Census Data Show Immigrants Moving to the Suburbs

The New York Times had more maps on their cover today. This time they are mapping new residents to the U.S.  Oddly enough, immigrants (mapped from 2005 to 2009) seem to be moving to the suburbs rather then the cities or rural areas.

The map above shows the area where I live (Poughkeepsie NY). This is a dot density map by census tract showing a dot for each 50 persons by variable. As you move into the interactive map, the dot density numeration changes. Pretty nice.

Here is the link to the Time's interactive map. It's powered by Google Maps and uses socialexplorer.com.

If you click on More Maps you'll get to choose other variables (by tract for the U.S.) such as Race and Ethnicity, Income, Housing and Families, and Education.

Marine Protected Areas Web Map

Check out this web map called ProtectedPlanet. Giving a worldwide interactive map, you can search for marine protected areas anywhere. Search by place name or species type, or don't search at all and just browse the map. There are lot's of resources like planning documents for MPAs around the world. From the site:

"Be inspired by the most beautiful places on the planet. Explore the worlds national parks, wilderness areas and world heritage sites. Help us find and improve information on every protected area in the world. Protectedplanet.net lets you discover these incredible places through elegant mapping and intuitive searching. Protectedplanet.net wants you to contribute information about protected areas alongside national agencies and international organisations. Protectedplanet.net helps you understand what and where our natural resources are being conserved. If you are interested in analysing a global dataset on protected areas, you can download the data, today, here at protectedplanet.net."

This site is elegant. It's a wiki in that you can add new information, they use relevant Panoramio photos, you can modify the geometry and the text-based information, you can discuss. Above is a screen shot of the area near the Folkstone Marine Reserve on the west coast of Barbados. You can see the outline of the protected area, geolocated photos and information on what you'll find at the Marine Protected Area. I didn't expect there to be much for Barbados but I was wrong, and if Barbados has coverage, then I can imagine that many other places around the world will have the same and this could be the go-to site for up-to-date geoaware information on protected areas.

Thanks for the tweet, Elliot Hartley.

Mapping Gothic France

If your interests lie in mapping, digital humanities, and things Gothic, check out this web site: Mapping Gothic France. 

"With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France lets you explore parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions: Space, Time and Narrative"

There's a lot here, all related to France and cathedral architecture. The curators of the site have included georectified archival maps, an interactive timeline, loads of photographs (geolocated, of course) and cathedral footprints - like the ones above for Notre Dame and Cathedrale S-Etienne.

"Though today the shape of France is a well-known polygon (reaching northward up to its containing coastline, stretching southward to the Pyrenees), in the middle ages the French kingdom was not so cookie-cut. Imagine the history of France as a history of polygons, and you'll witness the kingdom's outward expansion. A disjointed set of Capetian pockets of land -- the holdings of Hugh Capet, founder of the dynasty -- slowly grow outward by fits and starts: feudal custom, marriage and warfare, celebrations and battles. Click "Begin" to watch that story."

 

This site came to my attention following the New York Times article on digital humanities projects. The author of the piece put out a call for other digital projects in the humanities, so go to the link if you want some additional interesting pages to check out. 

Then I got a comment on my blog post from Trinity College's Jack Dougherty talking about how folks at small liberal arts colleges can get these large-scale digital projects off the ground when they partner with larger institutions. Mapping Gothic France is a collaboration between Columbia University and Vassar College (props to my former colleague Matthew Slaats from Vassar!) and it seems a good model to follow. The results are amazing.

 

Nottingham Caves Survey Using LiDAR

Check out the Nottingham Caves web site and video with its remarkable use of LiDAR imagery. This from the web site:

"The Nottingham Caves Survey is in the process of recording all of Nottingham’s 450+ sandstone caves. The project is now underway and we are surveying caves even as you read this. Keep checking the website for newly-surveyed caves! You can read more about the caves, see photographs, watch fly-through videos and take virtual tours by clicking the links on the Cave Map below...."

Check out all three videos here.

Caption for image: Laser scanned orthographic plan of the Goose Gate caves, Nottingham. These caves include a medieval malt kiln, 18th-century brewery cellars and a 19th-century butchery. Credit: Trent & Peak Archaeology / The University of Nottingham.

Thanks to a tweet from Geoparadigm. Wow's the word, AC!

Digital Humanities - Or How Geospatial Technologies Creep Into the Liberal Arts

The New York Times had an article on digital humanities yesterday. Though it may not be a thrilling time for humanities-focused disciplines, it seems a thriving time for digital humanities with grant money flowing in and places like the George Mason Univ's Center for History and New Media in the news on a regular basis.

From the Times article by Patricia Cohen:"The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data."

And much of that digital humanistic data has space and time attached to it as many of the projects listed in Cohen's piece are geospatial in nature or scope. And that's why I'm thrilled with all the digital humanities interest. Check out the Thomas Jefferson project out of the Univ of Virginia. Of course, history, religion and language were affected by place, topography, landscape, weather. You know, mappeable variables. But (some) historians and the like are now mapping those variables to analyze for patterns.

