Author Archive

Bivariate thematic mapping with ArcMap? Yes you can!

Colored proportional circles cannot be drawn directly on polygons, but they can be drawn on points. Thus, all you have to do first is to put your polygon data into point data. In the following example, I will be using a pre-existent point layer of commune centers to map data pertaining to the communes. This is a standard cartographic practice when mapping with symbols, as the populations you map tend to concentrate, well… in those centers. If you were mapping, say, climatic data, you would put your circles on the spots of the measurement stations. If you don’t have such a point layer, you can make one, for example by using Data Management Tools > Features > Feature To Point. In this example I already have my commune centers:

Points and polygons

The next thing to do is to add thematic data from polygons to points. You can do this by the “join” method, based on the spatial locations. Every point falls inside a polygon, and gets its data. The new point layer will be saved wherever you want, under whatever name.

Joining data from polygons to points

Usually, you have raw data only, given in absolute values. Colored circles are useful above all when you want to show both proportional and absolute values. Proportional values should be rendered as color shades, and absolute values as symbol sizes. In this example, we will show the population of women per commune, and their relative importance, given in per cents of the total population. We have to calculate these per cents. This can be done by first opening the attribute table of our freshly produced point layer and by adding a field:

Add a new field to the attribute table

We shall name our new variable “pct_femmes”:

Then we use the field calculator to get the percent of total population. Note that I use the Python language in my script. VB works too, but looks slightly different :

Now everything is ready to produce proportional circles. Right-click on your point layer to open its Properties. Under the Symbology tab, choose Quantities > Graduated colors. Pick your relative variable (“pct_femmes” in our case) and your color ramp. Than click on the “Advanced” button and pick “Size…”. In some cases, you might need to “Apply” first, otherwise “Size…” remains greyed out.

As my size variabe, I pick “P00BWtot”, which, in my case, is the absolute number of women. I divide it by 100 to limit the size of my circles. Log() or another transformation can also be applied, in order to smoothen the variation of circle sizes.

Picking a variable for circle size

This is it, your bivariate symbol map in ArcMap, you’re done…

Bivariate symbol map in ArcMap

… or almost done. Apparently, symbol “size”, in ArcMap, defines not the surface of the circles, but their diameters. There is a π * r^2 factor you have to account for in your formula. π being a constant, you can skip it if you wish, but you need to square-root your values if you wish your circle areas to be proportional to them. Thus, “Sqr ( [Sum_P00BWTOT]/ 3.14)” or simply “Sqr ( [Sum_P00BWTOT])” is what you want to use as for your Advanced Size expression.

Further, as you can see on the figure above, ArcMap does not take into account circle overlapping. If you don’t want your large circles to hide the small ones, you have to order them by size, in descending order of your population variable (in our case Sum_P00BWTOT). In ArcMap, sorting your table in table view won’t be enough for this purpose. You need to sort your dataset in the dbf file, which is only slightly more tedious. Use ArcToolbox > General > Sort to do this:

Sorting data in ArcMap

An alternative method would be to order the dbf file associated with your layer with some external software, for example Libre Office Calc. But I will not get into the details of this here. Using the methods described up to here, this is what you get. This time you’re all set:

Bivariate symbol map with sorted overlapping circles in ArcMap

Methods and tools

After a day and a half of work and fine-tuning, here we go: the commuting network of all individuals either residing, working or studying in the canton Valais. I’ve used R, with the RStudio GUI, and the igraph library for R. My staring point was the mobility matrix between all communes, including communes outside of the canton, which I’ve calculated from the individual data of the Swiss Federal Census 2000.

I’ve converted my commuting matrix into a directional weighted graph with the graph.adjacency function. I’ve simplified the graph by removing loops.

The vertex size has been determined by betweenness. To reduce size difference, I’ve squared it.

The graphic layout has been obtained with Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm, included in the igraph library.

To determine communities – identified by 11 different colors in the map above – I’ve tried out edge betwenness, leading eigenvector and finally settled for the walktrap community, which gave the most interesting results. Walktrap community, however, remains non-directional. I am still looking for a directional weighted algorithm appropriate for my study case.

