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This map is an agent-based simulation result produced by NetLogo. It has been programmed years ago by a friend of mine, Alexios Kitsoupulos, from the University of Lausanne. What you see are paths produced in the green by people moving from one place to another. The basic rules are :

- Individuals use existing paths unless they diverge by more than α degrees from the direct line leading to their destination. (This idea was introduced and confirmed by spatial observations in psychology. α is a parameter of the model).

- Individuals create (or deepen) paths by walking.

As simple as the model is, or perhaps because of its simplicity, its result remains fascinating. It illustrates to which extent many structures of our territories can actually be brought back to individual’s semi-conscious spatial schemes. The territory is a 1:1 map of the converging dimension of individual minds and bodies.

In this light, any spatial planning project (be it urbanism, architecture or transport engineering) appears as a translation of such a “1:1 map of the semi-conscious” into a conscious, verbalized, material reality. The quality of territorial projects should always be assessed regarding to their capacity to explicitate this translation.

Tool: NetLogo (script by Alexios Kitsopoulos).

This is a map by which I’ve presented myself to my students on the first day in a course on tourism and mobility. I’ve given it in 2010 at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo. I wanted to make two points by showing it:

1. What a professor teaches is deeply rooted in who he is. You can only acquire sufficient critical distance to a taught theory by considering the person of the teacher, above all his personal history with respect to the examined acedemic matter. I’ve moved a lot during my life, partly because I wanted to, partly because I had to. And I’ve moved essentially in the Northern Hemisphere. All this has to be kept in mind when I speak about mobility.
2. What an individual is is a unique composition of the relations of that person with other people, things, places,… Identity is connectedness and movement. It is rooted in a space composed by a plurality of places.

The map above gives a rich glimpse into these aspects; its cartographic protocol is simple, though: circle sizes represent relative stay-times, their colors the type of my relation with a specific place, the line lengths represent time-distances, and line thickness the frequency of travel. You will note that azimuatal relation of places respect their topographic distribution on the surface of the globe to some extent.

I did not use any formal data to represent it: it is a “free-hand” computer drawing. This is all the more legitimate considering that I am the subject of this map. It must be intersting to conduct the same spatial autoportrait experiment with subjects with no geographical training. The distribution of places will probably be very different in that case. The procedure is similar to the one used for the construction of Kevin Lynch’s mental maps; only that here, the time-dimension of the lived space gets the most significant part of attention, instead of landmarks and boundaries.

Tool: Illustrator.

Inspiration: The construction protocol of this map was inpired by the work on “self-extensive mapping” conducted by the SCALAB group, under the mandate of the Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (PUCA).

As strange as it seems in a globalized society, MS PowerPoint developers haven’t considered necessary to allow their users to change the language of a whole presentation. This becomes especially annoying when you translate your slides. You easily end up with a mix of languages on a slide, and you’ll notice, then, that it is not possible to select the main one: the language button (on the bar below) is simply not clickable if a multilanguage text is selected (in MS Word, this works, but NOT in MS PowerPoint). Even a mix between English/US and English/UK disables the button.

The basic roundabout consists in determining the “by default” language. Simply click the language on the language bar on some one-language slide where this actually works, select a language, and press “by default”:

Every new slide will systematically apply your the default language to any new box.

However, this doesn’t solve the problem of an existing presentation you wish to translate. Starting to write in English on a French slide, the auto-corrector will underline your spelling, perhaps even chew it up altogether if you have ‘correct as you type’ active. If you are lucky, the language chooser button works. But even a simple mixture of french-fr and french-chmakes it impossible to use it.

Then, how do you determine the language of a whole slide? Or even (woaw) the language of a whole presentation?

