This past week, I read an article that claims the number of people “getting around” by bicycle is steadily growing. The article references the American Community Survey (ACS) and the League of American Bicyclists (LAB). Considering I am a certified instructor from the LAB, I wanted to check the data for myself (and map it).
Smarter Paper Maps
It’s a quiz. I’ll name the required skills, you name the profession. Go. Identifying map projections and coordinate systems Interpreting map scale Understanding techniques of cartographic relief Interpolating latitude & longitude Calculating geographic extent rectangles Too easy? Well the profession I’m describing is not Geographic Information Systems guru or Cartographer or Neogeographer. In fact, my…. More.
“Old School Hydro” in the Scholars’ Lab
Please join us on November 4th (or look for our podcast) to get your feet wet with Old School Hydro: Modern and Historic Surveying Aboard the NOAA Ship “Thomas Jefferson!”
WMS vs. tilecaching
In our work on Neatline, we have made a deliberate choice to start by restraining our work to map-sources that are quickly and easily provided through WMS. This leaves out (for now) two popular sources of map imagery; Google Maps and Open Street Map. I’m going to explain why we made that choice, and why, when we do come to make these sources usable with Neatline, we will do so with great care and with an eye to scholarly method.
Frontiers in Spatial Humanities (video)
A video stream of the final event of our NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship (or #geoinst as it’s known on Twitter) is now available! Thanks to all our wonderful participants for making these lightning talks, collectively entitled “Frontiers in Spatial Humanities,” so thought-provoking. The Scholars’ Lab/NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship was held at…. More.
Frontiers in Spatial Humanities
[UPDATE: video for the "Frontiers" event is now available!] We’re crowd-sourcing the keynote to the final round of the Scholars’ Lab/NEH 2009-2010 Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. With all of these fantastic attendees on hand — not to mention the Institute faculty — how could we let the opportunity slip by? Frontiers in Spatial Humanities:…. More.
GIS: The (rare) Tartan-Plaid Point Dispersion Problem
Have you ever wondered what would happen to your map of points if while converting your coordinates from latitude/longitude in degrees, minutes, seconds (DMS) to decimal degrees (DD) you messed up the math? Ever seen a weird tartan-like plaid pattern emerge on your map from points that were suppose to be uniformly spread out over…. More.
Mr. Voronoi, meet the US state boundaries
In the Scholars’ Lab we are working with remarkably detailed datasets showing changes to US political boundaries over time. We’ve all been fascinated with visualizations where the familiar outlines of the US states emerge from thousands of boundary changes to their underlying counties over the last few hundred years. Did you know Virginia once spanned…. More.
The 1907 Massie map of Albemarle Co.
While going through our archives of scanned maps, we recently ran across a copy of Frank A. Massie’s 1907 “A new and historical map of Albemarle County, Virginia” [Special Collections, University of Virginia Library], commonly referred to as the Massie map, which contains a wealth of detailed historical information for the county in which the…. More.
Calculating county-to-county distances with GIS
In the Scholars’ Lab we recently worked with a researcher whose study areas focused on several groups of US counties. Of interest was the distance from every county within a group to every other county in that same group. We used geographic information systems (GIS) software to calculate these distances.