The width of the edges depends on the original weights. In other words, thick lines identify paths taken by most individuals.

Some interpretations

As often when reconstructing a network space from a geographical commuting matrix, the resulting space reproduces very closely the topology of the topographic layout of the canton. This is especially understandable in the case of Valais, because of its West to East tree-like structure.

A clear boundary appears between the French-speaking (Monthey, Martigny, Sion, Sierre, Montana) and the German-speaking (Brig-Glis, Visp, Zermatt, Fiesh etc.) communes. Obviously, the linguistic communities exchange only few commuters.

Also interestingly, commuters from Geneva and Lausanne do not connect to the Monthey subnetwork (which would be the closest from these cities further West on the Lac Léman), but share community with Martigny. My earlier unweighted tests with the walktrap algorithm even attached them to Sion. This confirms the hypothesis that larger cities preferentially “interact” with other urban centers, in terms of all types of geographical interaction (commuting, information, financial flows etc.). Smaller cities, like Vevey, Aigle or Montreux, on the other hand, participate preferentially to the Monthey commuting community. Besides their small size, their topographic closeness to the Valais also leads to this.

References

Pons Pascal, Latapy Matthieu (2005), “Computing communities in large networks using random walks” in arXiv:physics/0512106v1 [physics.soc-ph].

When you export maps from ESRI ArcMap to Adobe Illustrator, the raster background is by default exported as a series of associated bitmap strips, with superposed vector polygons.Here an example:

Bitmap strips (detoured in orange) and vector polygon layer (in blue)

In this – as in many other situations – you might need to crop the image to a specific area. Say the following rectangle:

Area to crop

To do so, first dissociate the vector layer from the raster strips. Then select the raster strips. By default an image options menu will appear just below the menu bar. On this, prese the button “modify the clipping mask” (modifier le masque d’écretage in my French version of Illustrator)

Modify the clipping mask (modifier le masque d'écretage)

Moving lateral line of the rectangle, then, will not make the image smaller but will crop it horizontally:

Dissociate all strips before cropping vertically. Otherwise, Illustrator crops all grouped elements individually, which would turn your bacground into a zebra. Dissociate like this:

Dissociating horizontal stripes

Once the stripes dissociated, you can crop only the uppermost strip that you want to keep, like this:

Erase all the strips above (you don’t need them anymore).

Once you’ve done this, you’re done with the raster aspect. The vector part, though hasn’t been cropped yet as shows the following image:

Cropped raster, uncropped vector layer

To crop the vector layer, create a rectangle of the size of your vector area and select both the rectangle and your vector layer. Once you’ve done this, open the “pathfinder” toolbox and click on the “division” button, like this:

Selected cropping rectangle and all of the vector polygon layer

That’s it. You’re done:

