Platial News and Neogeography

Open Street Map Party

Steve Coast from Open Street Map came by a little before 2 yesterday with the sad news that the airline had misplaced his luggage containing all of his gps devices and handouts. Luckily, among us all, there were a few gps gadgets to use, so Jason and Steve were able to amble around all the foot trails of Irving Park. We split up into pairs and went off with paper maps to annotate. I was paired with Caton, who discovered Platial through the new Nearby iPhone app, and who found out about the mapping party by reading our blog. We recorded some bus stops, convenience stores, a parking lot, traffic medians, and, most excitingly, a brand-new one-way street.

When we got to Tiny's, Steve opened up OSM and taught us how to redraw the map and add all the points of interest we'd recorded on paper. The basic interface for using OSM is fairly easy, but you have to learn the lingo a little to tag things properly. It's a bit of a rush changing the map. I recorded a bunch of medians on Martin Luther Kind Boulevard and it was a powerful feeling marking them.

Caton and I were marking things on the paper map and also adding places to Platial using Nearby. I could easily imagine a mobile OSM interface, at least for points of interest. Something that had drop-down menus of some kind for tagging would be great.

Open Street Maps is an inspiring project. I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to contribute something and I look forward to doing more in the future. Here are some pictures from our stop at Tiny's.

Terra-WebCam

From the digital art collective Pleix.

Lat Long Snow Sculpture

Jaume Plensa & Norman Foster created this sculpture as part of The Snow Show in Sestriere, Italy.

It's hard to get a reading on the scale of it, but it seems apparent that controlled melting is the means by which it was made.

Construction paper topo

art by Jen Stark

City Distances

How often are 2 or more cities mentioned on the web in the same sentence, or web page? Does this textual/contextual proximity indicate anything palpably similar about the places? This visualization represents an outstanding connection between New York City and London, far surpassing any other relationships on the map (the algorithm is fairly complex, but basically the score goes up the farther away the paired places are). I'm curious what role the English language (or English place names) plays in this study, and to what degree the internet has, or hasn't, expanded beyond these confines. Does this map simply show us that the 2 major cultural (as well as population and connectivity) capitals of the English speaking world are often mentioned in the same breath? I'd like to see a visualization representing the frequency of the most common place names mentioned on the web (maybe the top 1000 or so), which places are simply the most talked about in general?

Hand Held Mapping Device

Everybody is against Everybody

see it in gloriously large detail at strangemaps.com

found on:

Hunting Ghost Towns

Portland film man, Matt McCormick, has an interesting blog post about the trials and tribulations of hunting for ghost towns, culminating in this amazing photograph:

Keys to every city in the world.

Jon Sasaki is collecting ceremonial keys, keys to cities, keys to every city in the world.

I Want to be Welcome Everywhere, Always.

2008, ongoing

Ceremonial keys to various cities.

The artist's personal collection of ceremonial keys to various cities. Traditionally awarded by a mayor to noteworthy visitors, these keys suggest unlimited access and hospitality within a city's limits.

In an ongoing mission, the artist will attempt to amass an exhaustive collection which will include a key to every city in the world. A comically misdirected expression of that very human desire to be universally accepted.

Global index of the decay of the aura of language

» Dadameter «, 2002-2008, Global index of the decay of the aura of language, By Christophe Bruno .