"Some pioneering efforts began years ago, but most humanities professors remain unaware, uninterested or unconvinced that digital humanities has much to offer. Even historians, who have used databases before, have been slow to embrace the trend."

This I know all too well. I knew a professor interested in incorporating environmental and geospatial context in his Israel and Palestinian Authority course or one who wanted to map New York City neighborhoods from the 1920s to look at how demographics affected one writer's novels. The stumbling block for these and the many other professors - inside and outside the humanities - who wanted to investigate geospatial relationships but did not learn GIS while getting the PhD was taking the time to do/learn/keep up with/incorporate GIS into teaching and research which would only hurt those assistant professors when it came time for review for tenure. I lost them all that way. These digital humanities projects take a person devoted to the task of finding the hard copy materials, digitizing the information, interpreting the data along with colleagues, making those data presentable to a potentially non-academic audience. Large groups of professionals, some teaching and some not, at places like the CHNM or at the Univ of Virginia's Scholar's Lab are where these projects can take shape and make digital data come alive. 

One other aspect of this Times article that pleases me is the full mention, praise even, for GIS. They even spelled it out. I've had issues in the past with the Times writing stories with a geospatial angle and never mentioning the mapping that made the magic happen.

I found some of the inevitable Twitter back-chatter that followed the posting of the Times piece quite interesting. Here are two from Dan Cohen:

A) "7 stages of reaction to digital humanities: 1. Ignorance 2. Belittling 3. Denial 4. "Well, digital archives are useful" ... (1/2)"

and

B) "... 5. "Wait, how did you do that?" 6. "You mean it can complement our other ways of knowing?" 7. Acceptance. (2/2)"

and a followed from Tom Scheinfeldt: "@dancohen But what I'd most like to see is #8: "hey, let's work together."

Yep, that sounds about right. I don't think things are quite there yet, I mean at numbers 7 or 8 (see quote above), at small liberal arts colleges but we must be moving in the right direction.

Middlebury College Geography Majors Student Publication

Check out Middlebury Geographic. This beautiful student-produced publication out of Middlebury College's Geography department sets its sights on looking like National Geographic magazine and succeeds. With lovely photographs, interesting articles that span the world, and a slick on-line interface, Middlebury Geographic is a nice contribution to the world of travel magazines with the added attraction of including an occasional story that features GIS. The students use the self-publishing platform Issuu. Nice job!

Do Not Use Google Maps to Settle Border Disputes

Taking a close look at results in Google Maps, the Nicaraguan army has decided to lay claim to an island that has been a long-time holding of Costa Rica. I am not going to go into details here because the story broke on Friday and is well-documented by others (including Google). I do want to reiterate a quote from an excellent post by The Basement Geographer on why it is folly to use a web map service like Google Maps or Bing to settle border disputes.

"They are simply organisations that produce mapping products. It is up to the user to be aware of this. To be clear, both countries’ official maps claim the island falls on their side of the river; it’s just awfully silly to use a map from the Internet to justify a particular claim."

I will add that Google has never claimed accuracy in their mapping. How can they? Google sometimes uses content built with other map datums and road map geodata can be off by 1/2 kilometer. We find greatest accuracy in Google products in the U.S. and Europe but everywhere else, hold your nose and hope for the best. They have loads and loads of geodata for the entire world that they are displaying in Google Earth and Maps. How can these data align in any way that will allow for scientific (or military) accuracy? Google Maps, Bing and Google Earth can be used for display purposes, a generalized resource (think Wikipedia) and as a way to verify that some place exists relative to another place. Don't use Google Maps to 1) measure (with precision) the distance between two places, 2) quantify (with precision) an area of a region, or 3) claim a border. The internet is filled with lots of information, some true some not true. These web maps are the internet and they're to be used with a grain of salt.

Added 11/8/10: For a definitive discussion of this issue, please see Stefan Geens' post at Ogle Earth.

The image above is from the Google Lat-Long blog post about the Nicaragua/Costa Rica island dispute and depicts a map drawn in 1897. Yes, we still need these old, accurately drawn paper maps!

Think Again About Outsourcing the Academic Technologist

I was a geospatial instructional technologist at a college and, as you know, I was laid off from my last job. I worked with professors and students on teaching classes with GIS (or Google Earth or some other geospatial tools), creating teaching exercises and conducting geospatial research. Doing this type of co-curricular, teaching support at this college and writing papers and giving talks about that work with faculty members was exactly the reason I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship. I am a scholar and a teacher. I have argued that academic technologists should be considered an academic first and a technologist, well, further down than second and have come to the conclusion that we academic technologists should no longer be placed in the campus IT group. When we are placed in with the IT group someone in charge of the IT group may or may not know what it is that the academic technologist actually does, what our role is, what we bring to the college's learning environment, how we are useful in a unique way.

