Mapmaker, Artist, or Programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Mapmaker, Artist, or Programmer?

theatlanticcities.com

58 pointsgodisdad18 comments

Btw, the flickr in question: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/

Hi, I finaly registered to hacker news only to congratulate you and ask how did you make these? I love Data and love to see new ways of displaying it, this is an awesome idea, I'd like to try and make things like these for a hobbie, care to show me some pointers?

I'd love to see some of the code behind these maps. Are they rendered with mapnik? How practical would it be to make some of them live and interactive? Especially now we have vector graphics in the browser.

I really should clean up the source code and release most of it. The toolchain for most of them is kind of ridiculous: giant flat text files feeding through Unix pipelines and Perl scripts into PostScript files and Ghostscript. A lot of them would be better if they were interactive in the browser but I need to do the work to make it happen.

Wow, that sounds quite scary. I'd love it if you did release the source though, it'd be a great project for me to build an interactive version. (Whether or not it would get further than any of my other side projects is another matter :) Anyway, my email is in my profile and I'd be very interested if you did release something.

Are these evergreen? ie, can the data-sets be updated, etc. FWIW, I think they are conceptually intersting.

My immediate second thought was, what more could be done? [in a good way]

I've tended to make them statically, but I really ought to go back and update some of them with more data.

programmer == artist

It's really beautiful. But it's practically useless.

Thanks, and sorry the maps aren't useful to you. They're artifacts of the process of trying to understand the world, and maybe someday I'll make it all the way there.

The maps are not useless. In fact, they are tremendously valuable. If that is not observable, the fault lies in the observer.

I believe LIVE versions of the maps are a tremendous idea .. would you consider building a site replete with such an effort? Live versions of many (if not all) of your maps would make a tremendous contribution to the way our mobs conceive themselves.

(Perhaps this is something for ifft&co..)

I would love to make live versions of these, but the rate of data coming in is slow enough that they don't work very well in real time—even New York only has one geotagged tweet every 4 seconds, so using it would mostly be sitting and waiting for something to happen. A retrospective of the past day would probably be practical and might be useful, though.

I've registered to this site to let you know that I absolutely adore this work. I've added you as a contact on Flickr to see what else you are able to create.

These are beautiful maps, Eric. I'm a GIS/software developer living in your old haunt (Hyde Park), and I love stuff like this...especially with Chicago data. GIS folks love comparing old maps to new maps. Do you currently make any of your maps available in high-quality print format (e.g. http://store.axismaps.com/)?

Like many things, including works of art. But that doesn't mean it's worthless, and we shouldn't treat it as such.

Maybe for you but these maps can be very useful for urban planners.

Anything that is beautiful is useful.

It may be practically useless today but what if he rendered how people are connected to locations (via geotagged tweets and photos), in realtime, something like that flighttracker.. this has good potential man.

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