Well, the only way to go around this is a macro (!) I’ve got from Chocotooth’s blog:

Sub SetLangUS()
Dim scount, j, k, fcount
scount = ActivePresentation.Slides.Count
For j = 1 To scount
fcount = ActivePresentation.Slides(j).Shapes.Count
For k = 1 To fcount 'change all shapes:
If ActivePresentation.Slides(j).Shapes(k).HasTextFrame Then
ActivePresentation.Slides(j).Shapes(k).TextFrame _
.TextRange.LanguageID = msoLanguageIDEnglishUS
End If
Next k
fcount = ActivePresentation.Slides(j).NotesPage.Shapes.Count
For k = 1 To fcount 'change all shapes:
If ActivePresentation.Slides(j).NotesPage.Shapes(k).HasTextFrame Then
ActivePresentation.Slides(j).NotesPage.Shapes(k).TextFrame _
.TextRange.LanguageID = msoLanguageIDEnglishUS
End If
Next k
Next j
End Sub

What should you do with this? Click the Visual Basic button on the ‘Developer’ tab:

Insert a new module by right-clicking on ‘VBAProject’ in the left navigation pane:

This opens a new window. Paste the code into it. And run it with the ‘play’ button:

See? All text boxes have been set to English/US. You can save this code for later use in a file with .bas extension.

PS: Dear Microsoft, if you could offer a less tedious solution than this by simply integrating the language-switching feature in PowerPoint, many thanks in advance.

On Friday, April 15th, I will intervene in the symposium “Mapping Ethics“, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. The object of my presentation is Collaborative Augmented Reality. The following is the written form of my ideas, which shall be discussed in the workshop “Ethics Despite Aesthetics“, presided by Françoise Schein (École supérieure d’arts et médias de Caen).

Behind the illusion

In Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Klaus Kinski with his eyes buried deep into another world stands on the shore of a river and says: “everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams”. This is what the Jivaro Indians reportedly believe. But what Kinski’s character sees is his boat climbing over the hill to reach another river. It is loaded with latex, a matter to be transformed into money where the river ends, for the money in turn to be traded for Fitzcarraldo’s dream: an Italian opera master to sing in the midst of the Amazonas jungle. He envisions a place for beauty in a world of fierce competition for resources and land.

There is a gap between Fitzcarraldo and the Jivaros, of course, as they don’t share the same dream. But what unites them is a will to inhabit the world not according to what there obviously is but according to what there ought to be. They strive for an existence in other layers of space. Their struggle is rough, though, at the beginning of a century characterized by monospatial logics. Could today’s technology provide an easier answer to their wishes?

Innovation as network articulation and perspective shift

The technology I am referring to is actually a rhizome composed of at least three elements. The first is a plurality of mobile devices connected to a worldwide network. The second, their users. The third is a model of cohabited space, a world wide map materially carried by a system of satellites whose combined signals, considered within the scope of the model, assign a unique position to any device. This is what GPS is about. Most interestingly, this model allows for a plurality of objects to be situated in the same place. Only locations are non-equivocal: what is to be found in them depends on the selected layer of spatial information. For a long time, these layers could be observed only from a zenithal point of view, i.e., from a perspective exterior to the observing subject. The most recent technological advances consist in bringing them to his own, floor-level perspective. The position of a palm-held device – a camera- and accelerometer-doted mobile phone – is calculated. The selected layer of spatial information is then superposed to the image captured by the camera. It consists of 3D objects. The coined term is augmented reality. Looking through the eye of the beheld, you now dwell in the “layer” you chose. Seamlessly, you’ve conquered your reality of dreams.

A computer application has democratized this empowerment as recently as 2009. Called “Layar”, it has first been deployed on the Android operating system, before being implemented also for the iPhone in 2010. There are currently over 470 layers produced by third parties. An exponential growth of this number is to be expected, considering the relative simplicity of the API.