Cropped raster and vector map in Illustrator

Today, the United States are celebrating the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight: three tours of the globe in less than five hours. To mark the occasion, Craig Russell of Space Operations Inc., would have liked to see the mission replayed, but relying on private means only, this time. We get his point, because times have changed since Mercury Atlas 6: power concentrates elsewhere, the resources needed to send men in orbit are no longer in the hands of Nation-States. The conquest of space is no longer a political issue; it is about business. Uunless we look at it differently, that is to say, unless we admit that politics themselves have another owner. A growing private sector is about to own the transportation infrastructure into the margins of our World. Nation-States are its future customers. Google Lunar X Prize promises $ 30 million to the first team capable of sending a robot to the moon without public funding.
100 km above the ground is the Kármán line, where the atmosphere becomes so thin that it no longer provides the required lift for aircraft. Beyond it begins the field of astronautics and orbital flight. From this altitude on, territories and their borders lose their relevance, too: we leave the airspace and enter a “pure space”, even less legislated as the ocean waters. The French philosophers’, Emmanuel Levinas’ fascination for orbital flight, at that time, leads mainly to this: to the possibility of conceiving a space devoid of the cracks of history, and of the logics of separation and deep-rootedness that Europe has barely paid for, such a heavy toll, in the first half of its century. “What matters perhaps above all,” he writes, “is having been able to leave the place. For one hour, one man existed outside of any horizon – everything was sky around him, or rather, everything was geometric space. A man existed in the absolute homogeneous space. ”
Levinas was not talking about John Glenn, though, but about Yuri Gagarin, and his Vostok 1, whose April 12^th 1961 path around the Earth from Baikonur to Engels still leaves a narcissistic scar in the American sky. We do not celebrate the first orbital flight of humanity, today, but only the U.S. one. Gagarin, the Soviet saint, and his eyes filled with infinite solicitude, is still hanging in the corner of the cosmic izba, tucked in his spacesuit like in the gilding of an othodox icon.
The future of space travel, however, commits neither the Cold War, nor metaphysics. Russian Soyuz shuttles welcome American space tourists, providing what the language of economics now calls a “service”: to fall out of the atmosphere at 4g, to hover in weightlessness for a while and to glide to the ground, then, leaving behind the wastes of the dream. In the documentary Space Tourists (2009), the camera of the Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei accompanies Anousheh Ansari on board the International Space Station, where she stayed for 20 million dollars. Down by the cosmodrome, Kazakh scrap dealers roam the steppes in search for spare parts fallen off during the takeoff phases. They cook lamb soup in a piece of rocket. Larger pieces are used for shelter for the night. Here and there, you see a garden or a roof, ravaged by the fallout of cosmic exploration. As writes the journalist Nick Rodick, “forty years on from Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step for man’, we are still waiting for the ‘giant leap for mankind’.”
Ansari was neither the first woman in space, nor its first tourist. Other contenders – the first non-governmental astronaut, the first teacher in space, the first journalist in orbit… – punctuate the titles of the media since the 1980s, until the arrival of the first official “tourist”: the multimillionaire Denis Tito. “Official” only, though, because who is a tourist if not as anyone who moves away from his daily territory, into an elsewhere, devoid of any logic of necessity or obligation? As such, there is tourism, already, in Gagarin’s feat.
Tourism, in all its forms, is a way of escaping the space-time grid of everyday life. Can masses rushed through airport security locks still be considered as such, by the way? They don’t escape anywhere. The holidays themselves are carefully beaconed, by the soft jingle of travel guides, by family demands, by the need to confirm, back to the office, that you’ve been away from all this. Orbital tourism, in this sense, seems the only way into a real elsewhere. For how long, though? UK carrier Virgin Gallactic has already sold over 500 tickets at $200000 aboard its SpaceShipTwo. So watch out: the planet itself is about to become a landscape, the perfect background for a group picture! Its sighting may remain reserved to the privileged, of course, as the Jungfraujoch railway in its infancy, but this is just the beginning, right? Subsequently, as with all progress, any woman or man will be able to explore the outer reaches of sublunar space. In this respect, bold commentators are almost as touching as the poet Mayakovsky in his Flying Proletarian in 1925. Hearing them, we almost forget that one thing: that good old wood, beneath us, our Carboniferous legacy – wood in the form of oil that we need to burn, still and always, to go anywhere.

Resources

Image: screenshot from Space Toutrists, a documentary film by Christian Frei.

Oberg james, 2012, “Private Spaceflight: Up, Up, and Away. This year, commercial spaceflight will really take off” in IEEE Spectrum, January 2012.

Roddick Nick, 2009, Sell-Out on the Final Frontier.

Joan Johnson-Freese, Brian Weede, 2012, “Application of Ostrom’s Principles for Sustainable Governance of Common-Pool Resources to Near-Earth Orbit” in Global Policy, Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 72–81, February 2012.

Michel Foucault, in his 1984 essay Des espaces autres (Other Spaces), coins the term “hétérotopie”. He uses it to designate places evolving on the margin of what we could today call the territory of production. Foucault’s heterotopoi are cemeteries, brothels, prisons, boats, psychiatric hospitals… places inhabited by those who’ve either been excluded from society, or are no longer its members (being dead), or further by those who choose to step outside, in order to engage in “hidden” practices. Those who gather in heterotopoi have one thing in common: they do not exercise power. At least not in the power’s self-acknowledging way.

