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[We] show how open source GIS and curated “crowdsourcing” can create an infinite archive of places for digital historians and ethnographers. While the importance of space and place to their research has long been acknowledged by social scientists, there remains a wide gap between their theoretical concerns and the data-driven empiricism of GIS. For those without technical or database skills, maps and geodata are mostly commonly to illustrate rather than advance an argument. However, the web can render the tacit knowledge of geography implicit in most historical and ethographic narratives available to the scholars in entirely new forms.

We will showcase our ongoing work with the Maps Division of the New York Public Library on a web-based Map Rectifier and Digitizer, a platform for scholars and entusiasts to georeference scanned historical maps and digitize historical features of cities and the environment.

On Saturday, I gave a 20 minute presentation entitled txts 4 africa, or, How I Learned to Three-Point Turn an Eighteen-Wheeler in a Two Car Garage, for Open Everything NYC 2009, at UNICEF House in New York. Basically, this talk is an overview of why the lowly 160-character SMS is a logical and even necessary platform for building ICT applications for NGO-based international development projects in Africa. The talk describes in brief the experience of UNICEF in developing ICT apps that employ SMS to support projects in Africa for, inter alia, community health care management, famine relief, and distribution of bed nets for malaria prevention. Finally, in the talk, I introduce RapidSMS, an Open Source, Python-based application development framework, designed to facilitate the construction of these projects and others. I also gave shout-outs to Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS.

I’ve posted the slides for both talks on SlideShare:

• Open Historical Maps
• txts 4 africa

A note on the Harvard talk: The source of the “8 Reasons Why Some Wikis Work” slide is Aaron Swartz’s weblog post of the same title from 2006, which for some reason didn’t make it into the talk slides themselves. I have found his insight into the sine qua non of successful crowdsourcing very influential in my advocacy of the practice.

And one on the RapidSMS talk: The presentation was designed somewhat in the Takahashi method, so the slides themselves are rather telegraphic. I hope you find them entertaining anyway. I am trying to get audio for this talk to make the slides more comprehensible.

Anyway, please enjoy! If you have any questions or comments, or if you’re interested in further developments on either of these projects, please don’t hesitate to post here, or otherwise to get in touch!

The Soviets liberated Prague from the NAZI’s in 1945.  And then a monument was set up with the Actual First Tank into Prague.

(except, it was the wrong tank, but that is another

And one day in 1991 people woke to find that David Cerny had painted it pink.  And then a big brohuahua erupted.

(an article about this)
NAZI’s are bad, and our enemy’s enemy (the soviets) are/were our friend, so we should respect them, but the Soviets were pretty bad, so paint the tank pink.

I believe that this is the tank!

It was a strange thing.  The signs created an impossible geography.  First the military museum was 8 km and the motorcycle museum was 6, and then, somehow, the numbers changed but in a way which MADE NO SENSE!

And then we came around a corner and the military museum sign pointed us UP A DANG HILL!  We had fully loaded bikes, and really little patience for hills, but we persevered.

And it was glorious!  Today I managed to find a web site on the museum.
And I have flickr photos…

I wrote code to tag my photos based on which waypoints they were near.  So I have tags like ‘ waypoint:nearest_tag=SEXMUSEUM‘ and ‘waypoint:SEXMUSEUM_distance=0.11miles‘

(those are for this awesome photo of a policeman in Amsterdam offering me porn)

Here is a kml file of most of the trip.  Look especially at the aerial imagery around the waypoint ‘yuck’ where we ended up by the side of a major freeway, unable to go foward, or back, or anyway at all…until we finally ran across two lanes of high speed merging traffic and threw ourselves into the safety of high weeds by the side of the road, and then we clambored over a fence, with heavily laden bikes, and trudged through a field before finding the safety of a road which was not a freeway.

Oh yes…we were lost!

