Tag Archive for 'maps'

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Infrastructure visualization

Published on 16 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Ben Fry, a data visualization artist and teacher, compiled the above image of the US. As he describes it,

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.

While not terribly profound, it is an interesting inversion: geography as an emergent property of infrastructure. Fry mentions elsewhere that one of the reasons he omitted Hawaii and Alaska was because this relationship is not visible.

I rather like looking at a crop of the image, and watching these nameless towns become nodes in a web traced out by roadways, looking almost like bacterial cultures. It is almost like looking up into the sky and seeing all the different stars, some bright, some dim, wondering what those worlds must be like.

Project website with higher resolution close ups

Fry’s commentary and sketch of the technical process involved

Geospatial imaging and human rights

Published on 15 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wired today featured a profile of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) efforts to bring satellite reconnaissance photography to bear upon human rights violations within closed societies like North Korea and disputed territories like the Gaza Strip. They work with NGO’s and regional groups to help provide and disseminate documentary evidence of acts of violence to the world community.

Visualizing human atrocities from the perspective that these images afford is a quite a complicated thing to do. One can look at an aerial view of Auschwitz, for instance, of prisoners lined up, tracing a curved line, to be processed through the gate. But the whole scene still resolves at such a clinical level. One can illustrate and argue from miles in the air, but can one provide the visceral force of documentation needed to rouse the world’s intervention? After the fact, when the picture has meaning and history behind it, certainly, it can be quite compelling and have an almost a voyeuristic magnetism to it. This was where they would shoot them. This is the creek that the ashes were dumped in. But how do we understand it, how do we relate to the reality in these images?