full calendar year of doing this and a good moment to show some results.

Obviously this is not a novel concept (to choose a single example, I must link to UrbanTick here), and nobody besides me cares about the particulars of my travels. Shut up, it’s fun anyway. There are two reasons why this originally sounded interesting. First, I work from home, and there is very little routine in my trips out of the house, both in timing and destination. Rather than a predictable daily grind, I could hope for a an unknown awesome-looking pattern. Second, I keep the tracks separated by mode of transportation (foot, car, train, bus, and bike so far). A portrait of urban mobility or some such. As I bonus I will add that for a urban geography and cartography nerd, this project works as motivation to get out and explore different parts of town. There are witnesses to my excitement over being able to add a new line to the map.

Anyway, below is a little Flash animation of daily travels, with some transparency to highlight hot spots. I gave up on trying to do this beyond the immediate local area (Cambridge, Massachusetts)*, so there are some noticeable pauses where I disappeared for weeks on various out-of-town trips.

Goals for 2010:

• Cover more ground! I still haven’t made it to half of Cambridge, and there is a lot of neighboring Boston and Somerville to explore.
• Use a bicycle more than four times in a year. It is perhaps the best way to get around town and shouldn’t be collecting dust.
• Collect more data, such as distance, for summary statistics. This may require more sophisticated techniques than simply drawing lines, though, which would conflict with my New Year’s resolution to be more technologically lazy.

* Sorry for making this an increasingly Boston-centric blog, but hey, for your own projects you start with what’s outside your front door too, right? Not that I actually have a front door.

I have been learning my way around the Boston area for some fifteen months now, and I do not wish to suggest that the challenge in an urban area measures up to what the good people of rural Maine face, but I think of the phrase often as I’m puzzled by how to drive between two points in town. Compared to most American cities, the street network here can be rather chaotic, and absurdly simple trips like driving across a street or around the corner can require a convoluted route and an intimate knowledge of the local streets. It’s just another good reason to leave the car at home.

Anyway, while spending some time dreading getting in the car to finish a bit of Christmas shopping, I was curious to see what some of these ridiculous routes look like on a map. Here are a few of the not-so-simple paths required for simple trips in and around Boston. Bits of intersecting streets are shown to illustrate that there’s no such thing as just going around the block.

Bring GPS.

The compass rose or north arrow on a map is an easy place for a cartographer to leave his or her artistic mark on a map, in the GIS era usually to laughable effect. Or for a more corporate production, it’s a good place to stick a logo. In the days when American road travel was a bit more of an exciting adventure than it is now, gas stations distributed some heavily-branded highway maps encouraging travel powered by their fuel. As I browsed through a few of these in my possession (acquired from items discarded by the Arthur Robinson Map Library over a couple of years), this lovely north arrow from a c. 1937 Sinclair road map of Ohio stood out as particularly amusing.

I don’t think this was ever Sinclair Oil’s actual logo—rather, it’s long been the still-familiar green apatosaurus—but the company has associated itself with dinosaur imagery in general. The map, by the way, was made by Rand McNally.

Made with indiemapper. We’ll probably return the map projection code to normal before it’s released.

This site has said “We’re launching soon” for two harvests now. I still don’t know what it is, but it’s kind of cool.

My earlier post mentioned Mark Andrew Webber and his linocut maps, but since then he’s worked on a large and amazing map of Paris, which you’ve probably seen by now. More like awesomecut.

One of my favorite maps from the poster session at this years NACIS conference was Mouths Wide Open by Mike Boruta of Ohio University, mapping Athens, Ohio with things overheard around town as well as his own thoughts. With his permission, here is a larger section of the map. Mike, it must be noted, was the winner of the NACIS student poster competition for a different map, The Million Dollar Highway.

Hand-lettering is not typography of course, but we can be liberal here. Layla Curtis has several drawings of maps that consist, essentially, of labels. I think they are traced. On her site, look for them under Work->Drawings.

Portsmouth Vernacular by Jodie Silsby is a fabulous map of Portsmouth (UK) with the streets written as local slang phrases. Maps + typography + language? Yes, please!

Here’s a series of maps at Very Small Array showing the US with each state filled in by the most common location mentioned in craigslist “missed connections” posts.

Finally, this is as much as I am willing to show of an unfinished project right now, but here’s a tiny preview of a map I have slowly been working on for a while. For now you’ll just have to take my word that everything besides white space in the image below is made up of type.

Don’t say “white,” smartass. But don’t say “crimson” just yet, either.

This being a blog about maps, I of course mean Harvard not as a school but as a geographic entity. What color is the landscape, physical and cultural? When people look around at whatever interests them, what colors are they looking at?

I came up with one way of answering that. Here’s my logic, if it makes sense:

1. People take photos of what interests them.
2. Photos typically contain colors.
3. Flickr has many thousands of geotagged photos in the vicinity of Harvard.

After a few API calls and some code and graphics work, I’ve got a map showing the colors of the physical-cultural landscape around Harvard Square. This is not simply a map of the colors on the ground, which you can get from an aerial photo or systematic documentation like Google Street View, but rather a map of the colors that people on the ground are looking at.

Turns out crimson may be about right, as there’s a lot of red here. But that has less to do with Harvard and more to do with the fact that there is a lot of brick around here. The grass and trees of Harvard Yard are doing all they can to turn the map green in that area and only coming up with something yellowish.

