Mapping Hacks

Reality is what the maps tell us, whether or not that reflects reality on the ground.
In Ireland it is now illegal for the Ordnance Survey to use
English names on maps of certain areas.

The question of what a place should be called brings forth issues of control and domination, freedom and self determination, throwing off the […]

The Feature has an article written by Michael Sharon for Douglas Rushkoff on
collaborative
cartography, featuring Mapping Hacks.

“Everything that people do has a geospatial component. We do everything
somewhere. Even thinking,” says Rich Gibson, self-taught computer geek and
co-author, along with Schuyler Erle and Jo Walsh, of O’Reilly’s forthcoming
book Mapping Hacks, who believes that allowing normal people to
manage, present […]

Some explorations of the Straits of Gibraltar at a recent “tactical media”
workshop in Ljubljana yielded some insights into using GRASS to marshal geodata
for 3-D terrain modelling. The first image is a false color composite of
Tangier, Morocco, and the second is a true color composite. The third is a
rendered 3-D animation (about 600k) of the Straits […]

When Jo and I did an IRC interview with New Scientist reporter Will Knight,
little did we know that his piece, entitled "The New Pioneers of Map
Making," would come out so… lyrical sounding:

ARMED with a Global Positioning System receiver and a pair of itchy feet, Jo Walsh walks a different route around town each week. She […]

The following is an except of an email exchange between me, Jo, Rich, and
Tyler. Rich’s response to Tyler’s question was so good that I just had to post
it here.

> You know we are different breeds though, right? You guys
talk ‘location’, I talk ‘GIS’ - is that fair to say?
At one level, thinking ‘locative’ means […]

Mapping Hacks tech reviewer and all-around GIS hacker Tyler
Mitchell (aka spatialguru) has been working on his own book for O’Reilly,
entitled Web Mapping Illustrated, which will provide a more
traditional O’Reilly-style intro to basic Open Source GIS tools like GDAL and
MapServer. You can peruse some of Tyler’s topical musings on the subject of
GIS and mapping on his […]

ORA conference organizer and professional schmoozer Nat Torkington
recently posted an insightful blog entry on O’Reilly Net proclaiming 2005
as the Year of Local
Mobile Search. However, his article reads as a litany about why 2005
won’t be the year of mobile search.
Read the rest of this post…

Mapping Hacks contributor Anselm
points us to a web page describing how a number of role-playing game
enthusiasts have built a system for showing
tactical maps of gameplay on a table top via an overhead projector. Seems
like a pretty nice and inexpensive setup, and makes you wonder if this might
have other - dare I say? - more practical […]

Bill Fry is at MIT, and has a page on Genomic Cartograrphy.

There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are undergoing continous change. My research focuses on developing approaches to such data, in particular, the human […]

This press release, reposted to the EGIP list, made me yelp:
Ordnance Survey lobbies MEPs over INSPIRE wording
Tho it doesn’t mention the proposed INSPIRE directive by name, it illustrates the semi-privatised UK National Mapping Agency’s commercial obsession and greedy monopoly fairly clearly:

“We need to remove any ambiguity in the wording, as it would be a disaster […]