I am sure that for purely fiscally prudent reasons my position was eliminated. But because there still exists a thriving GIS program at my former college, there was still a need to support GIS work on campus so the college’s IT manager decided to outsource GIS. The individual works 10 hours a week and comes from a private environmental consulting company that specialize in Phase I and II environmental assessment, soil remediation projects and environmental impact statements and the like. I have it on good authority that this GIS support solution for my former institution is not working out so well. How could it? Cultivating relationships on a college campus takes years, not hours. They’re pretty unique place, college campuses. I am sure that someone from a consulting company can come into a GIS support position at a college campus and do "GIS projects" but do they understand what a professors wants to do with those projects? Are they aware of spatial literacy and the impact that using GIS and Google Earth can have on a history or poli sci class?  Do they know that, contrary to popular myth, students come at technology from all skill levels, mostly low to non-existent skills, and that using GIS software and teaching with it can be really challenging? Perhaps a consultant knows this intuitively but if this consultant has not taught a class before or worked directly with a faculty member to understand her or his learning goals, or worked with data other than environmental or engineering data, the fit will not work, at least not without some years of investment.  If that particular GIS consultant goes off to become a Project Manager for the firm, she or he will no longer do the "flunky" work of GIS support out at College X or University Y because that employee is much more valuable writing reports and working on bringing in more contracts for more and more projects.

To my GIS consultant friends out there...I am not saying any of this to damn you and your profession. You are awesome and you do great work. GIS consulting is a huge demand area (that’s why some schools want to teach with it!) and that demand is not waning in any way. I saw this email recently for a GIS position and thought I’d share it as an example of this type of GIS work:

"Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Coordinator. Working independently and under the general direction of the Technology Director, this position is responsible for the design, implementation, and general operational maintenance and promotion of the GIS system and its related databases and maps.  Position is responsible for regular updates to parcels, utility and basemap datalayers, annual production of tax maps, and updates to zoning, and other official maps as required.  Position fulfills map production requests from town departments, boards, and committees to support local initiatives and projects.
 
3-5 years of experience with municipal government, 4-6 years of experience utilizing ESRI's GIS products, and 1-3 years of experience with web based GIS applications. Must have a valid driver's license. Starting salary $61,077."

That’s not bad. I might even think about applying accept for the fact that I have never worked with “town departments and boards,” though I have had my share of working with plenty of (academic) committees. Well, my niche is an academic setting. I will probably just wait out the storm and work that niche.

The image above is a Creative Commons Flickr photo from Marjorie Lipan.

Map of Global Underwater Internet Cabling

Here's a nice web map - Greg's Cable Map - of internet cabling around the world. Zoom in and see the location where the cabling comes on land as well as the providers. It's interesting to see where you've been and where the internet access was sub-optimal (Belize, for instance) and see why.

This came to my attention via Bryan Alexander.

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Make Your Own (Different-looking) Web Maps

Sometimes you want a web map that looks just a bit different than the usual fare. Here is Polymaps:

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

Check them out. Polymaps provide the code for different and slick-looking maps.

I saw this on a tweet by Barbara Hui.

My Last Day of the My Fulbright

I had my last day of my Fulbright fellowship at CERMES and the University of the West Indies last Friday. I probably should have posted this earlier in the week but here it is. Short and sweet.

This year has been a gift to me. I have had a golden opportunity to spread my wings and take flight and I have had encouragement and a stable base to do so. Sure, I contributed some of my expertise to a few projects. But I gained so much more than I gave. Last Friday the department gave me a coffee, tea, and banana bread party send-off. It wasn't until a little later when I got in my car to drive home that I cried. I cried nearly the entire way home. What a joy to weep about missing a place that embraced me in such a short period of time.

The first project I worked on I did some final edits and additions. You may recall that work was a Google Earth project based on data from the Grenadines. Here is the MarSIS project site. Here is the project KML (will open in Google Earth). Take a look. It came out great, I think. But would love your feedback if the user experience is less than satisfying.

The second project was to organize the CERMES GIS data library. There were already some geodata up on the CERMES server but I just added some more data, organized by country and region, and set up a template for future data to be added. I hope this helps the students out. I'm not a librarian. I should try to go back and get an MLS degree if I really wanted to be an effective GIS consultant, but I don't think I have the time. I really do admire librarians, though.

This week has been spent packing and reflecting and filled with lasts...last full moon, last flying fish sandwich, last Magnum bar, last trip to Animal Flower Cave...our flight back home is Monday. Back to New York. Back to reality.

Worldwide Dengue Map

From the Google.org Blog, I heard about the Dengue Map. It's a Google Maps-based health map showing the locations around the world where there have been incidences of dengue. The maps was created by HealthMap and is a result of a Google.org grant. Dengue is on my mind because I'm living in Barbados where there is a worry about dengue, mosquitoes are everywhere, and according to this map Barbados is an area of ongoing transmission risk. I've heard that there's one child who got dengue, though I don't see that listed here as yet.  Wear your bug spray!

New York City Historical Map Search

From the new York Public Library, a great web map interface for searching for archival maps of New York City. Built using Open Street Map giving the page a nice, quick-drawing interface. As the image says, move around on the map or zoom in to a location, and the left side will update with available historical maps.