By pointing out the existence of heterotopoi, Foucault forces us to acknowledge their role. No territory can be made without them. But they are difficult to accept, even more so today than in his times, because the very fundament of the contemporary territory lies in the negation of everything it’s not. Heterotopy is the modern territory’s little secret, as foul as Guantanamo, as dark as Fritzel’s cellar, as tense as the Korean DMZ, as old as Mount Athos, as well-guarded as the bank vaults of tax heavens. But these heterotopoi, as much as the ones pointed out by Foucault, actually appear as what is left behind, or at best spared, by the integrating process of modernity. They are left-overs. Remnants. Residual spaces, where diverging realities survive, even grow perhaps, but mostly stall, like algae in a river shoal. Should the whole idea of heterotopy be limited to such spaces? Can it be?

I actually believe there is more to the concept of heterotopoi, even beyond Foucault’s own definition of the notion. Of course, it would make no sense questionning the coined meaning of the word if its etymological construction was arbitrary. But it is not. Hetero-topoi are the places of the Otherwise (ἕτερος), of an alternative reality, that can of course be a stalling one, but that is also a yet undetermined reality striving to make space for itself. We cannot let that Otherwise stall in some topological black hole of History, even if it was “only” a concept.  Why? Because heterotopoi are the only places capable of transforming a territory, as I shall show.

The problem with Foucault’s definition of the notion is that it focuses on heterotopoi already present in the margins of the territory. Their otherness is the result of History, which anchors them in the past. The other heterotopoi – the ones I have in mind – are not yet out there. They only exist in an infinite set of possible futures that bifurcate from any given location.

Heterotopoi are not projects (a project is a future reality for which place has already been made). Heterotopoi precede projects. They precede them somewhere, though, and in that sense, are not mere u-topias. The particularity of future-oriented heterotopoi is that they share their location with already materialized realities. In an urban environment, marked by the omnipresence of human beings, any given effective place has its set of heterotopoi. What I mean is that any given urban place also exists otherwise in the imagination of its dwellers: as very concretely filled with other amenities, people, practices.

Heterotopoi and virtual spaces

In the days of Foucault, such imaginary otherness was deemed to remain confined in the minds of individuals. Graphic artists were perhaps the only dwellers empowered to share their heterotopoi with others. This situation has changed, though, along with the trivialization of virtual spaces. What we possess today is a potentially infinite set of formalized alternative spaces called “layers” of geographic information systems. The access to such systems is commonplace, not only for professionals of spatial planning, but to all human individuals connected to the World Wide Web. The most common of them are web mapping services such as Google Maps, Bing Maps or Open Street Map. Behind such systems – or, better said, part of these systems – is a multidisciplinary community of spatial professionals that set up their structure, collect spatial information and adapt it, for it to be integrated in the geographic system. In the last decade, these professionals have managed to open their communities by shifting their roles:  they still produce spatial information, but spend even more time empowering non-professional GIS users to do so. In the case of Open Street Map, this empowering even goes so far as to allow users to produce the very base map used to display thematic information later on (traffic densities, land use types, building’s construction years, etc.). Still, even Open Street Map expects users to only report places that already exist, in the material sense of the expression. What about all the places that could be? I.e.: what about heterotopoi?

What we should be looking for are geographic information systems that gather and synthesize knowledge about all the Otherwise imagined by urban dwellers for any place in their city.  This gathering of heterotopoi, and their synthesis in a common virtual spatial layer, is what I wish to call urban hetorostasis. In a democratic society, only hetorstasis can, in my eyes, legitimate an urban project. Can we conceive a pragmatic system which would bring about, or at least facilitate heterostais?

Towards urban heterostasis

In fact, such systems already exist. One of them I have reported in a preceding article in this blog, consecrated to collaborative augmented reality. CAR, however, requires some degree of fascination for computer interfaces. Relying on CAR for heterostasis would, in very crude terms, lead to a city of geeks. In fact, no technological system will do by itself. Effective heterostasis cannot rely on a system of machines and algorithms. It needs a complex production network, composed of human, non-human (cf. Latour 1999), mechanic and electronic components. Social scientists at ease with human contact need to approach human individuals to sound out their needs. Many different ways to express their localized desires must be provided to urban dwellers: not only in the form of Tweeter tweets, FaceBook likes, virtual Layar drawings or Google Maps tags,  but also in the form of billboards, stickers, material traces in the urban space, that shelter heterotopoi in the form of text, drawing, sculpture, micro-model… A stimulating discussion with Jens Brandt, member of the urban thinktank Supertanker, recently made me discover the wide palette of such practices.

