web analytics

— urbantick

Archive
Tag "map"

I am giving a presentation to the MRes course at CASA, UCL today. There are two part to this lecture. The first part is covering the PhD research with a focus on the city and an overview of the methods of investigation that have been used. It is organised along the main topics of Time, Space, Morphology and Networks, but also covers Ethics and Mental Maps or Identity as aspects.

The second part really is a tutorial explaining the production of the New City Landscape maps. It covers pretty much all the steps from the preparation of the raw CSV file to the export of the map from Illustrator. A large aspect is the data handling in ArcGIS and how to perform the analysis as well as the exporting and inter compatibility with other software. Arc just doesn’t produce any pretty results so it is essential to extend the workflow to other software packages. Softwares used: TextEdit, ArcGIS, Illustrator, Google Earth, Cartographica.

Andy Hudson-Smith over at DigitalUrban will pick up with a third part and a second part to this tutorial talking through how he developed a 3D model of the landscape map and visualised it in Lumion. The result of this workflow is embedded below.

Read More

Mapping and maps as the contextual representation and abstraction of an environment is a very diverse, complicated and very challenging disciplin. With the current ongoing trend of spatialisation the understanding and suitable interpretation , but also creation of maps has become more important.

Martin Dodge presents together with Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, a Wiley-Blackwell publication. With this substantial reader the editors are presenting a very comprehensive discussion of the topic in five section: Conceptualising Mapping, Technologies of Mapping, Cartographic Aesthetics and Map Design, Cognition and Cultures of Mapping and Power and Politics of Mapping.

Imhof Laufen Relief Shading
Image taken from linkingelephants / Relief shading example by Eduard Imhof showing a detail map of Laufen.

On these topics the editors brought together a very prominent list of contributors. This ranges from Bruno Latour, Eduard Imhof, David Harvey to Mei-Po Kwan, to name a few. The over fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs are introduced carefully and with a lot of detail.

The editors not only introduces each section with a specific essay to introduce the topic, but also each essay or book exert. This explains where it comes from and what the wider context is of the tet to follow. Further more each essay is accomplished with references, but also a list of further reading, plus a list of publication internal links ‘see also’. This refers the reader to related chapters in the same book extending or continuing the discussion. It would have been nice to have page numbers with this section to make it more convenient for the reader to directly jump between the chapters.

Mapping is currently a dramatically fast changing field and with the introduction and extensive use of new technologies it probably even speeds up. Maps are dynamic, online, interactive and probably crowd sourced these days.

The publication acknowledges these changes without being drawn into the buzzyness of these developments, providing key readings and background information. Some of these texts are quite old. Only a dozen or so were originally written this century. However, this provides a substantial background with a lot more relevance than simply having some bibliographical references. In this publication one has the real thing the editors are referring to. Somehow it is like reading a text, plus also reading the references as they are discussed.

This makes for a tour de force of mapping, but mainly provides what the book is promising, an ‘coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century’.

The publisher offers chapter pdf’s of the book for download on their Wiley-Blackwell page.

Imhof Laufen Relief Shading
Image taken from the view from the blue house / The Map Reader Book Cover.

Dodge, M., Perkins, C. & Kitchin, R. eds., 2011. The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Read More

AxisMaps offers a new online historic maps page to cover Londons past. It is a great resource overlaying about 30 maps dated between 1800 and 1900, on a digital current map based on open street map data. The service allows for interaction with to zoom in for great level of detail.

The producers of the service proposa a concept of space and place as a conceptual framework to understand and use the service. As they define it: “Space or “Which areas of Victorian London are most similar / different to each other (and how did that change over time)?” The 19th century was a dynamic time for London and its population and we wanted to let you explore that by the numbers. Organized by metropolitan works district, you can see how and where the population of London changed over 100 years. We’ve also included the locations of social institutions throughout London as their locations help us understand how the city tried to cope with the changing nature of its urban population.

axisMaps Landmark
Image taken from London Low Life / Image showing the London Zoo from the World’s Metropolis, or, Mighty London.