Thanks for tweet from @HASTAC and @epistemographer
 

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Migration Maps

Demonstrating with maps that the U.S. is a mobile country with mobile citizens, check out some screen captures of maps at Migration Maps: The Real Social Networks. Go to the interactive web site and map for yourself at Forbes. Click on a county and see black lines (inward migration) or red lines (those people fleeing the county). The map above shows migration patterns for Las Vegas (Clark Co.) Nevada with lot's of people moving there from the northeast and California and lots more moving out and going to the northwest and points south. The data are from the IRS from 2008. Isn't anyone moving OUT of the U.S.?

I heard about these interesting maps from GISeducation.

Mapping the #hackacad Contributors

I saw a tweet about a graph of Hacking the Academy contributors compiled by Adam Crymble. It was an interesting look at who submitted entries or papers or posts for the crowd-sourced book-in-a-week project. Hacking the Academy is a project out of the Center for History and New Media located at George Mason University. (tag: #hackacad) Tom Scheinfeld and Dan Cohen are heading it up. The graph that Adam assembled was heavily skewed towards GMU. I wanted to see if there was more geographic diversity amongst the contributors.

I asked Adam if he would share his data and, like any good open-source scholar, he did. I took his spreadsheet, added some more details to Adam's truly amazing detective work, found some addresses, added group blog entries and Profhacker posts by location of the writer. Then I used Batchgeocode to get latitude and longitude for each contributor which allowed me to create a map (in ArcGIS 9.2) showing where the contributions came from.

The map above shows small black dots for each essay or article. Most submissions are from North America and the northeast is heavily favored. With this approach you cannot tell that there are, for instance, 40 essays from GMU or that Canberra, Australia, has six entries since all of the points for one location align on top of each other. So I did a density map for the points.

Using a cluster analysis (shown above) on the points with density type: kernel; output cell size: 0.5; and search radius: 25 sq map units, I still get a similar view of the contributions, with some hint of action in the UK area.

I put together a Google Earth KMZ file for these data. Find it here (launches Google Earth).

What I want to do is make a map mashup so that all the points show up at once on a world map. I couldn't get it to work. If anyone knows how to add over 300 points (by latitude and longitude) to a web map, please help a mapper out!

I could make a mashup using BatchGeocode but 1) I couldn't get all the 314 points onto one single map, and 2) multiple entries for a single location show up as ONE entry. Here they are:

Link to larger map shown below (US Contributors)

Link to the larger map shown below (Non-US Contributors)

 

Thanks Adam! This was fun.

Academic technologists know how to use a computer: Does that mean theyshould be in the central computing group?

[A contribution to the Hacking the Academy crowd-sourced book project.]

We all know this. Change comes slow to higher education. Technology, on the flip side, is racing forward at bullet train speed. When combining higher education with computers, do we really want a train wreck? With the silos comprising a typical U.S. college campus, that may be what we are getting. Faculty members are in meetings with their professor colleagues. Librarians mingle and talk with other librarians. Then there is everyone else. It's time to shake things up.

I am an academic technologist. Academic technologists are those campus professionals that assist with the use of emerging technologies to sustain effective learning experiences. Sometimes called instructional technologists or educational technologists, we have varied backgrounds but our role is to collaborate with faculty members to create and design digital course content, or use high-end visualization software, or set-up relational databases, or video and audio editing tools, or script, or program digital games on mobile devices, or code, or build rich web sites, or set-up rigorous evaluative methods.  That’s the abbreviated list. Most academic technologists can work closely and collaboratively with busy professors and their students. In the U.S., academic technologists are typically placed within the central computing group on college campuses. Why is that? Admissions offices have their own technology specialists who know how to use spreadsheets and run MySQL queries to help in the recruiting effort. Development has its researchers who run data analyses all day with an eye towards fund raising for the college. There are probably exceptions, but of those educational technology specialists that I personally know of or Tweet with or meet at Educause meetings, most are positioned in the campus computing group. I think the reason is historical. I think the academic structure should be hacked.

The computing group is a vitally important part of higher education as it keeps the technology across the campus humming. Though far from an exhaustive list, the functions of central computing include: keeping the network operational, making sure the wireless is switched on, patching the Learning Management System so it’s always ready to go, pricing, purchasing and setting up office and lab computers, telephonics, removing viruses, and if the campus still hasn’t out-sourced email, verifying that it too is working all the time. It, I mean IT, functions as a utility. The computing group is that often invisible entity that is charging along at top speed. Fortunately, the educational technologist knows how to speak two languages, the language of network, systems, and administrative computing professionals and that of the faculty.

Historically, academic technologists were expected to work with a particular software, teach with it, and show faculty and students how to use it.  Maybe they also needed to run a full high-end computer lab.  Professors don’t normally do that nor do librarians. Because Deans hire professors and Heads of libraries hire librarians, there was no other logical place in the hierarchy to put an academic technologist than the computing group.

