Realtime Mapping and Interaction

[from gapminder.org]

All Around You is very interested in mapping possibilities: take a map of a particular region, say Pilbara, with data embedded all throughout. Click on a school there to see short films made by students or to hear songs they have written and/or like, move your cursor overland to retrieve history of the region via hyperlinks or a simple timeline of humanity’s interactions with the land.

The digital age has brought with it a revolution in mapping techniques: see Vasco Furtado’s WikiCrimes.org, a map of Brazil to which anyone can add information concerning criminal acts. I urge you to zoom in on Rio de Janeiro to see the areas you should avoid and why. In a country where the police do not release information of criminal acts, this is of the utmost importance. All see Carlo Ratti’s Real Time Rome, a mapping system developed to present realtime information about a city’s characteristics, such as population density, uses (and users) of public transport and mobile phone usage.

[Real Time Rome showing mobile phone and transportation data]

So what I am interested in is mapping being used as a form of expression for people, both artistically and as a form of documentation (of course these are intertwined); embedding a culture in a map which is itself already embedded in the culture.

This, coupled with a touchscreen interface (which we ARE going to make), will crystallise as an interactive mapping world to which anyone can upload their stories and find them tangibly through an interconnected series of maps (some geographical, others more abstract such as graphing people’s reluctance to use technology against time against exposure to systems such as CuriousWorks [horizontal axis, vertical axis, colour or duration or transparency etc...]).

Regardless, check out GapMinder, slightly more abstract than pure geographical mapping but an amazing way to map ideas/concepts/etc… using interactive graphing techniques. the best thing is you can download it for yourself and muck around.

What I would love to see in the future is not only embedding data in geographical maps, but in maps of this variety to aid in the explanation of trends, in establishing causal connections between what up until this point would necessarily remain disconnected data. To see!