Posts tagged ‘places’

Embracing the Social Scatterplot

June 30th, 2010

You have a checkin tool as part of your webservice, don’t be embarrassed, everyone does. You also don’t have to be shy about the fact that you are passing the user’s lat long over to Google, Yahoo, PublicEarth, or even foursquare, for a list of potential places they might be at, because, let’s face it, these place databases are not just growing on trees. It would make sense for you to pay attention to the coordinates sent over and which place the user ends up picking as “the place they are at”, to build up a user generated scatter plot of GPS points that might be used in future candidate offerings, but sometimes we all simply depend on the longevity of benevolence from our chosen API providers, no harm in that.

I think the only harm done in this situation would be to continue to assume that a Place has a singular, static, defined relationship to a cartographic framework. If we aspire to understand what Places people are talking about, as they connect to these places with a growing variety of devices and standards, we might do well to move from a vector based polygonal model to something more pointillist.

If we can establish an array of coordinates as the historical collection of points that have been used to define, or to reference, a Place, no matter how askew they may be from our sense of the real boundaries, then we can actually start talking about the same Place, regardless of each tiny, singular, gadget or app specific definition. This methodology is conceptually related to the common notion of subjectivity, in which we learn to understand from early childhood that a toy, or a person, or a Place, looks different from different perspectives, or as seen through different media. We eventually learn that we are talking about the same kitten, even if your photograph looks different from my drawing. The concept of the kitten is just a collection of all the successful references to the physical object. Even in the act of trying to capture, or document, that actual objective nature of the kitten, we are simply creating more subjective references to it. The need, and ability, to objectively define and describe a physical object only becomes increasingly ridiculous and futile the more one tries. The same can be said of Places. The harder we strive to objectively define exactly where a Place is, or what happens at a Place, or what category a Place falls into, the more we realize our measurements and descriptions add to the collage of data they are hoping to clean up.

It’s time to put down the minimalist fallacy of Place Objectivity, and embrace the polymorphic cloud of the Social Scatterplot for Subjective Place Definition.

photo from gps insight

Looking into the past

March 10th, 2009

(Via Looking into the past: Market Street on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.)

About New York – No Photo Ban in Subways, Yet an Arrest – NYTimes.com

February 18th, 2009

“The cop wanted my ID, and I showed it to him,” Mr. Taylor said. “He told me I couldn’t take the pictures. I told him that’s not true, that the rules permitted it. He said I was wrong. I said, ‘I’m willing to bet your paycheck.’ ”

(Via About New York – No Photo Ban in Subways, Yet an Arrest – NYTimes.com.)

The Atlas of True Names

December 10th, 2008

334 – The Atlas of True Names: “

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Travellers, discoverers and cartographers have named the world around us so that we might find our way in it. The purpose of a place name, therefore, is to be as distinguishing as possible. But there is another, opposite force at work in toponymy: geographical and other similarities often lead to different places receiving similar names — even if these names are then modified by differences in language.The English city of Oxford and the Dutch city of Coevoorden (*) were named after river segments shallow enough to facilitate bovine transport.

This phenomenon becomes apparent when one digs up the ‘deep etymology’ of place names, as is done in The Atlas of True Names. The Atlas substitutes the original meanings of the world’s place names for the better-known, ossified toponyms. The authors of the Atlas, German cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Preust, have said their clever technique was inspired by the place names in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, some (but not all) of which are indeed quite direct. (’Mount Doom’ is grimly descriptive, but a name like ‘Lothlorien’ means diddly squat — unless you speak Elvish, of course).

The Atlas was first published in German as Der Atlas der wahren Namen, and in that version all the original etymologies are of course rendered in German. If like most people you are at least mildly conditioned by movies, literature and other media dealing with World War II to associate the German language with fascism, this ‘germanified’ version of the world is a bit disconcerting. London, for example, transmogrifies into ‘Hügelfest’, and nearby Norfolk is still recognisable but considerably more ominous as ‘Nordvolk’. Ethiopia becomes ‘Land der Brandgesichter’ and its capital Addis Abeba ‘Neue Blume’.

The more recently published English version of the Atlas presents us with an equally disorienting and sometimes revealing array of ‘original’ place names. Across the Irish Sea (or ‘West Land Sea’) from Blackpool lies another ‘Blackpool’, more commonly referred to as Dublin. ‘Trading Folks’ is none other than the Canadian capital of Toronto Ottawa. The British port of Plymouth is literally ‘Mouth of the Plum’, Brussels is ‘Marsh Cell’, and London’s ‘Hügelfest’ translates as ‘Hillfort’. Nicaragua is ‘Here are people’ and Newfoundland… remains ‘Newfoundland’, one of remarkably few place names with an etymology recent enough for us to take the toponym literally.

But etymology is not an exact science, and some derivations are too funny or elegant to be true. Consequently, some of the etymologies used by Hormes and Preust have been disputed. One example is the word-origin of the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, which is rendered in the Atlas as ‘I don’t understand you!’ — supposedly uttered by the Maya when addressed by the first Spanish conquistadores (a similar folk etymology traces the origin of the word kangaroo to a miscommunication between aboriginals and British explorers). Other examples abound, but the authors themselves include a caveat lector, stating that they think their work is not scientific, approximately 80% correct and should primarily be seen as an invitation to look at the world through fresh eyes.

Thanks to the dozens of people who sent in this map. A few excerpts of the Atlas can be found here on Kalimedia, which also publishes the German version of the book (here). For a critical discussion of the book, see this entry on Languagelog.

*: and, by derivation, the Canadian city of Vancouver, named after a British captain of Dutch descent whose surname originally was van Coevoorden.

 

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(Via strange maps.)

Where I Was When Obama Won

November 5th, 2008

Add yourself, no reg required.

space collective gallery

October 7th, 2008

just found a stimulating new thing to look at, scroll through, and share:
http://spacecollective.org/gallery/

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WhereCampPDX :: Oct 19th

October 2nd, 2008

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WhereCampPDX

It’s going to rock!

Scavenger Hunt, RIGHT NOW

August 29th, 2008

Get details and play at http://platial.com/laborday

Win a trip to NYC for the Conflux Festival!!!

Platial’s iPhone app

July 22nd, 2008

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The All New Platial

May 9th, 2008

As everyone in the inner circle knows, we have all been very heads down over at Platial for the last couple months working on the redesign that just launched today! Now, while still working on more improvements for the site, we’ll also have bandwidth to kick our native iPhone app development into high gear.

So go get up on one of my maps, and let me know about your Places.

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