All this material, however, would be meaningless if not brought together at some point in time. While it is simple, for any human individual, to dwell in heterotopia, the aim of a human city is to co-dwell with all those of which it is composed. Precisely at this point, the mapper, the statistician, and the GIS technician step in, producing classes of equivalence between aspects of imaginary places, making them comparable, opposable in a common ontology, bringing them together in a common space, transforming a complex set of heterotopoi into a unique, spatial, representation of desire, that only one further step separates from becoming an urban project.

The task is hard and full of methodological pitfalls. Alain Desrosières, in his history of statistics (2000), belongs to the authors who reveal its complexity, its high stakes, its aporias. But the game’s worth the candle. In urbanism, the only alternative practice to heterostasis is the would-be “esthetic” tyranny of the architect, of the drawer of Sforzinda, of the builder of cities in the (social) desert, of the egocentric demiurge only eager to gather fame in the service of dictators. Urban heterostasis is everything  except that type of urbanism. Heterostasis is the open possibility, for all the inhabitants of a city, to play the role they are able to play in producing a desired urban space.

References

Desrosières Alain,  2000, La politique des grands nombres : histoire de la raison statistique, 2^e édition avec nouvelle postface de l’auteur, La Découverte (1^e édition : 1993).

Foucault Michel, 1967, « Des espaces autres » – Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967, (publiée in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, octobre 1984, pp. 46-49).

Latour Bruno, 1999, Politiques de la nature : comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie, Paris : La Découverte.

See also

“Hétérostase” in Wikitractatus, 10.01.2012.

Rajesh Kottamasu, 2007, Placelogging Mobile spatial annotation and its potential use to urban planners and designers, MA thesis,  MIT Sensable City lab.

Liina Einla, 2009, The Notion of Heterotopia in the Practice of Landscape Architecture. The Garden of Education – Alnarp, MA thesis, The Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Faculty of Landscape Planning, Horticulture and Agricultural Science.

“Allopatric speciation” occurs when a biological species divides in two distinct populations, due either to the emergence of a natural boundary (river, mountain) or to migration in opposite directions. Over hundreds of generations, the genotypes of both populations evolve on their own until, finally, they become two separate species.

For some species of fruit-flies, this operation takes but months.  For squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods, it takes hundreds of thousands of years. But how about the human species?

We might soon get a chance to figure it out. Or at least as soon as we get to Mars.

November 2011 shall be the month of the Red Planet: the crew of Mars500 will emerge out of its 520 days of simulated travel; two real probes (Phobos-Grunt and  Curiosity) shall be launched later on. These events remind us that Mars travel constitutes a real possibility; its colonization a thinkable horizon of  human action.

However, if humans colonize Mars, and if they survive, they will be lost to most of us. Relatives at 56 millions of kilometers are not the ones you get to see every weekend. They will live their separate ways, develop their distinct survival strategies, their distinct pathologies. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into two separate species.

What will happen then? Will the “Martians” communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us, like the homo sapiens sapiens perhaps did to the homo sapiens neanderthalensis ? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and spit and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding become so great that we’ll eventually lose all interest in each other? How will we deal with the radical otherness of those that have once been exactly like us?

These are the great social questions of Mars. The planet named after the God of War could one day grow to meet its name, but it can also lead us to re-evaluate all our values. Perhaps the mere thought of it can too: the thought of Mars, our most challenging hypothesis.

See also

Echos

This post has been enhanced, translated in French and published here: Ourednik, A. (2011, November 4). “Penser la colonie humaine sur Mars comme une question sociale” in Le Temps, Genève, p. 13.

The Le Temps version has been commented in the Revue de presse internationale de Cecile de Kervasdoue, France Culture.