From amplifying the obvious to spatial empowerment

Most existing layers are still confined to localization purposes within the one, obvious layer: you are to be guided to shops, fast-food corners, bus stops, commonly acknowledged touristic attractions… So far, we are dealing with an amplification of an existing striated space. Some layers, though, do take serious advantage of the empowerment. One of them is “ARTags”. This layer literally doubles walls. It drapes space in another space, providing a new drawable surface to its subscribers. Like any space, ARTags has a territorial logic. In its case: “first come first served”. But this logic is distinct from the one allowing a building owner to erase an undesired graffiti. Precisely here, collaborative augmented reality (CAR) becomes more than collaborative mapping. It is an open challenge to a territorial logic of exclusion which claims since the times of Aristotle that two bodies cannot occupy the same portion of space at the same time (Physics, Book IV). More importantly than this logic itself, CAR defies powerful spatial actors who made it into a tool of assertion of their social position. A more elaborate example of this is the AR exhibition realized by Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek within the walls… of the New York Museum of Modern Art. As the artists put it, “the show is happening in augmented reality, and will therefore not be visible to regular visitors of the MoMA”. The exhibition exists as an AR-layer but occupies floors 1 to 6 and virtual floors 7 and 8 plus garden. It “opened” on October 9^th 2010. Here, the artistic legitimacy of a controlled portion of space (the MoMA building), is stolen, and thus defied by an artistic project in augmented reality.

Aesthetics as a political process

But possibilities outgrow the realm of art. A political slogan remains a slogan even if is sprayed on a hyperwall, and what AR can do is more suggestive than graffiti. Couldn’t a hyper-Temple of Solomon finally coexist with the Bait-ul-Muqaddas? Couldn’t the West Bank Barrier be made transparent? With respect to such questions, contemporary technology is both despairing and exalting. Despairing because its solutions are desperately easy to implement, yet would only be effective if they propagate to all spatial layers. Exalting because it allows, for a moment at least, a suspension of our spatial aporias. Dangerous, also, because spaces tend to act on other spaces. Dreams are programs and there are the more efficient when they are formulated with higher precision, the more compelling when they are concretely experienced. The Jivaros manage to transport Fitzcarraldo’s boat over the hill but they send it down the rapids because such is the final will of their God.

The future isn’t the only realm of efficiency of AR and CAR, though. It extends into the past as well and can be seen as an extreme form of an urban palimpsest. An example of this is the layer “Berliner Mauer”, an AR reconstruction of the historic scar of Germany’s capital. For an AR-device owning stroller, it is a highly suggestive approximation of what the Wall must have felt like for thirty years. Other layers give concrete form to less discussed historical facts. Among these, the “Frontera de los Muertos”, a memorial dedicated to the thousands of migrants who have died along the U.S./Mexico border. Erased remains are put back to their place in the landscape in the 3D form of Mexican calaca. In this example, AR becomes an actor of a collective memory which tends to be erased in every-day space.

Extending both into the future and into the past, AR finally offers also a new scale of architecture. There is “Biggar”, another project by Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek consisting of over seven billion blocks circling around the earth. For now, this is described as the world’s biggest sculpture. It still seems episodic but it does illustrate AR’s potential of becoming the setting of yet unthought-of manners of defying existing topographies and topologies.

Moving maps and Bodies

CARs’ main vector, Layar, will yet need to escape from its own excluding logics (for now, every layer has to be authentified by the application owners prior to publication). It and its competitors – for now Wikitude and Junaio – will need to walk the thin path between monopolistic territorialization of spatial dreams, and their fragmentation into a foam of incompatible standards. Yet CAR remains the first big step in the evolution of cyberspace since the emergence of social networks like Facebook and Myspace. This time, the evolution has a strong spatial component, in the bodily meaning of the term. More than in any other information system, in effect, bodily movement is required to access its places. Yet it is composed by a plurality of maps, i.e., by a plurality of images constructed according to an explicit symbolic spatial language and based on an analogical relationship to another space. Their uniqueness consists in their 1:1 scale. They are the first maps needing the participation of multitude of users, not only to be written but also to be read. By their use, the global information polis acquires a kinetic dimension without losing its plurality. They compose a world in which many worlds are possible. An everyday life beneath each of whose layers there will always be space for the reality of dreams.

PS: Note on the term “Collaborative Augmented Reality”

Though the term CAR has spontaneously imposed itself to me while preparing my presentation, a subsequent google search revealed that it has been coined as soon as 2002 (see refercences bellow) in the context of human-machine interface research. I have thus included the reference here bellow.

References

Billinghurst Mark , Kato Hirokazu, 2002, Collaborative Augmented Reality. Working paper.

