Friday, December 28, 2012

Looking geographically



Image above: Fishing fleet, Port Lincoln, South Australia

Sites related to Spatialworlds
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Port Lincoln, South Australia: S: 34º 42' E: 135º 52'



Seeing the world through the eyes of a geographer with maps and visualisations


Much has been spoken about geographical thinking but much of geographical thinking is dependent on geographical looking. The geographer’s use of maps and visualisations enables them to see the world quite differently to the non-geographer. Maps and visualisations expose locations, distributions, patterns and trends which provide the basis of spatial thinking and analysis. In this posting I have listed a range of great maps/visualisations which provide a different look at the world. When looking at each representation (whether old or new), the geographer will undertake spatial analysis with the ever present geographical questions of where and why. It makes sense that some describe geography is the study of the "why of the where".
The following are just the tip of the iceberg of interesting maps from the past and today.


 * Power socketmap

 

* Africa in 1908


* London: a functional analysis from Patrick Abercrombie's post-war urban planning, 1944
* Time-Lapse Map of the World's 2053 Nuclear Explosions

* Visualization of taxi traffic. Part of "Sense of Patterns" - visualizing mobility data in public spaces.

* "Dencity"by Fathom, a look at population density, with larger dots representing sparser.
* US map of the percent born in state of residence (2010)

* Where people post geo-tagged photos toFlickr (red) from and geo-tagged tweets to Twitter from (blue), or both (white). By Eric Fischer.

* UK riots overlaid on a map of UK poverty

* Eight-year olds travel distances, then and now


* "Food Deserts" - no car and no supermaket within a mile.


* Google Earth layer showing Russian Wildfire activity


* "See Rome as it looked in 320 AD and fly down to see famous buildings and monuments in 3D. Select the 'Ancient Rome 3D' layer under Gallery in Google Earth."
* Ten of the greatest: Maps that changed the world . A recent  exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever


Just for interest on the nothing is new theme A fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey’s end.

No comments: