Isaac Griberg
Social Media Jedi at the ICRC. Likes diving, photography, flea markets, post-apocalyptic films and bacon.Connect
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Digital cartography tools
People have created maps since early civilization, but only recently have digital mapping tools like Google Earth and Maps made it easy to build interactive maps that can be disseminated online. Here’s a sleek promo for the two.
If you’re sick of Google, there are options. Founded in 2004, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a community of more than 150,000 volunteers dedicated to building a free editable map of the world.
OSM popped up on my radar in January 2010 when volunteers galvanized at the onset of the earthquake to scan existing geo-spatial data on Haiti, from old atlases and maps, to satellite imagery declassified by the government.
By tracing roads, bridges, and buildings, the community turned a blank spot on the map into one of the most accurately mapped countries in the world. Each ‘flash’ in this video represents an edit to OSM’s map of Haiti.
On the back-end, OSM feels like an hybrid of Wikipedia and Photoshop. While its web interface is clunky, there’s an excellent Java-based software to download. Below is a screengrab of the Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM).
To edit a waypoint, or perhaps add information about a local hospital, I simply drag-and-drop or use the toolbar on the left-hand side. Let me show you how it works by adding some data to a less known island on the Swedish west coast.
Taking on the Facebook Timeline
On March 31, 2012 your Facebook page will migrate to the Timeline, a reverse-chronological display of your (organization’s) history on Facebook and before. It shows the story as you choose to tell it or as Facebook has recorded it, in a visual, scrolling, ordered timeline. Here’s a screengrab of the ICRC’s Facebook page.
The cover photo on the top of your page is 850 x 315 pixels. ‘Milestones’, text and images (843 x 403 pixels), can be used to describe critical events in your organization’s history. Once added, milestones appear on the right hand side of your page and allow users to browse your story by year and month.
Facebook has expanded the width of custom pages to 810 pixels. Unfortunately though, they’ve removed the option of setting a default landing page. According to John Haydon there might be a way around this. Feel free to drop me a line if you’ve any questions or comments. Thanks!
When data meets location, magic happens
The idea of using a GPS-enabled smartphone to browse and share data based on your physical location is intriguing. When spending a weekend in Tokyo for example, the handset could guide you to the nearest sushi bar. Likewise one could picture an app helping you to locate the emergency room when your buddy Al Lergic overdoses wasabi. Unfortunately I haven’t found such an app, yet.
To address this app-gap, I recently blogged about a crowdsourced effort where the general public, armed with smartphones, join forces to map the location of hospitals. Data which simultaneously would be accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Before turning concept into action though, I’ve looked for inspiration in other projects marrying data with location. Let’s look at three of them.
Inspired by Dave Troy’s groundbreaking ‘flickrvision’, László Kozma (Helsinki University of Technology) created WikipediaVision, a visualization of edits to Wikipedia articles. Kozma built the app by pinning data from a public inventory of recently modified Wikipedia articles, which also contains the editors’ IP addresses, on a Google map. The IP addresses were translated into location using an API by hostip.info.
Yasmin Elayat and Jigar Mehta, who I had the chance to meet in Geneva last year, are the brains behind the project 18 days in Egypt. Committed to immortalize the 18 days of uprising that took place in Egypt last year, Yasmin and Jigar are creating an interactive documentary website mapping and aggregating stories recorded by Egyptians who filmed pivotal events on their smartphones, snapped pictures, tweeted and facebooked their bid for freedom.
This map of the world depicts the locations of earthquakes rocking the planet over the past seven days. Whoever built this did so using Yahoo Pipes, a quite powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. The current data set isn’t imported via RSS and therefor outdated, but it should be easy to update with a new set from data.gov.
The three projects mentioned above are quite different, but they have one thing in common: when data meets location, magic happens. Resting with these examples, I reckon an exhaustive inventory of hospitals located across the world would come very handy. In particular when plotted on a map accessible via mobile devices. Or what do you think?
My second time lapse video
Following my first time lapse video I’ve done some reading, bought a remote release cord and a power adapter. I’ve also downloaded the nifty software Time Lapse Assembler. Before shooting something fun, I decided to snap another batch of photos from my kitchen window. Here’s the result.
I used my Nikon D70s with a Sigma 10-20 mm f/4.0-5.6 lens. Shutter speed was set to 1/1000 sec and aperture to f/4,5.
The camera was connected to the power adapter.
The remote release cord was programmed to 300 exposures with 30 sec interval. The photos were taken between 14:39 and 17:08 on Sunday 25 March.
I processed the photos in Photoshop (resized to 1920×1200, added warming filter) and created the time lapse using Time Lapse Assembler (at 30fps).
