mapping – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: mapping

September 18, 2012 – 6:00 pm

“a map for what?”

Shannon Mattern, writing “about material networks that span continents… and the strategies we devise to comprehend their scale and composition”: What is the “aftermath” of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to “make visible the invisible” and thereby “raise awareness” are far too often regarded as ends […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure, meta | Also tagged | Comments (1) | Permalink
June 4, 2011 – 6:00 am

“winds of drought, winds of flood”

[A NASA visualization of the 1993 summer wind patterns that caused that year’s Mississippi floods: “The arrows indicate wind trajectories, while color indicates wind height. The length of a line equates to wind speed (stronger winds get longer lines). Black arrows trace the low-altitude winds that carry moisture, the winds most relevant to the 1988 […]

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May 2, 2011 – 9:32 pm

predictive gis and geospatial intelligence

A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software […]

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July 7, 2010 – 8:00 pm

sid meier and peter cook

Serial Consign has posted an excellent short essay on the overlap between representations of cities in video games and representations of cities in architecture: Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural […]

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November 18, 2009 – 12:16 pm

pueraria lobata

A couple months ago, The Dirt highlighted an article from the Times about Alabama’s “War on Cogongrass”, in which Alabama’s forestry commission and a hired company of landscape managers, Mobile’s Larson & McGowin, deploy a series of escalating military metaphors (“killer”, “the Perfect Weed”, “war project”, “parallel attacks”, “eradicate”) against that rather aggressive species. Angela […]

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September 28, 2009 – 7:53 pm

not purely mathematical constructions

[Sensors lining the coast of Monterrey Bay, measuring surface currents] A NYTimes article reports on the increasing interest of scientists in “Lagrangian coherent structures”, physical constructs within liquid and gaseous flows which are essentially invisible to unaided eye, but revealed and mapped with the aid of networks of sensors and pattern-discerning algorithms: The concept of […]

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