Place or “What was it like to be in Victorian London?” As London’s population was changing in the 19th century, the city itself was being reshaped. This map contains 3 different perspectives on the changing city. Historic base maps not only give you a top-down view of the city; they also allow you to see what aspects of the city cartographer’s felt were important enough to include on their maps. Original images let you see the important features of the city from a variety perspectives. Finally, the Tallis streetviews allow you to put yourself on a London street and look around.”


Iframe embeded from London Low Life / Click HERE for full version.

It is however not only about the maps, there is great additional information. This ranges from Street View to population data and also includes details of landmarks and infrastructure. The Street View is based on the maps and drawings produced during the 19th century by John Tallis. He was a publisher of maps in London and his company produced this very comprehensive Street frontage atlas. AxisMaps have now made this accessible via this online platform using pins on the map that correspond to digitised
scans. It is even possible to move around in the streetview and of course see both sides of the road.

axisMaps Population
Iframe embeded from London Low Life / Image showing the popuation of London around 1850.

With the additional information, the service covers population over the whole of the century and as well as population density and population change. In the infrastructure section the data details location and covers a range of types, such as prisons, universities, orphanages, work houses and lunatyc asylums. For most areas there are also additional documents such a s sketches and drawings to illustrate specific landmarks or institutions.

The platform provides a great experience of Victorian London and lets you explore many different aspects of a great city over a whole century. This interactive time-warp makes it a lot of fun and can become rather addictive. However it would be great if the information could be a bit more personal and engaging. At the moment it is very much the look at type of conventional museum presentation, very much a teaching environment.

It fits in with a range of other great tools providing access to historic location information, such as the iPhone app Historic Earth, the Walking Through Time iPhone app, or the augmented reality iPhone app Streetmuseum provided by the Museum of London.

axisMaps_01
Iframe embeded from London Low Life / Digital version of John Talli’s London Street View.

Read More

Since the introduction of the Google Earth service in 2005 it has been the standart for online virtual 3D representation of the world geographically. The service has been hugely successful and millions of people have explored the world from the desk in their home. The service offers tremendous details via hi-resolution aerial imagery combined with layers of annotated point data. In addition the tool offers, via the KML language, the integration of individual and user generated information and data.

Several services have picked up on Googles success and offer now similar services. These are for example the Nasa World Wind, Microsoft Earth now Bing 3D maps, the UK focused yell.com 3D mapping service or the on Australia focused NearMap service. There were however also earlier virtual globes and mapping services, back then running offline. For example by Microsoft Encarta, 1997 or the 3D Word Atlas, 1998.

Google’s service still is the most popular. It runs on all platforms, which some of the others dont do and it works more or less intuitive. However there is the characteristic Google playful comic design to it which is, especially for the maps rather annoying. From fonts to placemarks the users always have to accept the content to be slightly ridiculous looking. Some of the other services clearly offer competitive features that are a lot better than the Google service can do. Yell has the amazing 3D modeling of the UK with great zooming, angle and rotation functions or NearMap offers the extremely great time slider function. Both functions Google products can do, but nowhere nearly as nice.

OVImap3D-07
Image taken from OVI Maps 3D / San Francisco down town in 3D. In the foreground the Transamerica Pyramid.

Now, Nokia is entering the market of digital globes and 3D mapping by taking the Nokia OVI Maps service 3D with OVI Maps 3D. And it is a great start, the service looks very pretty and the imagery is amazing.

On the Nokia blog it is described as: “Starting with a bird’s-eye view, you can scale up and down and move around objects such as buildings and trees from the desktop, experiencing a virtual but super realistic perspective of new places.

The feature includes 20 cities today, but will expand over time. Cities in the Nordic region includes Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. When visiting Copenhagen or Oslo in Ovi Maps you can also use the new road-level imagery with a detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets that completes the experience.”

OVImap3D-05
Image taken from OVI Maps 3D / San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, showing street view bubbles in blue.

