Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
This comes from the Poynter blog…..
While much of Southern California burns, online news staffs and citizen journalists definitely aren't fiddling around. Here's a quick roundup of some of the more intriguing efforts:
What kinds of innovative online coverage of the fires are you seeing today? Please comment below.
(Thanks to the members of Poynter's Online News discussion group for tips to some of the items above.)
Today, literally hundreds of square kilometers of Southern California — Los Angeles to San Diego — are burning. Some very alert newspapers and radio stations, though, are using Google Maps and a program called Twitter (www.twitter.com) to update the maps on a regular basis. A good example, I think, of applied tools of analytic journalism.
Southern California fires on Google Maps
Here's a train journos should get on, m'thinks, because of its long-term value, implications and potential for synergy.
http://openstreetmap.org/ — OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. OpenStreetMap's hosting is kindly supported by the UCL VR Centre and bytemark. — tj
Andy Crain, of the Cincinnati Enquirer, just posted an interesting item on the NICAR listserv related to an innovative integration of news stories and JAGIS. Check it out.
All, The Cincinnati Enquirer has just launched a database application we hope will become our primary vehicle for providing highly local database content to our readers. We call it CinciNavigator. It's a map-based application where users can search currently about half a dozen types of data from numerous sources (much more to come), updated as often as hourly, including stories published in the paper. Check it out, and please share any comments/criticisms/suggestions. Thanks! http://data.cincinnati.com/navigator/ Andy Crain The Cincinnati Enquirer acrain@cincinnati.com
All, The Cincinnati Enquirer has just launched a database application we hope will become our primary vehicle for providing highly local database content to our readers. We call it CinciNavigator. It's a map-based application where users can search currently about half a dozen types of data from numerous sources (much more to come), updated as often as hourly, including stories published in the paper. Check it out, and please share any comments/criticisms/suggestions. Thanks! http://data.cincinnati.com/navigator/
Andy Crain The Cincinnati Enquirer acrain@cincinnati.com
We were pleased to see last week (via the NICAR listserv) that multiple newspapers, at least in the U.S., have discovered they can get public records data bases, create specialized look-up tools for their frontends and post it/them on their web site. Let's keep on keeping on with this. It seems quite possibly that the next phase of bringing bits and bytes to the people might well be in the realm of 3D, mapping and simulation modeling. To that end, take a look at the “Terrain Tools & Software Packages” jumpstation. This is a nifty collection of commercial and open-source apps that just make your job easier and more interesting.
And this just in from CNet via O'Reilly Radar….
Google To Release Embeddable Maps
Posted: 15 Aug 2007 08:38 AM CDT By Brady Forrest Over on CNet they have the scoop on an upcoming cool Google Maps feature. Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. Google Maps “To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed–it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created–and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog,” the spokeswoman said. Given how smart of a feature this is I can't believe its taken this long for one of the major providers to release a feature like. Yahoo, Google, Live – they've all had the ability to get permalinks to a map for easy inclusion in a website. They've also all had APIs, but now a fully featured map, even those that have Mapplet data, will be fully embeddable on a person's website with cut-n-paste. Google Maps already dominate on third-party websites; this will increase that margin substantially.
Posted: 15 Aug 2007 08:38 AM CDT
By Brady Forrest
Over on CNet they have the scoop on an upcoming cool Google Maps feature.
Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. Google Maps “To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed–it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created–and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog,” the spokeswoman said.
Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. Google Maps
“To embed a Google Map, users will simply pull up the map they want to embed–it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map they have created–and then click 'Link to this page' and copy and paste the HTML into their Web site or blog,” the spokeswoman said.
Given how smart of a feature this is I can't believe its taken this long for one of the major providers to release a feature like. Yahoo, Google, Live – they've all had the ability to get permalinks to a map for easy inclusion in a website. They've also all had APIs, but now a fully featured map, even those that have Mapplet data, will be fully embeddable on a person's website with cut-n-paste. Google Maps already dominate on third-party websites; this will increase that margin substantially.