HERZOG Werner, 1982, Fitzcarraldo, film, Peru, West Germany.

Most 2D-maps are used to represent topographic metrics: distances and areas measured on the map (multiplied by the map scale) give traveling distances and land surfaces. In some cases, this information is irrelevant or even misleading [see an example]. As a cartographer, you may wish to use map metrics to represent other data, such as human populations or amounts of produced resources. This is what ScapeToad is for.

A couple of years ago, I was happy to supervise the production of ScapeToad. The Java programming was done by Christian Kaiser. Its core code is based on the Gastner and Newman [2004] diffusion algorithm. Dominique Andrieu, from the University of Tours, France, was our tester. In case you wonder what the toad is about, well, I was looking for an animal that inflates its shape when designing the logo… If you try out the software, you’ll see what I mean.

While all three of us discussed the conception of the software, we stumbled upon a theoretical – and to some extent philosophical – problem: is it right to say ‘anamorphosis‘ to describe what our software does? While this term is widely used for density-equalizing population cartograms, one must recall that its Greek meaning is “deformation”. Can a geographical space be “deformed”? For one, the term has a negative connotation. More importantly, it implies that there is something out there to be deformed; some original space from which our deformed representation derives.  Clearly, in philosophical terms, this is a realist stance. I hope we all agree that geography is done with realism by now. Two acceptable positions remain: phenomenology and pragmatic positivism (the latter is often mistaken for realism, but this is another problem). In both cases, there is no such thing as an original base map to refer to. There is no ontological hierarchy, no transcendental relation between a social space of populations and a topographic space of the Earth. So shouldn’t we rather talk about transformation, i.e., about “metamorphosis” when moving from the one to the other?

For a long time, I’ve been in favor of that opinion. Today, I think otherwise. The reason is: calling a density-equalizing cartogram a “metamorphic map” clearly overrates its theoretical scope. Cartograms do not overcome the topographic space. They do not put social and topographic space on equal grounds. On the contrary: they participate to the reification of topographic space as the original territory. By doing so, they are a part of what I call a realist drowsiness of geography. Why? Because their use insists on the importance of topographic topologies. The whole point in a software like ScapeToad is to keep the topologies of the original base map intact. Things that were side by side, topographically speaking, remain side by side. In a density-equalizing cartogram, these relations of topographic adjacency are treated as a fundament of geographical relatedness. Here we are, stuck with the old geographical saying that “things that are closer have more influence on each other”, and displaying our inability to ask what actually “being closer” means. As if we had forgotten that there are many ways to measure distance and that topography is only one of them.

One might object that any base map can be taken as a starting point of a ScapeToad “transformation”. This is true. But all cartograms produced with ScapeToad I’ve seen up to now use a topographic base map. While taking population sizes seriously, none of these cartograms actually questions whether topographic adjacencies actually mean anything in terms of relations between the mapped populations.

To overcome the unbearable evidence of topography, we must go one step further. This step might consist in more sophisticated position of things in space, such as multidimensional scaling, based either on mobility flows or on direct social connections between individuals. In the upcoming years, Open Graph technology might provide just the data geographers need to search in that direction. With François Bavaud of the University of Lausanne, we are currently working on a multiscale mobility-based analysis of the Canton of Valais. We will try to combine our results with cartogram techniques.

So there will be more to hear about ScapeToad. The “only” thing to work on is the base-map. In the meantime, don’t let the user-friendly ScapeToad lure you into theoretical drowsiness. All it does is to deform a given: it slightly stretches the original base-map to give more importance to the population variable. In mapping political results, this deformation is necessary. People vote, not square miles. Anamorphosis is a major step in votation results mapping. But it remains anamorphosis; it always refers to an original base-map which has to be produced and theoretically founded before its density-equalizing deformation.

Reference: Gastner, M.T. and Newman, M. (2004). Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(20): 7499-7504.

The TinEye search engine allows you to find images on the web based on an image-file URL.You can also upload the image to search for.

Basically, the serch engine finds copies of your image scattered around the web.