To use the 3D feature of te map the installation of a browser plug-in is required. With this the maps come to live and a combination of map, virtual earth and street view is accessible. The integration of the different elements currently work neatly in one direction. From the map view to the 3D view to the Street View. However going the other way can be frustrating, with the position and perspective being changed in the transition.

Nevertheless the detail and information is very good and of high quality. The best benefit is probably a different design approach using better symbols. For example the street view pops up in the 3D view as blue circles that change size as the user hovers over it with the mouse curser. Looks really neat. However, the integration of temporal aspects in both content and imagery is missing from the OVI maps and 3D. The 3D part is currently in beta and there might be quite some changes with the release of the final version.

OVImap3D-06
Image taken from OVI Maps 3D / San Francisco street view at the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid, looking up.

The digital globe covers the terrain modelling across the entire world. However, currently the 3D rendering of buildings is only available for a selection of cities. This list of 20 cities will be extended continously, but so far they have not provided a schedule for this. Also the integration with the OVI API is not yet announced. Here again OVI offers great features the Google API does not. For example a geoShape that draws a circle with a given radius around a point.


Map by urbanTick for NCL / The current location of NCL twitter mappings of urban areas worldwide on the OVI map.

Read More

The devastating earthquake that hit Japan earlier on 2011-03-11 was with around 8.9 magnitude the biggest in the recent history. Even though Japan is probably the best prepared country on the world this is a dramatic shock for the nation and the whole region.

The earthquake hit at 02:46:23 PM local time and was probably a aftershock of an smaller quake on March 9th that increased the tension in this already unstable region. The epicentre of the earth quake was located of the east cost of Japan about 200 km in the pacific. The closest metropolitan region is Sendai, but also Tokyo is only just over 300km away.

japan2011earthquake02
Image taken from mapLarge / The dots show the earthquakes logges on March 11 2011 surrounding the devastating 8.9 magnitude quake. Colour indicate time of report with dark being old, bright is new.

The movement of the pacific plate was described by experts on BBC news as several meters causing a massive tsunami wave rippling out through the pacific, of course first hitting Japan, but threatening all countries on its shore. Mainly Haiti was directly in line with the main force of the tsunami.

tsunami 2011
Image taken from BBC News / Direction and expected height of the tsunami caused by the 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan. The dotted line indicates expected times for the wave to travel.

Rescue and suport team around the world are on standby to be flown in if requested by the Japanese Government. Aid is being prepared and numerous charities. Online help and aid systems are coming up or are already running. Google has put up a platform for finding or reporting a missing person and the ushahidi open source mapping platform has released a specific platform for Japan. USGS is providing them maps and details on the earthquakes. For details see the list. NOAA provides the information on the tsunami in the pacific region. A live kml for Google Earth can be downloaded HERE, provided by USGS. Also earth quake related app for the iPhone or iPad are trending HERE.

japan2011earthquake01
Image taken from ushahidi / Ushahidi platform for the 2011 Japan earthquake in March 11th. The red dots show the number of logged messages, informations and requests. The open source mapping intends to help by enabling to log info directly from the ground.

Even though Japan is well prepared and equipped the extend of this combination of tsunami and earthquake is devastating. In terms of architecture the regulations are very strict and buildings dealt well with the impact. Nevertheless, some serious damage has been reporte on infrastructure, most prominently issues with nuclear power plants, most of which have been shut down preventive.

In a sense all of these map conveys the temporal aspect as discussed in an earlier post. All that counts at the moment is time for Japan. The sooner they can get a hand on things the better. It is about evacuating injured and trapped individuals, secure and maintain infrastructure, supporting people in need and then it is also about rebuilding. Of course these are different time scales but things are running in parallel at the moment. This disaster is likely to have a long term impact, leaving scars in the public memory. Very similar to the also devastating Kobe earthquake.

With the recent natural disasters in Haiti (earthquake), Pakistan (flood), Christchurch (earthquake), Indian Ocean Tsunami (tsunami) having grabbed large scale medi attention this time will be no different not least because Japan is very well connected both politically and in terms of media. Mahups and especially social networking platform will be, actually already are, flooded with related content.

