MapBrief™

End-of-year summaries and next-year predictions are the web’s way of helping you pass time during the most unproductive work week on the calendar. Or save you from continued contrived conversation among those with whom you share little except a similar genetic imprint. Rather than go the solipsistic blogger route and explain why The Decemberists put out the best album or that Incendies was my movie of the year, I’ve chosen a tack in which I’m more heavily invested. For “hotness” here refers not to PR buzz but tools that can solve both my clients’ current problems and their soon-to-be problems.

The next great GIS isn’t a “GIS”–but rather the statistical package R.  It’s the nexus where modelling, statistics, and graphics meet.  An open-source project with a large community and big developer momentum, there’s a critical mass of know-how such that you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a quantitative challenge that hasn’t already been tackled by the R community.  For mapping, the obvious starting point is the maptools package, but there are also hooks to familiar tools such as GDAL (RGDAL) and PostGIS, as well as the recently released GUI DeducerSpatial.

Let’s be clear, it isn’t about trying to replace your trusty GIS with statistical software. It’s about acquiring a more robust quantitative toolset to wrestle with a multi-variate world. Statistical clustering (spatial and non-spatial), principal components, multi-dimensional scaling, etc. will all be go-to techniques in a world that can no longer be explained by a single variable displayed on a map.  We all laugh at “red-dot fever” where lazy analysts overwhelm a map by displaying every coffeeshop, every bank, every whatever, creating visual confusion instead of anything approaching meaning. But the crashing of the tides of “Big Data”, the “sensor web”, and the “Internet of Things” upon our shores is imminent, and wrestling with those datasets with advanced statistical techniques will be the prerequisite for making meaningful maps.  A small taste of what’s possible in R is one of this year’s most compelling maps:  the Facebook map.

A lot of mapping shops will be scratching their collective heads this year figuring out how to serve a public that uses everything from Internet Explorer 6 to the iPad, as well as your preferred smartphone. With the mobile web leaving the worlds of Flash and Silverlight behind, where to turn for interactive vectors in the browser. Why not plunge into the future and go pure HTML5/SVG? Because the mapping community, with the large presence of government agencies at all levels has a disproportionately high use of older versions of Internet Explorer. Recent stats from ESRI suggest that visitors to ESRI.com use IE 6-8 at a rate roughly double that of the overall web user population.

Raphael is a javascript library that bridges the gap by rendering vectors natively as VML in Internet Explorer 6-8, and as SVG in the newer web browsers. Hence you get “live vectors”: rollovers, tool tips, click events, etc. without requiring plugins such as Silverlight or Flash.  Of course, rendering tens of thousands of vertices won’t go so well in older browsers, but for everyday thematic maps, such as this example of US States, it is perfectly serviceable. With 2012 being a Presidential election year in the US, expect many news organizations to move away from Flash to Raphael for their choropleth-ing of results.

Some of the most innovative work of 2011 came from Washington DC-based Development Seed. First, their open source TileMill cartographic studio is a much-needed tool that enables the making of visually compelling maps without GIS. This is a huge boon to the geospatial sector where too many of us, present company included, have been all too content to crank out always utilitarian, sometimes ugly, maps for our clients. Better still, the styling specifications use the CSS-inspired Carto language, making for easy re-use and sharing of styles.

And that’s not all. Using the very clever UTF grid approach, maps created with TileMill and served up via TileStream (also open source), feature interactivity that is also cross-browser–from Internet Explorer 6 to the iPad.  And because the interactivity is pixel-based, it can handle many, many thousands of features without killing your browser.

The coup de grace is the MapBox iPad app. All your great cartography created in TileMill with the full experience available in disconnected settings. In important ways, I see the iPad (and, hopefully, future tablets that can match the user experience) as a great second chance for mapping on the web. Because the first time around we as an industry failed our users by insisting on a desktop-GIS-inside-the-browser metaphor that was utterly foreign to anyone except fellow professionals. I’d love to see the default standard be a well-designed, informative basemap plus once “clickable” layer: enough information for 85% of your users without introducing the confusion of dozens of layers (tucked within layer “groups”!). And my observation tells me that there’s an intimacy users have with their iPad that is very different that their relationship to their desktop machines. Simple to use, informative, and aesthetically thoughtful is the big win here.

So the excitement about these new tools and capabilities would naturally lead to a conclusion that “it’s never been a more exciting time to be in geospatial.” But there’s also an underlying lesson in highlighting projects that don’t come out of the traditional group of GIS vendors: geospatial is attracting significant outside attention and people are getting things done using tools and methods that are unfamiliar to many industry veterans. Combine that with the contraction of the public sector that is a huge component of GIS employment, and the more sober conclusion is that our little niche traditionally off-to-the-side is more mainstream and much more competitive. So think about and spend time with some of these new technologies not for the “cool” factor, but to ensure the continued relevance of your skill set.

—Brian Timoney

“Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You’d be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts.”

–Father Paulus confesses to Nick Shay in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, pt V, ch 3

 

Or, alternatively, looking out your window and cataloging what you see.