A distinction between “professional” and “amateur” is not so important…
As in politics, “the new” and “the old” are marketed at the expense of one another - change versus experience, renewal versus reliability. The more different the new is, the easier it is to distinguish 2.0 from 1.0, the easier it is to sell upgrades.

The following is the notes that were left after the word limit:

—-

For Tim and his Valley friends, everything was going soft.

For the neomapmakers, selection by software made no sense - only pure data was there to be reused.

Participants don’t see themselves as numbered in a mob any more than anyone sees themselves as a blinded participant in mass culture.

Is the best promise we’ve got that it will be the same thing, but it will take longer, and the end results will be free?

Internet applications allowed users to collaborate on map data in …
but were they really producing anything something “new”?

Maps were programmable pictures, interfaces in themselves.

A quarrel started then, rather than stopping, between GIS specialists and the “locative media” newcomers - to use the modern slang, the “paleotards” and the “neotards”. One could see this quarrel, too, echoed in the broader cultural context - the bloggers and their nemesis the “MSM” and its cadre of journalists.

The problem with being too professionalised, too specialised, is that you’re too likely to see what you expect, to the exclusion of other goings-on.
“creativity in asking the right questions”

Yet every bit of good work isn’t done by a smart mob but by a souped up clique.

A wrapper around many different kind of functions. Once you learn one it becomes easier to learn another with a similar interface and that is what turns people into specalists. But then everything starts to look the same. One catches everythingism. Everything, everywhere. With the web everywhere, everyone is infected with everythingism.

Which in practical terms means not stopping people from communicating by propping up language barriers by embedding language too firmly in tools. Less of the browser, more of real things and the ability to translate back and forth between digital and physical representations of things, or between one medium and another. A focus on hardware allows us to retreat from problem-solving but is seldom effective - remember all that 3G consumer-facing LBS? No? It didn’t take off not because the time wasn’t right but because the model was wrong.

This isn’t the Internet of Things, because these aren’t new things. We are in an atmosphere of economic contraction - of “decroissance”, as they say on the Continent - and budget for technology purchase and development will be scarcer.

As “the rising tide raises all boats”, all should benefit from an expansion of interest and investment in geographic information.

Given knowledge of one tool, another with a similar interface becomes easy to learn, and this is what turns people into specialists. But then everything starts to look the same. With the web everywhere, one becomes infected with everythingism.

“Spiritual Mapping” is the collaborative mapping component of militant evangelism . A team of the devout researches and annotates spaces meeting with disapproval - non-conforming churches, vendors of magic supplies, family planning clinics, gay bars. Thus is gathered “the strategic information necessary for effective intercessory “smart prayer” deployment.“, and warfare (in the form of cluster prayer bombardment) is carried to the territorial spirits.

The roundest critiques of spiritual mapping come from within the evangelical movement itself, viewing it as a magical, works centered ploy, unjustified by scripture and infected by an unhealthy sensationalism. Good works and good faith alone don’t satisfy the impulse to activism. As games with the language of “neo-pagans” lost its appeal, mappers play with the language of military planners, and pronounce “strategic level spiritual warfare” on the genius locii.

I want to see some of these maps.

It was the first tool I used to communicate with a GPS.
The new version is here.

Forgive my confusion, since I thought the whole point of ‘geocoding’ was to get coordinates, or a code of some sort, which would let you specify the location of something on the Earth.

It turns out that this person’s vendor, Vertex ‘where taxation meets innovation,’ has created the ‘Vertex GeoCoder™’ which appears to be both a super and sub set of a georeferenced zip code database, with all of the cross jurisdictional ugliness of zip codes removed.

For example, zip code 80227 includes parts of both Denver and Lakewood Colorado and so is in two different tax jurisdictions.  At least, it used to include parts of both Denver and Lakewood.  It is possible that it has been split or reassigned.  That is one of the main advantages of their ‘geocode’ system.

That is fine.  Even useful if you are trying to manage different tax jurisdictions.  Except that once you assign a number and call it a ‘geocode’ your customers are going to want to act like they have something which will let them map and analyze their data.