If you are interested in how you can help Good is running a good list that they intend to update as news come in.

Links via BBC, Map Room Blog, Good, Google Maps Mania

Read More

We are updating the the collection of New City Landscape maps and add two new world cities. The earlier maps can be found HERE and HERE. The new data comes from San Francisco and Sydney. In terms of physical Landscape they both have the Ocean as a defining element of the urban area, together with large water bodies enclosed by the urban area. In both maps these features come through in topography generated from the tweet locations.

sanFrancisco_ncl_100916
Image by urbanTick / New City Landscape also available in the flickr pool NCL

San Francisco New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / San Francisco New City Landscape – Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view.

San Francisco on the other hand shows similar to New York multiple centres that grow together. Beside San Francisco, also Oakland and some other sub centres show up. A strong point is of course the airport again.

Sydney has a very strong island characteristic, with downtown showing up strong on the right hand side. The Sydney map was developed in collaboration with ‘The Works Sydney’.

Sydney New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Sydney New City Landscape – Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view.

The maps were created using our Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

Earlier maps cover London, New York, Munich, Paris and Moscow.

Read More

Over the past few months we have been harvesting geospatial data from Twitter with the aim of creating a series of new city maps based on Twitter data. Via a radius of 30km around New York, London, Paris, Munich we have collated the number of Tweets and created our New City Landscape Maps.

New York New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / New York New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view.

The highest New York point is the Time Square Peak. It sits within a ridge running down the lengt of Manhattan. It drops of in the south shortly after Chinatown Head and Little Italy Side. A second group of mountains are location around the Franklin Avenue Rock and a third in the Jamaica area.

The maps were created using our Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

Image by DigitalUrban / Screenshot of the Tweet-O-Meter
Image by DigitalUrban / Screenshot of the Tweet-O-Meter showing New York, London, Paris and Munich.

The data is derived from tweets sent via a mobile device that includes the location at the time of sending the message. The contours correspond to the density of tweets, the mountains rise over active locations and cliffs drop down in to calm valleys, flowing out to tweet deserts. Throughout the emerging landscape features have been renamed to reflect these conditions. Embedded below a zoomable version of London, created using CASA GM Image Cutter software software developed by Richard Milton, you can zoom in and pan around just as you would do on Google Maps.

London New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / London New City Landscape – Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view.

In this visualisation London does not show the normally characteristic East-West differentiation. Here it is a more North-South directed structure. The highest peak is Soho Mountain in the centre of London extending Eastward towards Liverpool Street.

Munich New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Munich New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view.

Paris New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Paris New City Landscape -Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. This map was created with the support of Annick Labeca.

‘New York, London, Paris, Munich everybody talk about Pop Musik’ – that was 1979 and the catch line by the group M. This was the start of the project, to mine what people are talking about in 2010. This has led to the creation of our New City Landscape maps.

Images of the maps can also be found on flickr. More cities are coming soon….

Read More

The New City Landscapes have been introduced earlier as a visualisation of tweet activity in the urban context. The maps are derived from data sent via a mobile client and including location information.
The rising mountains and dropping valleys remodel the density of messages as a temporary urban landscape. Earlier coverage on this topic can be found HERE and HERE.
A more detailed series we start now looking at the different places New York, London, Munich and Paris individually. This time the focus is on Paris, Ille de France. In timeRose diagrams the temporary aspect of the data is developed with a visual means line to indicate characteristics of individual units. This method allows graphical analysis, highlighting the important aspects.

paris_contour_colour-02
Image by urbanTick / New City Landscape of Paris, France. A topography map generated from twitter activity around the Ille of France.

