Posts tagged Mapping
Flickr as a database?
Sep 6th
Nine Ladies stone circle, viewed from the King Stone
I went out on a photo trip yesterday. I’ve been testing the iPhone app GeoLogTag recently. For some reason I simply cannot get my iPhone talking to my MacBook, which makes a lot of the WiFi syncing apps a waste of time. GeoLogTag has an option to geotag photos on Flickr. If you visit this photo’s page on Flickr and look at the data on the right side, you’ll see it was taken near Stanton in Peak and there’s a map so you can see other nearby photos.
Once you’ve remembered to leave the phone on, which means cancelling the auto-lock, which geo-logging, then tagging is pretty much painless. The phone keeps track of where it is at any given time. It connects to Flickr and any ungeotagged photos that were taken while the phone was logging get tagged. This works because the photos have a record of the time they were taken. If you remember to take your phone around with you when to take a shot, then you can have a reasonably accurate log of where you are. At $5 it’s a lot more sane than buying one of those dedicated photo-loggers you can More >
Time Savers
Jun 11th
Normally blog entries here are written days in advance, so when I have busy days things continue as usual. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been very busy, hence the lack of blogging. On the plus side I have had some help from other people who found me some time saving tools.
Mick Morrison has been reading the Google Earth EULA, like we all did before we clicked ‘accept’. He points out that the guidelines on the Google site say:
You may use Google Maps and Google Earth content including photographic imagery in brochures, marketing collateral, packaging, trade show displays/banners, newspapers, academic publications, journals, and books.
Quite reasonably he’s asking why they aren’t being used in academic publications. The answer in my case is that it didn’t occur to me that getting permission would be simple. I’ll be using the maps in my thesis now.
The other big time-savers are the applets from The Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project. What I need to do is create some diagrams like the one below showing how apparent star paths change with latitude, how the sunrises over different parts of the horizon at different times of the year, and so on. The NAAP Astronomy Labs have More >
Making Memory Maps
Jun 5th
Colleen Morgan demonstrates how she can track the past with her phone. Photo (cc) Miss Colleen.
Mbedr is a tool for embedding Flickr photos with notes into other websites. This is not something I would normally bother with and it seems I’d be missing a huge opportunity. Colleen Morgan has realised that if you get a satellite photo, then drawing notes over a photo is an effective way of making an annotated map. An example below is from Miss Colleen and is part of the Remixing El Presido project.
That’s interesting, but by itself it’s a curio rather than something exciting. What is exciting is that Colleen Morgan has really thought about what you can do with Flickr’s features. It’s a beautifully elegant idea. Because above, what you see is a photo, albeit a photo with notes. However because Flickr also allows geographical information to be associated with a photo you can give it a place. Now comes the stroke of genius.
Add in triangulation from GPS or WiFi and suddenly you have a GPS which not only knows where you are but also where the past was too.
Impressing people when you have something shiny and new isn’t too difficult. Taking a lot of publicly available tools More >
Wiltshire and its 21st century SMR
Jan 28th
This is how Tom Goskar casually tosses a cat amongst the pigeons…
If you’re interested in the archaeology of the county of Wiltshire, you can now access the Wiltshire Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) online, complete with a map interface.
The SMR is the archaeological record of a county and, as Tom points out, Wiltshire is the county with Stonehenge in it.
Adding the map interface is one of these things which sounds simple, but which hardly anybody offers. I can find my house on a map, but I couldn’t tell you the OS grid reference, nor parse grid references from locations in the record to work out where they lie in relation to me. It doesn’t add any new information to the SMR but changing the interface makes it a lot more accessible. If the SMR databases over all UK counties were opened up then this kind of approach would be a massive help for anyone who’s interested in their local archaeology rather than their local administrative district.
If you don’t know the names of local villages or parishes, or OS references, but are interested in Stonehenge and its surroundings, then Wiltshire Council’s action is a important as any major book the subject.
Unfortunately the map isn’t More >
Freedom is…
Sep 20th
Not Berlin. Photo (cc) thischanginglife.