As with much of what I post here, Harvard Square is of course merely a convenient and familiar local cartographic test subject, being just up the street from my home. Here’s another one, Boston Common. Lots of green in the park areas, red and orange in the Beacon Hill neighborhood (bricks again), and kind of blue (sky?) around the state capitol building.

Anyway, WTF is going on here? Quite simply, I’ve grabbed about 2,000 photos in each location from Flickr, determined the dominant color in each, mapped those colors, and interpolated liberally. Here are some dirty details.

Flickr API
These maps are based on the most recent 2,000 or so photos uploaded to Flickr and geotagged within the specified bounding box. This is easily accomplished with the flickr.photos.search request. Now, it would be wonderful to make a silly little web app that draws these maps on the fly, but the next step makes it pretty impractical. That is downloading 2,000 images. Even at the “square” (75×75) size, it takes a while.

Dominant color
Here things are fudged a fair amount. I tried a number of ways of simplifying a photograph down to a single representative color. The most obvious option is to calculate the average color, that is, combine the average red, green, and blue values into one color. But too often that results in a dull grayish color because there is too much color variety in the image. Next I tried the color that appears most frequently. It was sometimes better but also frequently just some dark unsaturated color. Then I looked at histograms and combined the most common red, green, and blue values into a single color. That was hit-or-miss and often produced a color that was not representative of the image at all. After a few other attempts, I decided to simplify a lot: get the average color, but only be concerned with the hue; keep it saturated and fairly bright. As such the maps are showing much stronger colors than most photos actually contain, and they poorly represent the occasionally unsaturated photo, but this seemed like the best way to get a set of very general overall colors. Here’s an example of three basic color options, using one of my own photos of a lovely summer day in the Boston Common; the bottom green color seems most representative and is what I’m using on the map.

Mapping the colors
Easy. Just draw a little square at the location of each photo. Here’s the Boston Common.

Sometimes there are multiple photos tagged at the exact same location, however. This time I was lazy and did not take that into account, so the color displayed at such a point is simply that of the last photo to be loaded there. I decided it wasn’t too big a deal given the many other points on the map.

Interpolating
Both of these map extents have thousands upon thousands of geotagged photos within them, but the locations are not at all evenly distributed. To get something more than clustered dots, I employed an interpolation method known as “blurring the crap out of them in Photoshop.” Generally colors fade nicely into one another, but these maps do display some colors that are largely artifacts of the blurring. Still, it works pretty well. I’m sure everyone recognizes the image below as Boston, right? (A shiny nickel to anyone who can explain why Allston-Brighton is so strongly blue/purple, so that I don’t have to go over there and find out for myself.)

In conclusion, call this stuff a work in progress, as I’d like to pursue it further, maybe just because looking at trippy images is fun. There must be a lot of locations that would produce interesting maps. Suggestions?

I’ve recently returned from Sacramento after attending the 2009 conference of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), and I wish to briefly plug the organization here in case either of my readers is not already familiar with it.

If you work with maps, you should join NACIS and go to its meetings. Consider these facts:

• NACIS represents all sorts of cartography, and you will see some amazing maps and learn about lots of work that’s going on in the field.
• NACIS comprises all sorts of cartographers, and you will meet some all-around fantastic people and make useful contacts.
• NACIS offers some incentives for students, including several map awards and I believe one or two travel awards.
• NACIS not only accepts, but embraces and encourages your drinking habit.
• NACIS is a darn good time.

Except that an outbreak of swine flu among my friends apparently occurred, I had a blast this year and greatly enjoyed shaking many hands and talking (with varying coherence) to many people whom I hope to call friends and whom I very much look forward to seeing again next year or sooner.

Some quick highlights:

• Stamen Design’s Michal Migurski was the keynote speaker. I was thrilled to meet and chat a bit with Mike, whom I admire to a point just shy of having posters of him on my walls. He’s posted his talk on his site, so check it out. It was very good to see someone like him and a topic like his invited to NACIS, as I think the organization has hitherto been lacking in representatives of some important new trends in cartography.
• Natural Earth Vector was unveiled here by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Tom Patterson. This project is, quite simply, a godsend to cartographers. It’s a big collection of geographic reference vector data designed by cartographers for cartographers (i.e., designed to look good at various scales). Keep an eye out; it’s due to be released soon.
• Cartographic Perspectives, the NACIS journal, was introduced in a new digital, open-access format. You can download the special issue (PDF). Also see the CP page on the NACIS site, where you can access archived issues.
• Another face that was good to see at a NACIS conference: a representative from Google! Andy Szybalski, the designer of Street View, spoke about the powers and limitations of combining immersive views with maps, and gave us a look at the evolution of Street View’s design. All told he seemed to be a hit with everyone and was a pleasure to meet.
• Of course I’m going to promote my own work here. We gentlemen proprietors of Axis Maps showed off indiemapper for the first time, and are getting ever closer to being able to launch this awesomeness. I’ll let the website do the advertising, but if anyone who was present at NACIS should happen by here and didn’t already give us an earful (or, um, suspects that the Axis end of the conversation may not have recalled it the next morning), we welcome your feedback! Hit me or anybody else at Axis Maps.
• There was a bathtub full of beer.

And there were many other excellent people to meet and things to see and hear, too numerous to list. So get in on this! Next year, St. Petersburg, Florida!

A note on the post title: somebody (I don’t remember who) characterized the group this way in the past, so it’s not just me saying it, although we who came up through UW-Madison have tried to be the standard-bearers.