
Monday, April 26, 2010
State of the Art: Blogging on Maps

Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Mapping Games
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Recreation and Space Representation in New England

Looking at specific recreation guides for New England, such as one guide I have that details the recreation in Western Maine, I have noticed similarities in the way that recreation and space is represented. The theme of most recreation maps for New England centers around nature and the outdoors. Many of the recreation guides include activities such as kayaking, mountain climbing, hiking, sightseeing, etc. New England has is unique in that it has some of the most beautiful and lively landscapes in the country. For example, the fall foliage, cranberry bogs, and landscapes of New England are unique and cannot be found in other parts of the country.
The wealth of history of New England, going all the way from the Pilgrims landing in 1620, attracts many tourists from all over the country as well. Many of the sightseeing and museums are devoted to experiencing the history that was written in the area, such as covered bridges, which are extremely popular and mentioned in many recreation guides.
Overall, I think the “charm of New England” is the combination of the landscapes, history, and wealth of recreational activities available in the area.
MassGIS.gov provides an interesting recreation map for Massachusetts here,
Sunday, March 28, 2010
The Tale of 3 Granvilles
Granville, MA is a community of 1,521 people whose main ancestry is Irish, English, Polish and German. However, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Granville, MA is a very small rural town with a couple of major arteries running through it. It definitely doesn't appear as successful as the Granville created in Ohio by its former residents.
The Granville in Iowa has no history with either of the other two. With only 325 citizens, it also doesn't compare on an economic and prosperity level. In fact, Granville, Iowa has the lowest median income of $33,000. However, an interesting similarity between the Iowan Granville and the Ohioan Granville is the German ancestry. The Ohio Granville has a German ancestry of 22% and the Iowa Granville has a major German ancestry of 51%! Granville, Iowa is obviously a farming community and is probably the occupation of most of the citizens.


Sunday, March 21, 2010
Mapping the News
However, mapping the news does not just have to be limited to the linear “showing the location of something” formula. Marcos Weskamp,
a design engineer specializing in information visuali
zation, has created a remarkable program to map the news.
It is best understood in his own words,
“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the
aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”
Needless to say, this is an amazing piece of technology that is very interesting to use. The program runs in your browser and can be found at this url, http://newsmap.jp/
Give it a try! I spend quite a while looking at both national and international news and came across some very interesting articles.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Mapping the V&T Railroad
Nevertheless, these maps show several interesting geographical features that occured almost 90 years later.
Here are the results:
The Impact of Weather on the Geography of the Planet