The Occupation is finally bringing the peoples of Iraq together in peace. I’ve tagged a blog post in del.icio.us Baghdad residents protest US-erected dividing wall on Annotated Life which notes that Sunnis and Shi’ites are hand in hand in opposition to the construction of the latest wall across the city. I briefly noted that in another context it could pass for an Iron Curtain. With a bit more though I think I was wrong. What has surprised me is after thinking about it some more there may be a grimmer historical comparison. (more…)
Angkor Wat and Urban Sprawl
Aug 14th
Sunset at Angkor Wat. Photo (cc) Cap’n Surly.
The big story catching my eye at the moment is the discovery that there’s a lot more to Angkor Wat than previously thought. To some extent that shouldn’t be too surprising. The site is boasts massive buildings and is carefully planned. There’s some stunning engineering and hydraulics which feeds a network of pools. The problem is finding where the extra settlement is. The discovery of Angkor Wat was in the sixteenth century, but serious work only really started with the reports of Henri Mouhot in the 19th century. The big problem is finding the sites. Angkor is the stereotypical Lost City in the Jungle. The solution is to use radar which the Greater Angkor Project has been doing to look for plant growth and moisture.
You can’t build a massive city without there being some environmental impact, and the trick here is to see how plants grow after the site has been abandoned. Places where trenches were dug and ditches cut stay slightly damper than normal. Soil that accumulates over walls in contrast is better drained. This creates differences in in plant growth and produces images that look a bit like an x-ray or More >
Displaying astronomical alignments in academic papers
Jul 6th
[Cross-posted to i-Science]
Astronomical alignment at Segesta
There’s a couple of paper which have come out recently which use different techniques for indicating astronomical alignments at archaelogical sites. The image above is one I put together for a poster to show why horizon altitude is important as well as azimuth. It’s quite tight, so it’d be no good if you wanted to see where sunrise was in midsummer for instance, and charting the paths of astronomical bodies over a site is a problem. By and large you can treat a site as a small flat area, so there’s not usually any cartographic problems in accounting for the curvature of the earth. The sky in contrast is very curved over every archaeological site, so how to you display that in a paper?
The Megalithic Portal put me on to an interesting article published in Information Visualization: A Sky Dome visualisation for identification of astronomical orientations by Georg Zotti. The abstract includes:
This paper presents a novel diagram combining archaeological maps with a folded-apart, flattened view of the whole sky, showing the local horizon and the daily paths of the Sun, Moon and brighter stars. By use of this diagram, interesting groupings of astronomical orientation directions, for More >
Imitation – The sincerest form of mappery
Apr 19th
Laputan Logic links to the Surname Profiler at UCL. He also has interesting comments on tracing surnames. If the proposed connection between surnames and Y-chromosomes holds then you can bask in the genetic link to your forefathers. If you lack a Y-chromosome then you’ll just have to comfort yourself with the knowledge you can think with your brain instead.
If you’re one of these people who changed their surname a while ago then a map like this might not tell you so much about your ancestors. On a totally unconnected note I’ve found that if you’re looking for Mackensie, you need to spell it with a ‘z’.
Fun with overlays
Mar 22nd
Chichen Itza overlay on Google Earth
The site Google Earth Hacks is deeply cool. As well as all the handy place marks, there are a few other models. I’ll see what I can do when autumn comes with this model available for download.
Atlas and Satellite data
Feb 18th
I’ve found that satellite data is getting cheaper. Eurimage are selling archived Quicksat data for $17/km2, though the minimum order is 25km2, so not an impulse buy yet. But it may soon become feasible to order satellite imagery of a site as it’s dug which could lead to fascinating things.
I was interested as I was trying to find Catalhoyuk on Google Earth. I eventually found coordinates via the ArchAtlas project. There’s a fantastic idea buried away at the bottom of the menu on the left side. You can get ArchAtlas points on WorldWind or Google Earth, including Çatalhöyük overlays as .kml files for Google Earth. How amazing is that? They also have a nice gallery of sites seen through Google Earth.
I’ve lost the rest of the day now as I’ll be playing with this.