If you think about it, Google Earth has changed the way we teach with geospatial information, blogs have changed the personal essay, YouTube and podcasts changed course content and allowed for alternative modes of lecture delivery, wikis and Google Docs changed collaborative writing. We couldn’t do these things in this way with this much ease and this DIY ten years ago. Another example: how many campuses have underutilized dedicated video conference rooms? Skype and a web cam broke down the walls of the classroom and changed our communication options with the outside world. 

The rapid increase in technological advances influencing pedagogy have not just rested in the cloud with Web 2.0 technologies.  Laptops, tablet PCs, mobile phones, clickers, and virtualized computing have changed the face of computer labs, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation on campus. Any classroom is a potential lab. What’s next? What should we expect in the coming five years that might be the latest indispensable tool for teaching?

Who is going to keep an ear to the ground on these coming technologies? And figure out how to use them? Who will attend the unconferences or EduTech meetings or read the blogs? We want the answer to be “the professors!” because we want them to keep up with technology. But professors are expected to go to their disciplinary meetings, read journals and blogs related to their field, subscribe to lists that focus on their academic interests. And I agree they should.  All of that faculty professional development feeds right back into the courses. Besides, given a professor’s teaching load, service to the university, and a research agenda, where is the time to put into staying current technologically?  Does any of that time count towards tenure and review? That is where the educational technologist comes in, working closely with the professor to co-develop course content, produce digital scholarly objects, or teach about the utility of teaching with these emerging technologies.

If I had it my way, I would move the lone instructional technologist on campus or the educational technology group, whole cloth, into the academic dean’s office. Or the Library. Or the Learning and Teaching Center. Or into individual academic departments. You see where I am going? Educational technologists are academics, they should be considered as such and they should think of themselves as such. I would write the job description of the educational technologist to require an advanced degree. This is not to be elitist or exclusive. There’s already too much of that on our U.S. campuses. On the contrary, having been through the rigors of developing and finishing a thesis or dissertation makes the statement that the person filling the role of academic technologist can conduct original research, develop courses, write papers and give presentations, and quite possibly write and win grants. This person is a scholar. She or he could win a teaching position but has chosen to follow a different path, one that utilizes rare-in-the-academy technical skills used for the betterment of media-inflected co-curricular development and digital research. There is no need to provide "Project Management" training to this academic technologist because one’s advanced degree has clearly been a practical lesson in project implementation and follow-through. The model for this in the UK is one of calling these non-faculty technologist positions "research associates" or "analysts" as is the case at the King's College London.

North American faculty members may or may not see the educational technology specialist as a colleague, a comrade, or as Jim Groom put it, an "engaged participant in the transparent intellectual life of the university," but they never will when the academic technologist is sitting in with the central computing group. That gets me to another point. Since the system should be hacked and the educational technologists embedded with the academics, they should contribute to the mission of the college as an academic is expected to. They should go to faculty meetings and sit on committees. They should advise students. They should teach classes! I would go so far as to say they should have sabbaticals, but that might be stretching it.

Why should it matter whether or not an educational technologist is positioned with the computing group or sits with the faculty? The reasons are two-fold. First, in the interest of educating our students with needed 21st century skills, the educational technologist can fill the technology gaps found in the faculty ranks.  From the 2009 Horizon Report, "There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy" or what Gardner Campbell calls "Media Fluency," which is to say an understanding of computers as tools for thought.  As they earn their Ph.D.s, future and current professors aren’t necessarily trained in emerging technologies and how to teach effectively with them. It is in the best interest of developing media fluency for our students to integrate the educational technology professional alongside faculty members with the goal of co-curricular development and pedagogy. Second, review time. I think the people on campus that understand more closely what it is that the educational technologist does or should be doing - that is curriculum development, understanding teaching and learning goals, providing expertise instruction, consulting on the integration of media in pedagogy, conducting scholarship in education and research in one’s field - should be those providing the annual reviews.  That would be coming from the academic side of an institution. Typically hired as staff or administrators, educational technologists do not enjoy tenure and are usually not part of a union. Some are hired on soft money. Their reviews should come from those they work most closely with and are allied with and ideally the review won’t be skewed by a misunderstanding of what the role is of an educational technologist

I write while sitting in an office at the University of the West Indies in Barbados where I am fulfilling an 11-month Fulbright Scholarship. I am taking my own hard-won and honorable sabbatical. The department that I am affiliated with, the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies, sees me as an academic. The feeling of respect that I get here as I do the same things I was doing at my previous job, developing digital course materials, conducting research, writing grant proposals, showing people how to use new and emerging technologies in their teaching and research, writing papers with students and professors, is palpably different than the feeling I got in the computing group I was in back home. I was an anomaly there; I am a scholar here.

As I said, change comes slow to the academy. What I've presented here is a suggestion, a hack to the system, that may infuriate some of my educational technologist colleagues across the country. I may anger the faculty members who read this, those who are not technology averse. I may hear "How dare you!" The point I hope to make is: the system for educational technology on most U.S. campuses is disconnected from the real work that could be going on in bridging teaching and learning with the possibilities that exist in alternative pedagogical technologies. Maybe we need a committee to investigate...

Creative Commons photos above:"Old School " by Caro's Lines and "Teaching about Wikis" by the author.