Philosophy

“Bande de Möbius” in WikiTractatus.

Biology

Rice William R. and Hostert Ellen E., “Laboratory Experiments on Speciation: What Have We Learned in 40 Years?”, Evolution, Vol. 47, No. 6, December 1993, pp. 1637-1653

Roth Louise V. and Mercer John M., « Differing rates of macroevolutionary diversification in arboreal squirrels », Current Science, Vol 95, No. 7, October 10, 2008, pp. 857-861.

Mars travel and colonization

The Mars society. The purpose of the Mars Society is to explore and settle the planet Mars.

“Can people go to Mars?” in Science@NASA.

The Mars Homestead Project: The Mars Homestead Project, the main project of the Mars Foundation, is developing a unified plan for building the first habitat on Mars by exploiting local materials.

MarsNews, Newswire for the new frontier.

Up to the beginning of the 20th century, the Ancient Testament had been the most cited text in societies with Christian heritage when it came to condemning the human hybris and its emblematic spatial figure: the city.  Yet, quite surprisingly, the most anti-urban text contains the perfect set of ingredients to build one. As the prophets write, “behold”:

“The whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [may reach] unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people [is] one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. ” [Genesis, 11:1-9]

In other words, a human community needs three elements to exist:

• A common language, i.e., a common symbolic space necessary to articulate a coordinate action,
• the mastery of  matter,
• and a name to give itself, in order to make oneself distinct from the rest of the world.

And then one more thing: a common project, i.e., a shared idea of the highest good as Aristotle points out at the very beginning of his Politics. When these three ingredients give them the ability to do anything “which they have imagined to do”, humans only need to imagine something. Jerusalem imagines God. Yet its ingredients are exactly the same as Babylons, who only imagines itself. Precisely here lies the difference and the sin of Babylon in the eyes of the authors of the Bible. Because there are two ways of conceiving a human project.

The first one – and this would be the Jerusalem model – consists in trying to converge to a transcendental ideal. This is the model of religious fundamentalism, of 20th century totalitarianisms, and of our Brave New Worlds. Yet the Jerusalem model is also one in which humans ask themselves what happiness is before undertaking anything. It is a model that prohibits striving unless there is something to strive for.

Babylon strives without goal. It is beautiful and free and terrible and mad. It is the city of those who launch the “arrow of longing” beyond themselves, as Nietzsche would exalt before the end of his century. It is the city of infinite growth, fleeing forward men making themselves – and the world – miserable in their rush out to nowhere. Babylon depletes its environment. It lives on a mountain of high-tech garbage. But it is also the city in which men do not have to be told what to expect in order to live in expectation, they do not have to be taught what to desire in order to feel longing.

While the perfect ingredients of city building have so long been in our hands, we still don’t know which city to build.

Image

Tatlin Vladimir, 1919-1920, Model for the Monument of the 3rd International, sculpture.

R is the greatest open source statiscal programming package around. It is all a mapper need to pretreat data. Yet it suffers from interfaces that are either uggly, tedious to set up, clumsy to use or all of these. After years of glaring at the Windows interface of R, I’ve finally sutmbled upon a nice tool which takes seconds to intall. It’s called RStudio, it’s  available since February 28th 2011 and it displays many nice features among which:

• Code coloring.
• One-button execution of selected lines.
• Code search and replace toolbar.
• Workspace data and values listing, extremely useful to keep up to date with variables and arrays you’ve produced in lines of code. This pan lists all objects with their type and dimnesion (e.g. “b : character[2]“; “dat : 4159 obs. of 49 variables”, “ab : 2×2 double matrix” etc. )
• A searchable help pane.
• etc.

All of this neatly packed in one interface window, with tabs giving access to plots, files and to all the other nice things you expect R to do.

Among lacks of this Beta version, on could still mention:

• The “import dataset” button only allows you to load comma-separated values. It would be more interesting if this button’s options allowed users to load Excel, SPSS, etc. files. For now, you can always run R Commander (> library(Rcmdr) )  and use the “Data>Import data” menu for GUI access to datasets.  Other Rcmdr menus would also be welcome in R Studio. Why not merge them?
• No code completion in the coding pane.
• A slightly clumsy packages manager.