The algorithm has an excellent tolerance for resolutions and color variations. Here an example with one of the images of this blog:

For the professional cartographer, this might be an excellent tool for finding out who comments the maps you’ve published. Incidentally, it might also help you to find unreferenced or unauthorized reproductions of your work…

Counting how many people reside at a given address might just not be enough to understand a territory of mobile individuals. Instead of counting people, I count their “stay-times”. In other words, I sum up the time spent by people in each place.

The map above compares two results:

• ΣH, the hypothetical total stay-time which would have been registered if people never moved.
• ΣT, the observed total stay-time,  calculated from data of the Swiss Federal Population Census 2000, the hotel night counts and the transborder workers counts.

Both ΣH and ΣT are calculated in minutes. If ΣH of a commune is divided by the number of minutes within a year, we get the residential population of that commune.

The ratio ΣT/ΣH makes it possible to identify communes whose “population” is under- or over-estimated by standard census counts. They also make it possible to identify attractors of mobility. In effect, red areas have a larger population than suggested by a residents-count, because time is spent in them by people residing in other communes. Blue areas, on the contrary, have a smaller population.

The lowest ΣT/ΣH-ratios are registered for peri-urban communes. Obviously, people who sleep in these actually live elsewhere.

The highest ΣT/ΣH-ratios are registered in the cantons of Valais and Graubünden mountain resorts. In most extreme cases, tourists triple their population. Urban centers have “only” up to 30% more dwellers then resident-counts would suggest, but their ΣT/ΣH-ratios are systematically positive.

These population differences are important for many reasons, among which infrastructure costs. Shouldn’t peri-urban regions contribute more to the financing of urban centers?

Spatial data resolution: Swiss commune.

Time-data resolution: minutes.

Data handling tools: SPSS and Excel.

Mapping tools: ArcMap, ScapeToad (for the anamorphosis) and Illustrator.

A cartographically challenging fact about the Canton of Valais is that most of its communes cover mountainous areas with no inhabitants. Standard choroplethe maps distort data in these conditions:  communes with only a few inhabitants may appear very large on the map and give a disproportionate importance to data collected from only a few individuals.

One solution would be the use of cartograms. In this map, I use another another solution, based on the hectometric resolution of the Swiss population census. I’ve aggregated the data to the square kilometer.

This map shows more precisely the population density of the male population.

Mapping tools: ArcMap, Python script, LightScreen (for the screenshot), Photoshop (minimal editing of the screenshot)

This map shows all movements made by Swiss citizens questioned on their traveling practices in the “Mikrozensus zum Verkehrsverhalten 2005“. 33’390 people have been asked. The map includes trips made for the purpose of work, study, leisure and household matters.

Material infrastructures, like roads and railways, are shown too, in pink and red, but they are not the main point here, with the respect to the question of mobility. What really moves and, by moving, makes relations between places effective, are the travelers themselves. Places are primarily linked by those who move between them.

Recorded movement between any two places is shown in black transparent lines. Transparency is essential here, as overlapping generates darker regions, revealing main mobility network nodes.

Observations

The star-shaped nodes coincide with large cities, both sources and attractors of travel. The city of Luzern appears as one of the largest – surprisingly so, because it is relatively small in terms of residential population. Luzern is an important touristic attraction, though, which explains its centrality in terms of mobility.

Note also the coincidence, between actual movements, and the density of the transportation network (railroads and roads are shown in red and pink). Where they don’t coincide might be a sign of suboptimal – or subefficient – territorial planning. One might ask, for instance, whether it was really “necessary” to build the Lötschberg Base Tunnel… Analyzing mobility data from 2010 might at least tell us whether the construction of this link had any effect on the individual mobility structure.

Tools

Mapping tools: ArcMap, Python script, Illustrator.

Trick: transparency has been applied to straight lines to accentuate main nodes and to prevent rare connections from covering the picture.

Searching for an harmonious color scheme starting with a givent color? I recomend Petr Stanícek’s “Color scheme designer“.

Using a simple yet powerfull graphical interface, you can find complementary, triadic analogic and many other methods to any web color. Colors can be directly copied to your CSS.

I recommend combined use with ColorZilla Firefox plugin.