U.K. Election Results Shown in MapTube

I saw some great choropleth maps of the U.K. election results shown using MapTube from a blog post at the CASA blog. What is shown above are the results for the Liberal Democrat vote and the Conservative vote, with a degree of transparency for each. Use the small slider bar under the map icon to the right to increase or decrease the transparency. You can drag and drop the maps, too. It's a very slick interface.

I haven't used MapTube at all but it is one of the better web map interfaces. You can see what maps they already have, download as a KML, or upload your own maps using GMapCreator software. All maps come with legends, some legends are better than others. CASA is the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis out of the University College London.

More Horrific Graphics on the BP Oil Catastrophe: From the New York Times

The incredible graphics depicting the worst oil drilling catastrophe in history keep coming. The New York Times has this amazing graphic on line. Use the Play button at the top to see how the oil is getting dispersed through time. They will probably continue to update the map. Notice there's habitat information on the map, and on the right side of the graphic, estimates of the volume as compared to our most recent "worst oil spill ever," the Exxon-Valdez.  Though the Times calls this an "oil spill," it is hardly a spill or a leak. Those words, to me, imply a minor mistake, an unfortunate mishap. This is so beyond "ooops, we're really sorry."

More on LiDAR: Uncovering Earth Without a Backhoe

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Two days in a row, the New York Times has run stories related to geospatial technologies, in particular LiDAR. The laser mapping technology must be hot or something. Two archaeologists who have worked in Belize for years mapping and excavating Maya ruins sites, stumbled upon a non-invasive technology to cut through forest and discover how the ancient civilization in Belize lived, built their cities, grew crops, and probably how they used water. Not only does the use of LiDAR save loads of time but it means ground doesn't have to be broken to get a picture of the past society. Be sure to check out the imagery of the mapping.

When I was in Belize for the Natural Resources Management class in March, we went to a Maya site, Xunantunich. After seeing the structural shape and the surrounding terrain (shown in the photo above and the video), and the fact that not all buildings were excavated, when traveling around Belize on the rest of the trip, these pyramid-shaped structures were clearly visible in many places. They were just not uncovered. With this remote sensing, they don't really need to be, it seems.

LiDAR Imagery for NYC

In an effort to be prepared for the affects of climate change, New York City is getting a LIDAR scan. LiDAR is Light Detection and Ranging technology. This will help with figuring out the best locations for solar panels and to analyze for impending sea-level rise, among other concerns. The article in yesterday's New York Times make it sound like this is the first of its kind in the Big Apple. However, after September 11 LIDAR was collected by NOAA and used for cleanup efforts. Couldn't that data still be used?

I can think of a few small island nations here in the Caribbean who could use some LiDAR data. These low-lying coastal countries are extremely vulnerable to climate changes and fluctuations.

Thanks for the tweet, NYS_GISA.

Putting the Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico Into Geographic Perspective

If you want further evidence of just how big the oil catastrophe is in the Gulf of Mexico (I refuse to call it a "spill"), take a look at this amazing visualization using a Google Earth API created by Paul Radacher called "How big is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?"  Click on each of the cities to get a perspective of the area involved. Imagine oil covering all of the Washington DC, flowing south into the Potomac and spreading all the way into Delaware. Incomprehensible! Type in your town, and see what you see. The spill covers all of my home county in New York and each of the adjacent counties.

Thanks for the tweet, ogleearth.

Historical GIS Datasets at AAG

If you are interested in combining geography and history, I heard about a rich resource for historical geodata, projects, digital atlases, and forums. The Historical GIS Clearinghouse and Forum provides a long list of links to data sources and other projects is compiled at the Association of American Geographers, by the Historical Specialty Group. From the site:

"The Historical GIS Clearinghouse and Forum provides a central reference point for scholars seeking to access or catalogue projects that apply geographic technologies to historical research. Visitors are encouraged to explore--and contribute to--the resources on these pages."

Thanks for the tweet from Brett Bobley.

New Geospatial Technology Blog: Moved the Old Blog Here

As of January 1, I was laid off from my geospatial technology support position at Vassar College. I started the GIS at Vassar blog for myself, so that I could do my job better, to keep track of links to useful web sites, to remember Google Earth KML network links useful for teaching, to answer questions that faculty and students had around the college, and to remember projects that I found valuable. Over the three and a half years of running this blog (I started it in September 2006), I've had an average of about 50 page views a day. And though I really slowed down on my posting while I've been doing my Fulbright, I still get visitors. So the GIS at Vassar blog and the old posts will stay right where it is on Blogger, but I will no longer add new posts to it. I will start more posting to this new blog called Geospatial Technologies in Education that I set up on Posterous. I migrated all the old posts here but will keep adding new material. Please follow me here.

And if you're in the market for an educational and geospatial technology professional with skills in ArcGIS, Google Earth, field technologies like tablet PCs and GPS receivers, and spatial literacy, I'm available... stewart (dot) meg (at) gmail (dot) com

Final Map For Grenadines MarSIS Project: Some of the Details

I have finished up my Google Earth project for the Grenadines. If I didn't have grant proposals, papers, job searches and interviews, and other mundane tasks like that, I would have completed this project in about four weeks. That's the way it goes sometimes.