The ‘Dents des Halles’ mark the highest point on the map, being a location of high tweeting activity. It is quite an important meeting point for people of all ages. It is a place to hang out, to stand around with no specific activity at hand. This seems to be an important condition for high twitter activity. Counter the assumption important places wil stand out, usually the less expected places close by will have the peak. Take the ‘Tour Eiffel’ for example it made it only as the ‘Flanc Tour Eiffel’ at the bottom of the ‘Colline d’Champ-Elysees’. The mix is more complicated and I am guessing that everyday location combined with routine activities actually float on the top, over one of activities. However to make the peak it obviously needs a combination.
From the Tour Eiffel up to the ‘Cime Excelmans’ down the ‘Flac des Princes’ across the ‘Carriere Marnes-la-Coquette’, one reaches the ‘Aiguille du Chesnay’, The peak next to Versailles. This another example of lower activity than expected.
A group of three peaks to the north-east marks the airport Charles de Gaulle a dent that would follow the logic.

paris_timeRose_means-03
Image by urbanTick / TimeRose analysis of the tweeting activity in Paris, France over the period of one week. The means line helps to classify the information.

Looking at the activity over time of the individual weekdays the pattern between weekends and weekdays is quit obvious. The visualisation here is a timeRose where the 24 hours are plotted around the circle, with the amount of tweeting plotted radial.
The means line is used to mark the highest activity peaks, with the angle of it indicating the fraction of the day covered. A steep line means late morning and late night, representing the tendency on weekends. Whereas a flat line points to early morning and early evening activity, as it draws on weekdays.
There is a problem with the data from Wednesday, this is due to the fact that witter was down and we do not have data for this period. However the drop off’s on both sides suggest a similar pattern as we find on the other weekdays.
The usual pattern is a three peak blob, representing morning, lunch and evening. With flater means the morning merges in to the lunch peak and a shift towards later times takes place. This shift starts to build up already during the week starting from Thursday.

newYork_sand01
Image by urbanTick / The island of twitter land Paris in the digital see of information. Generated from tweet density send form mobile devices in Paris, France.

The Other cities wil follow as blog posts very soon, stay tuned.
Thanks forsupport with the development of this to Annick Labeca at Urban Lab Global Cities

Read More

We have been monitoring different cities’ tweeting habits over the past months using the Tweet-O-Meter. This project is developed together with DigitalUrban and was coded by Steven Gray. Earlier we had covered a London Weekend (HERE, HERE, HERE) and now we are looking at four cities. Those are New York, London, Paris and Munich over the period of one week.
The data is derived from tweets sent via a mobile device from an app that includes the location at the time of sending the message. We see large differences between the overall tweeting as well as in the mobile usage of twitter. London and New York generally send about the same amount of tweets, New York however has about twice the amont of mobile users compared to London.

tw_newYork_100507_m
Image by urbanTick / New York tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density. Click map for a detailed version.

From the pool of tweets covering the city we have generated the New City Landscapes as a form of tweetography. Here the landscape features corresponds with the twitter activity of locals. THe mountains rise over active locations and cliffs drop down in to calm vallies flowing out to tweet deserts. Through out the emerging landscape features have been renamed to reflect the conditions.
The data is based on information collected over a seven day week last month. SOme temporal graphs will follow. There are obviously differences in temporal activities, but the New City Landscape is an overview of the logged time frame as a whole.

NewYork_contourNames_zoom_m
Image by urbanTick / New York tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density – Zoom.

Charactering New York along the New City Landscape we can distinguish a massif of mountains from Fordham Heights southwards over the Central Harlem Rock, dropping down into Central Park to steeply rise up to the Timesquare Peak a long a ridge to the NYU Top to the Chinatown Head, where it starts dropping down the Financial Cliff. Towards the East the Manhattan Bridge Ditch separates this massif from the Brooklyn set of peaks. Were it starts with the Downtown Peak towards Bedford Hill, turning south over Ocean Hill, Rugby Ridge down towards Flatlands into the Mill Bassin Curve, dropping into the Jamaica Bay Pit. Another smaller group of hills form around the Jamaica Hills, Rosedale Hill and JFK Terminal 4 Point. For more details refer to the detailed map. Special thanks to John Reads for helping out with local knowledge.

london_contourNames_m
Image by urbanTick / London tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density. Click map for a detailed version.