In brief: RStudio is a nice piece of software to follow closely, and already of great help in ist current version.

Hotel and para-hotel overnight stays in Switzerland in the year 2000. Total numbers and comparison do the residential stay-times.

Who’s the real inhabitant of a place? For a long time, population maps have been constructed as if everybody stood still in their homes. Yet leaving this “domostatic” perspective is to geography like opening Pandora’s Box. All objects of any concern to the discipline must then be understood in a dynamic relationship to the rest of the world. Because any spatially defined area in today’s globalized context is actually inhabited by more people than those that reside in this area, all individuals on the planet can be considered as a potential part of the population of any place. In other words, no place is local. A population map of any territory can only strive for accuracy if one tries to include global-mobility-induced stay-times within the mapped area.

To what extent this is true can be verified by looking at “imported” stay-times I’ve already talked about in a preceding blog . Here is another illustration, based on hotel nights. As you can see can see on this map, the touristic presence can sometimes up to triple the local population in terms of total stay-times, which shows not only the inaccuracy of domostatic measuring but raises also major political questions about “local” governance. In effect, to what extent can a place in which only one third of the actual occupants has political rights and obligations be considered as democratic? To which extent are local constitutions already concomitant with the principles of the World Tourism Organization? To which extent does the basic right to move, protected by the Article 13 of the Human Rights Declaration, need to be extended to the freedom to act, politically, in places other than one’s residence?

The place of the topographic territory in politics will need much thought and attention in the upcomming epoch. No doubt its importance will be both downscaled and coupled to other societal interobjects. The westphalian model of the territorial state is under rising pressure. New models of participation, based on transterritorial societies, will have to be invented, unless we want to see democratic systems turn into unpraticable reliques.

References

Ourednik André, 2010, “Cartografare in due dimensioni la realtà diacronica dello spazio abitato” in Emanuela Casti e Jacques Lévy (a cura di): Le sfide cartografiche. Movimento, partecipazione, rischio, Universtà degli Studi di Bergamo: il lavoro editoriale, pp. 65-77.

Tools

Excel, Spss, ArcGIS, ScapeToad, Illustrator.

Easter 2011 has been marked by a very particular conjunction of celebrations:

• the beatification of the body of the Pope John Paul II, preceded by its exhumation
• the capture and burial in deep sea of the body of Osama Bin Laden.

John Paul II’s body has been moved to a marble stone monument in Pier Paolo Cristofari’s Chapel of St. Sebastian in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (see number 76 of the floor plan), closer to the Blessed body of Pope Innocent XI. Then it was beatified. It has, in other words, been brought back onto the map of the World, labeled, and re-localized to become a convergence place of the crowds.

Osama bin Laden has been embodied – i.e., both brought into existence as a localizable body and transformed from a living person into a body – at 34°10′9.67″N 73°14′33.60″E. According to Wikipedia, the DNA from bin Laden’s body has been compared with DNA samples on record from his dead sister’s brain, confirming his identity. Then he was disposed of somewhere unknown in the North Arabian Sea. It has in other words, been brought back onto the map of the World, labeled, and de-localized to become a divergence no-place of other crowds.

In both cases, crowds flooded the streets to celebrate the mapping event. Barack Obama and Pope Benedict XVI praised crowds “under God”.

A strange reinterpretation of the crucifix can be made by the mapper under these circumstances, reminescent of the words of the French songwriter Brassens, who sings about “the four horizons, that crucify the world (par les quatre horizons qui crucifient le Monde)”. See the cross as a pair of coordinates, and it becomes the symbol of a localizing imperative: every body in its place…. except for those who somehow present the threat that maps might be torn apart: in their case, the map must be used as a tool of delocalization!

This forceful territorialization, this need to see human concerns incarnated, then pinpointed  to a place, is both the cross our culture has obviously chosen to continue to bear, and the cross upon which it intends to be celebrated.

Old scrolls weight heavily on the surface of the Earth.

Illustration tool: Illustrator.

Sources: Mercator Map, Da Vinci’s ‘Man’.