Here is the link to the Grenadines MarSIS geodata KMZ for your viewing pleasure. The link will launch Google Earth.

I also created (thanks to Valery Hronusov) a KMZ of a nautical chart for the Grenadines. Check it out. It’s big, about 10MB.

And check out the video that describes what’s in the file and explains how to make sense of the many layers of data.

After the first draft of this KMZ, I ran a post that gave a little how-did-I-do-it synopsis. Now I will discuss what the final issues were and how I resolved them.

The original database I was handed was compiled as an ESRI geodatabase. I'll admit it, I have been slow to the geodatabase lifestyle. When I exported shapefiles in my first draft, I had lots of '1's and '2's that looked like this: Island= 1. What I needed to do was export feature classes to a shapefile. I had to switch all the ‘1’s to equal the proper designation that the researcher applied back when the database was built. So now the file shows Island = Mayreau. It was a bear, I must say. But it made it so that the KMZ placemarks contained the information that the original layer contained. It had to be done.

I had to use an HTML editor. I don’t think I mentioned this in my other post, but it is required. That little HTML class I took back in 1996 at the community college still comes in handy. I used HTML-Kit. It is free and works like a charm.

The MarSIS logo used to not stay static. It would stretch and squish when the Google Earth window was resized. I used this helpful site that gave me the code to help me created the screen overlay for the MarSIS logo. This interactive KML code site is superb as it gives you the code to work up in your HTML editor.

I got the snippets, those extra lines of text under the folder or placemark (circled above), to go away. That was done with the HTML editor. Use this snippet code

after the folder or placemark name tag. Find the snippet code discussion here.

I added a legend for the habitats, both shallow water and deep water, using Adobe Illustrator and then creating a screen overlay, see above, with that raster but this time hard-wired to the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

I mentioned in another post that I had fabulous success with SuperOverlay. It bears repeating. I had a large raster file map that I wanted to bring into the project. SuperOverlay was the way to go because it automated the process of slicing up the map to create a smaller KMZ. It was still 10MB so we did not include it with the project KMZ.

Lastly, I had about 200 photographs and 200 videos with geolocations by latitude and longitude to include in the KMZ. Google Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0 made geolocating photos a breeze. Video are a different story. The first draft of the project had a simple screen capture taken from each of the 200 videos that I used as a placeholder until I uploaded each of the videos to a place. That place was YouTube, naturally. The problem is, Spreadsheet Mapper does not take video embed codes, unfortunately. What I did was meticulously copied each video’s embed code as the video finished being uploaded, saved those codes to MS Excel (could have used Google Docs but didn’t), then modified the original previously geolocated placemarks with screen captures that I had created in Spreadsheet Mapper. I erased out the tag for the image and copied in the embed code for the video. It worked very well. All of this was NOT a big deal and I spend more time dreading doing it than I needed to. In retrospect, using the Spreadsheet Mapper to geolocate the video locations was very useful for quickly and accurately finding where the videos belonged in the world.

And now I am done and popping some sparkling wine. On to the next project...organizing the CERMES department's GIS data library. Cheers!

Mashup image above uses a Creative Commons photo from titanium22’s photostream.

Talk on Tablet PCs in Field Classes and Research

Taking Technology in the Field: Data Collection and Mapping on a Tablet PC

View more presentations from Meg Stewart.

I was invited to give a talk this afternoon as part of the CERMES brown bag lecture series. It was nice to show marine-based people the use of a tablet PC, where all of my examples are terrestrial. Their wheels were turning. Here are my slides; I linked to videos during the talk so check those out too.

Google Earth Tutorial for the Grenadines Project

The Grenadines MarSIS project web page now links out the the KMZ file that I've been working on. Find it here. You can also get the nautical chart. We made a video to help folks navigate the many layers of geo-data. I think it might help since there are a lot of layers to keep track of.

Using Superoverlay for Your Google Earth Project

You know those times that you have a large scanned map of your field area or project site and you want to use Image Overlay to add the map to a Google Earth project? If you want the file size to remain small and portable, you need to re-sample the map and lose all your useful information, or you can try to keep the map as the original file size and then you have an enormous KML to share. What to do? Use Superoverlay!

Superoverlay, developed by Valery Haronusov, has been around as long as I've been dabbling in Google Earth, I just never gave it a try. Until now.

I've been working on a Google Earth project based in the Grenadines. One of the files that I needed to add to the project folder is a nautical chart (shown above) that in digital form is a 110 MB file. It would be too unwieldy - both geographically and in digital file size - to try and do an Image Overlay for this file so I needed to make it smaller and so used Superoverlay. Superoverlay cuts up the raster file into rectangular chunks and creates smaller raster tiles. This makes it so that when you zoom in, the tiles that draw are more clear and have the nice resolution that you want maintained. You can do this by hand. But why?