And so I was asked if there was a way to get Latitude and Longitude out of this so called ‘geocode.’

I made one of the most frustrating telephone calls of my life.  The answer is that this is their proprietery scheme, and I use the word ’scheme’ in the most perjorative sense, and that they won’t even answer my question without ‘logging’ the call and determing that the customer’s support agreements were up to date.

I told the representative that I did not feel entitled, for privacy reasons, to reveal the name of my contact person to a third party.
I asked questions like ‘do you have a product this person can buy which will let them turn a ‘geocode’ into a latitude and longitude?’  But no, even the capabilities of the mythical ‘geocode’ were to be hidden from me.

I am, frankly, disgusted.

It supports searching wikipedia and google, including images, video, blogs, etc.

It also has a command line map mode. You can type ‘map ‘ and get a bit larger than thumbnail map. Location can be any of the search terms which google maps recognizes (but not the proximity searches - you can not look for ‘pizza near SFO’). Instead of ‘map’ you can also type ‘places’ or ‘p.’ (’m’ is reserved for ‘more’).
Goosh implements a simple command history with the up and down arrows.

I have made it my default home page.

It is run by our good friend Chris Schmidt, and it rocks.

Chris has posted imagery of Where Camp 2008 taken by Pict Earth. Pict Earth is what happens when RC hobbyists become geowankers, or vice versa. They have a number of stock radio control planes mounted with cameras and GPS units. It is very cool.

This image is centered on the registration tent at Where Camp.

Aerial imagery precision is referred to by the resolution. If you say you have ‘2 meter imagery’ it means that you have 1 pixel of image data for every 2 meters of the subject. Other things being equal, if you are closer to the subject you have higher resolution (more pixels per meter), and if you are higher you have fewer pixels.

The resolution of an image is simply the number of pixels in the image divided by the area covered by the image. Resolution is just a fancy word for ’scale.’ You could say ‘100 pixels = 1km’ which would mean 10 meter imagery.

You can calculate the area covered by an image if you know the distance to the subject, the size of the camera sensor (or film plane), and the focal length of the lens. The focal length of common lenses is given in the 35mm film equivalent. First calculate the (horizontal) angle or field of view:

Angle = 2 * ArcTan(35/2f)

Where f is the focal length of the lens. The ‘35′ is the width of a 35mm negative (35 mm film is 35 x 24mm).

As a rule of thumb a 50mm lens has a 40 degree angle of view, and the angle of view is inversely related to the focal length. A 100 mm lens has a 20 degree angle of view, 200 mm is 10, 400mm is 5 degrees, and a 25mm lens is 80%. (For 50mm and larger lenses the actual field of view is about 3% higher - but 3% seems pretty good for a rule of thumb!).

You can determine the subject width from the angle of view and the distance:

subject width = distance * sin(angle of view)

Shooting a 50 mm lens from 100 meters away  you get just under 64 meters of subject in each shot.

To get pixels per / meter:

pixel resolution per meter = number of pixels / number of meters

With my 8 megapixel Canon S5IS (3264 pixels horizontal) shooting a 50mm lens at 100 meters I get about 50 pixels per meter of subject, or 2 cm resolution.

As a (rougher) rule of thumb, doubling the focal length of the lens doubles the resolution.  This is about a 10% overstatement - a 400 mm lens is about 360 pixels per meter, rather than the 400 of that rule of thum.

In order to continue my theme of ‘all Gigapan all of the time’ I have documented some of these notes on another page.

I used to sit in history class staring at the maps showing European borders from pre-WWI, then through the two World Wars. I’d marvel at the strange names. It was not just countries, but whole empires of which I was totally, or nearly totally, ignorant.

And now, through the power of the internets, I can revisit that profound sense of ignorance!

update: 6/3/2008 13:56

Ortelius sent in a link to his blog post which included this map, and a lot of other maps and history of ‘Southwest Asia.’

Interesting stuff.