I started this blog invoking Halford Mackinder, discussing his evangelization efforts on behalf of an analytically robust Geography that would no make apologies for standing astride the physical sciences and the liberal arts. However being neither-fish-nor-fowl has not served Geography well as it has been found ill-suited for both the abstraction-heavy model of education imported from aristocratic Europe  as well as the hyper-specialization of academia. In one of those ironies in which the Internet excels, geographic reasoning has its own platform on one of the web’s most popular blogs.

 

    Locating window views brings out everyone's Inner Geographer

Blogging politics, religion, and pop culture, Andrew Sullivan began posting reader photos of the view from their window as a mere diversion, which led to a book , which in turn led to a “where in the world” contest to give away copies of the book.   And people got into the contest.

Way into it.

And a much-anticipated ongoing weekly ritual was born.

Architecture, landscape analysis, license plate styles, and sun angles are all grabbed in an effort to piece to together the riddle of Where.  The best part are the excerpts of user submissions and their line of geographical reasoning.  And boy can that reasoning be wildly off-base.  Take this scene:  people forthrightly place it continents away. At the other end of the spectrum are the Google Maps commandos who are 3-letter-acronym levels of scary in their ability to track down exact buildings and windows using familiar consumer mapping platforms. (Ed. note: author has only guessed correctly once, a scene from Cartagena, Colombia).

But what makes it particularly fun are the personal stories people share that are attached to their memories of place, accurate and otherwise: Geography as a trigger of memory and the sharp edges of lived experience too easily dulled by the passage of time. While there is indeed an intellectual rigor to piecing the clues together, the peculiar connection of location with emotion–which we all feel intuitively–is less categorizable but no less powerful, terrain navigated by few but most compellingly by Yi Fu Tuan.

At the risk of killing your productivity for the next couple of hours, here is a link to the Google Search page for past View From Your Window contests.

Returning to DeLillo, let’s give Father Paulus the last word:

“Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it,” he said.

“Quotidian.”

“An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

 

 
—Brian Timoney

This week many of us in the geospatial community have been deeply troubled by news that our colleague Atanas Entchev, along with his wife and son, have been detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a for-profit “Community Education Center” (read: prison) in Newark, New Jersey.  Prominent in the online world with his blog, articles in professional publications, and reliably droll tweets, I enjoyed meeting up with him when on the East Coast for wide-ranging conversation over lunch, comparing notes on the life of freelance GIS consultant.  Among others, John Reiser, James Fee, Adena Schutzberg, and Bill Dollins have helped spread the word about Atanas’ plight and the support fund set up for his family.

It's a lot of things, but certainly not "justice": US Government is spending your tax dollars to deport law-abiding immigrant entrepreneurs in order to meet internal quotas.

A native of Bulgaria, Atanas came to the US in 1991 in the wake of the turmoil in Eastern Europe following the disintegration of the Iron Curtain, etc.  The winding road of the 20-year legal saga can be found here. To a layman, it reads as a story of differing interpretations of perceived threat in a chaotic political climate and a litany of motions, counter-motions, and paperwork deadlines.  Amid these gray areas of interpretation, there is no accusation of any type of criminal behavior on the part of Atanas or his family members during their 20-year stay here. Given that Atanas became firmly established professionally and his family lived the life of the educated middle-class, the question of “why deportation now?” lingers.

By coincidence, Frontline this week is broadcasting a feature, ‘Lost in Detention’, outlining the increasingly aggressive measures to deport immigrants.  The key clip begins at the 17-minute mark outlining the arbitrary goal of 400,000 deportations, including “Non-criminal removals”. So like school test scores and police CompStat metrics, deportation goals seemingly have unleashed their own set of nasty counter-productive consequences.  And is it any wonder in our time of federal budget cutbacks that agencies re-double efforts to protect their slice of the pie, invoking “security” whenever possible?  Further, with an election year coming up, neither party wants to be seen as anything but tough on immigration, happily playing on the fears of economically downtrodden voters.

But here’s the funny thing about immigration:  economically, it’s a net positive.  And when you’re talking educated professionals fluent in the language with an entrepreneurial bent it’s utterly self-defeating to turn them away. In our time of expending trillions in the hopes of stimulating the economy, that the inarguable financial benefits of immigration can’t be acknowledged speaks volumes either of the ignorance or moral cowardice of the political class.  Hell, even Tom Friedman gets it.

Having little faith in the efficacy of appealing to the better nature of politicians, I would nonetheless urge you to, in addition to the methods of support listed above, drop a line to Atanas’ Senate and Congressional representatives asking why taxpayer money is being wasted on imprisoning a non-criminal immigrant entrepreneur and his family members–

                     Congressman Frank Pallone (Atanas’ office is in his district)
                     Senator Frank Lautenberg
                     Senator Robert Menendez

 
Like so many whose formative years were spent elsewhere, Atanas is notably well-mannered: I’m utterly confident that whatever effort you can expend on his behalf would earn a lifetime of gratitude.

—Brian Timoney