I followed the Superoverlay instructions, which are great. Because the chart was in UTM, I needed to re-project to the WGS84 coordinate system. Superoverlay uses the world file (i.e., *.jpx, or *.tfw) for spatial reference. The spatial reference is read directly from the world file. The output I got for the KMZ file of the nautical map was 10.5 MB.

There was one slight problem. The nautical chart looked great but I have other files in my project that need to draw over the chart, and the chart was not drawing on the bottom. This had something to do with the DrawOrder tag. I contacted Valery to see how this could be fixed and he found this ordering issue to be a bug and he fixed it!

If you want your Superoverlay map to draw under your other files, use a negative number in the Start draw order box (circled in green above). I found that -20 gave me the order that I was looking for. By the way, it may seem like you can just reorder your KML files in the folder and place the Superoverlay map at the bottom and then this problem is fixed (like in ArcGIS). It doesn't work that way in Google Earth, unfortunately.

Shown above is the mapping of the shallow marine habitat near Mayreau and Union islands with the nautical chart layered underneath. Just the way I wanted it.

If you're interested in GTOPO30 maps for the world (shown below), one has been created by Valery using Superoverlay. Click here to find it.

This is how to make the file shown above. So, if you have super huge raster datasets, what do you do? Use online storage. Here is some useful information from Valery on the process of these larger Superoverlay projects:

"I use Dropbox and Amazon S3 storage for tiles. For huge rasters I use Global Mapper + Superoverlay or KML2KML. Global Mapper makes large tiles (2048 x 2048) from huge and Superoverlay makes small tiles (256 x 256) from large. And with the last one, we can copy to cloud web storage (S3) an absolute "authoring" independent low cost solution. I use Cloudberry as an Amazon S3 explorer."

Thanks, Valery! This is all great stuff and so helpful.

Weighing In: Like Everyone Else, I've Got Something to Say About the iPad

The big news this past week was Steve Jobs' throwing the coverlet off of Apple's long-awaited iPad. Though it has long been rumored that Apple would make a tablet PC, none had materialized. The wait continues. Touted as a 'tablet PC,' the iPad is not that. The fever surrounding the launch of the yet-unnamed-Apple-tablet was incredible. Then once it hit the streets, everyone and her auntie had gushy words for it. On Twitter, #iPad was number one with a bullet all week, even in the face of people still buried under rubble in Haiti and the President giving his first State of the Union address. It's still a Trending Topic today. It's weird. Even my favorite political podcast at Slate, last week, couldn't resist weighing in on the iPad. Why? I really don't get all the fuss as yet. Another favorite podcast of mine, Digital Campus, seemed to think that the iPad would be awesome for archaeology or geology students because those students would have all this internet information at the their fingertips when they're out on their digs. What?! Field researchers need data collection tools (like a tablet PC) when they're out there in the muddy and the dusty and the boggy. Maybe I'm missing the point.

This line from Steve Jobs' announcement demo doesn't help give me any more clarity: "It’s phenomenal to hold the Internet in your hands." Umm, I'm using a netbook /Blackberry/iPhone /tablet PC right now and I'm actually holding the Internet in my hands. Weird.

Look, I want more choice in hand-held devices just as much as the next guy. But what the 1st Gen iPad seems to be is a large iTouch. Maybe before the 2nd Gen iPad comes out, Apple will listen to all the howling cries of ...So What!...*yawn*...Big Deal!...and actually add some functionality to the pretty little thing. Or it could just remain a Kindle alternative. That's fine with me, except for the fact that I don't really read books anymore. I listen to them on my iPOD!

Dear Apple, If you really want to make a killer tablet PC, make it so that I can do Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator using the tablet's pen, I don't want to use a Wacom tablet because I think your new iPad would deem them obsolete. While you're at it, give me some GPS location-based ability. Didn't you hear that everything these days is really GEO-everything? In an ideal world, I could actually make maps on an iPad using a GIS software and make drawings using something like AutoCAD, but I digress. But for goodness sake, I want to make phone calls, make videos, shoot photographs, record a podcast. Awesome price on these little 1.5 lb babies, by the way. Don't change that, alright? Alright.

And all you fans and rushers-out-to-get-the-new-<wbr>iPad take note. You will be sad for not waiting. Apple does this to all of us and here is my story. Before leaving for Barbados for the Fulbright, I bought my two children an iPod Nano each. I was thinking ahead and purchased them early. Well, these slick Nanos were still in their slick Apple boxes when I happened to see an Apple commercial claiming that the new Nano can take video! If only I had waited my kids could have been the next James Cameron or Kathryn Bigelow.

So, for the Apple iPad, take my advice: wait. And as for the unfortunate name...look at 'Google'?

Google Earth Workshops Given in St. Vincent and the Grenadines

While traveling to St. Vincent, Grenada and Union Island this past November, I took some video of our workshops and the intervening travel between workshops. Kim Baldwin, PhD student at CERMES, and I were there to talk about her MarSIS marine mapping project and show how to view the geodata in Google Earth. I only just now was able to get to finishing up editing the video from our trip. I blogged about the workshops on my other blog, if you're more of a reader than a viewer of video.