Assoc. Prof. Paul M. Torrens, at Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences (torrens at geosimulation dot com) continues to turn out interesting simulation models. Most recently they are about crowd movement, but the methods are applicable to many venues. See his work at Geosimulation.org
Yet another interesting innovation of mapping. Imagine what this might mean for analysis of tourism sites or crowd control? From O'Reilly Radar (http://radar.oreilly.com/)
Bio Mapping Project in Stockport This Weekend Posted: 20 Jul 2007 01:04 PM CDT By Brady Forrest The Bio Mapping project sponsors people to walk around an area with a GPS and a Galvanic Skin Response sensor and logger. The emotional responses of the participants are then mapped. The map of San Francisco (pdf) was recently completely. They had previously developed a beautiful map of Greenwich (viewable via Flash viewer or Google Earth). The project has been run by Christian Nold for several years now. Here's how he describes the project in an interview: You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain? Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated. How? By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation. This weekend they are biomapping Stockport. If you happen to be in the UK you can participate — I know that I would. I would love to set this up at one of our conferences to watch the emotional response of attendees throughout the day and at different sessions. Did the keynote speaker or product launch really get people excited? What about that debate?
Bio Mapping Project in Stockport This Weekend
Posted: 20 Jul 2007 01:04 PM CDT
The Bio Mapping project sponsors people to walk around an area with a GPS and a Galvanic Skin Response sensor and logger. The emotional responses of the participants are then mapped. The map of San Francisco (pdf) was recently completely. They had previously developed a beautiful map of Greenwich (viewable via Flash viewer or Google Earth).
The project has been run by Christian Nold for several years now. Here's how he describes the project in an interview:
You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain? Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated. How? By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation.
You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain? Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated.
How? By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation.
This weekend they are biomapping Stockport. If you happen to be in the UK you can participate — I know that I would. I would love to set this up at one of our conferences to watch the emotional response of attendees throughout the day and at different sessions. Did the keynote speaker or product launch really get people excited? What about that debate?
An interesting conference just completed in the UK. Be sure to scroll down to listen to the presentations and, in some cases, see the slides. Go to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/State_of_the_map
State Of The Map
The State Of The Map is the name of our OpenStreetMap conference(s). However, as there has only been one so far, all the information below refers to the State of the Map conference in 2007, held at the University of Manchester, UK.
OpenStreetMap's first conference was at the centre of the geographical industry universe on the weekend of 14/15 July 2007, supported by Manchester University's School of Environment and Development.
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From the Directions Magazine “All Points Blog” …..
A map of O'Hara Corporation's proposed project site in Rockland. (Photo by MapQuest.com)
I'm sure that was a cut and paste error, but I do have a point. As more citizen journalism and more students use the Web to search for and use content, they (and others) need guidance in how to cite such references. Let's assume the map was used under “fair use” (I'm not sure it was). How is it to be cited? Must it include the copyright info for the data? (It does not.) Must it include a link? What do Manuals of Style say? What does MapQuest say?
Author or statement of responsibility. Map Title [map]. Data date if known. Scale; Name of person who generated map; Name of software used to generate the map or “Title of the Complete Document or Site”. (date generated).
Delaware, Ohio [map]. 2001. Scale undetermined; generated by Deb Peoples; using “MapQuest.com, Inc”. (2 May 2005)
The following website offers additional examples: http://library.owu.edu/citing222.html, and a websearch for the phrase “citing maps” yields numerous results.
Concerning copyright, the United States authority has many useful papers demystifying the topic: http://www.copyright.gov/. Another serious examination comes from J.B. Post of the New York Map Society, who has collected map copyright case law from 1789-1998; see: http://www.nymapsociety.org/FEATURES/POST.HTM
#1 Alan Glennon (Link) on 2007-07-09 11:39 (Reply)