London has compared to New York a centralised Peak structure with the Soho Mountain as its peak. The massif here falls from this point in all directions with a north ridge going along the Camden Ridge across Arsenal Point, Finsbury Park Ridge to the Tottenham Hill. This line ends with the Edmonton Peak at the Ponders End. Further outside singular peaks can be found such as the Heathrow Peak, the Selsdon Peak or the Chaffordon Hundred Hill in the East.

london_contourNames_Zoom_m
Image by urbanTick / London tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density – Zoom.

We are still working on other maps. Munich and Paris are under way and more are to come soon. The language translation is tricky but with the help of specialists we might get that together.
Here a Munich preview.

munich_contourNames_m
Image by urbanTick / Munich tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density. Click map for a detailed version.

——
Update 2010-06-04

Paris is now joining the other three cities. Here is the New City Landscape map of the Ille de France. Special thanks go to Annick for helping out with the terminology.

paris_contourNames_m
Image by urbanTick / Paris tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density. Click map for a detailed version.

And the zoom-in as a preview

paris_contourNames_zoom_m
Image by urbanTick / Paris tweetography, the New City Landscsape generated from tweet density – Zoom.

Read More

The current map exhibition at the Britsh Library is still on and it is big, really big. There are far more examples and beautiful maps than I had expected. However I was a bit disappointed that there are exclusively old maps, apart from a few contemporary artists takes on mapping. The exhibition manages a few things, it brings together a large collection of very old maps, covering the past 500 years. It presents scientific aspects of mapmaking as well as cultural and social aspects. In fact there is a strong emphasis on the cultural aspect of maps, how they comunicate and manifest wealth and status. In this sense they are presented less in a scientific sense but an cultural. Maybe this explains the absence of modern maps and the presence of artists impressions.
For me the fascinating aspect of the exhibition are the many different roles maps have played and the much more holistic approach to map making cartographers applied in these early days. The rich illustrations the additional informations around the outside the characters that were as important as the symbols. Compared to this richness the clean and ‘objective’ maps of today apear really boring.
One of the most beautiful maps in the exhibition is Diogo Homem’s ‘A Chart of the Mediterranean Sea, 1570. A map of the Mediterranean only showing the shorelines, in a very imaginative abstraction decorated with colours and gold.
Another impressive object is the Hereford Mappa Mundi c1300. Its name meaning ‘cloth of the world’ and it is drawn on calf skin. The BBC documentarie discussed it at length. Fascinating is the way the map combines different times of past and present as well as eternity into the same picture. Also it combines knowledge and myths, believe and culture as elements of the same whole. In this sense it shows as much of the known as of the unknown and also presents the beginning as well as the end. This cyclical aspect ist the key to its power.

image description
Image taken from Wikipedia / Hereford Mappa Mundi, about 1300, Hereford Cathedral, England. A classic “T-O” map with Jerusalem at center and east toward the top. Find a version with description HERE.

At the heart of the map is Jerusalem and the main orientation is East. Of course this reflects a very christian world view but historically this is important. In temporal terms the map depicts events separated by hundreds of years. There are activities such as the Caesar sending out helpers to map the world, the Arche Noah and the crucifixion of Christ in the same image representing the history of the world. Outside the disc of the world additional scenes put it into context. There is judgement day at the top of the map and the passage to another world at the bottom of the world. Interestingly the disc of the world is fastened to the surrounding eternity by the letters M, O, R, S – latin for death. This all sits in the context of the late medieval world view, but surprisingly to me this represents a sort of inside out understanding of life, a sort of progress from the centre to the edge and beyond. This narrative approach to mapping was for me the exciting and surprising part.

I have to say immediately after seeing the exhibition I was a bit disappointed not to see the art of map making progress through to the current state. However the more I thought about it, the more I realised how much of the detail and additional aspects of old maps would have been distracted from by new maps purely focused on technology.
The BBC does present the topic on their website, the Beauty of Maps, in two parts of them one are the old maps and the other part are the modern maps. This includes for examples Google Earth or MapTube, a platform to create and share maps.

Read More