Martin Dodge’s edited book Geographic Visualization is getting nearer completion. The latest table of contents includes a few chapters close to my focus:

• The Visual City by Andy Hudson-Smith (probably based on ‘Digital Urban - The Visual City‘)
• The Role of Map Animation for Geographic Visualization by Mark Harrower
• Making Uncertainty Usable: Approaches for Visualizing Uncertainty Information by Stephanie Deitrick and Robert Edsall (including a section on “Uncertainty visualization: a user-centred research agenda”)
• Visualizing Data Gathered by Mobile Phones by Michael A. E. Wright, Leif Oppermann and Mauricio Capra

Word done by Doantam Phan under the umbrella of Terry Winograd at Stanford and presented at InfoVis 2005, Flow Map Layout uses a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, and flow data between the nodes. The abstract goes as follow:

Cartographers have long used flow maps to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network. The advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. Most flow maps are drawn by hand and there are few computer algorithms available. We present a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, and flow data between the nodes. Our techniques are inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings and distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another. We demonstrate our technique by producing flow maps for network traffic, census data, and trade data.

The designer of this visualization used the Flow Map Layout to produce a flow map which then they mapped to a globe. It appears in the UK Interdependence Report.

Relation to my thesis: I am looking for techniques to improve my flows maps of tourists.

In the light of my latest spatio-temporal visualization, I stumbled on Paul Torrens’ Geosimulation and his research on modeling time, space, and behavior. He will present his work on Wi-Fi mapping and geography at the upcoming O’Reilly Emerging Technologies (ETech) conference.

Paul describes geosimulation as:

Geosimulation is a catch-all phrase that can be used to represent a new wave of spatial simulation modeling that has come to the fore in very recent years. Besides traditional urban modeling and simulation, the intellectual roots of geosimulation derive from recent developments in computer science and geographic information science. The geosimulation approach draws together a diversity of theories and techniques, offering a unique perspective that traditional simulation has commonly lacked: a view of urban phenomena as a result of the collective dynamics of interacting objects, often represented at the scale of individual households, people, and units of real estate and at time-scales approaching “real time”.

The book Geosimulation. Automata-based modeling of urban phenomena covers the subject

The cloud of Wi-Fi signal that envelops central Salt Lake City, UT, generated by ~1700 access points. Courtesy of Paul Torrens.

Relation to my thesis: Besides the geospatial information visualization, this works relates to my exploration of agent-based modeling. Generating a “geosimulation” was one of the potential approach to validate models of people use of location information. It is also interesting to see that these types of spatio-temporal analysis (urban analytics) projects now reaching the audience of emerging technologies conferences. I strongly expect a “urban computing” (or whatever the catch-all word will be) track at LIFT 2009…

While finishing a journal paper on our initial results of Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, I completed the development of my “Urban Dynamics” software to visualize on top of Google Earth the tourist density and flows. There is an explanatory page with examples of Barcelona, Spain and Florence, Italy available in: 3D geospatial visualization of tourist density and flows

Relation to my thesis: I have been developing “Urban Dynamics” as a tool to analyze spatio-temporal data of field studies. It is also a piece of work that proves that 2008 might be the year of Neogeographer as suggested by Andrew Hudson-Smith at CASA.

People at the Chronos Group digged up the term “chronotope” from the 90s. According to Wikipedia, chronotope can be literally translated as “time-space”. In the context of urbanism, it highlights the temporal features of the city (see Une interprétation chronotopique by Alain Guez). The increasing availability of digital traces allows new perspectives of chronotopic analysis of urban spaces. The chronotopic visualizations (and tools) developed in WikiCity and Tracing the Visitor’s Eye most definitively go in the direction of revealing the “mobilities” not only in space but also over time (history and real time).

A few events I would love to attend in early 2008, but I unfortunately won’t be able to…

The Mobile City conference
Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ oimmaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?

4th and 5th seminars in the ESRC Research Seminar Series: Rethinking the Urban Experience: the Sensory Production of Place
Seminar on the sensory awareness of urban infrastructure. This seminar will ask questions about the infrastructure that supports urban society. Topics may include sensory experiences of public transport networks, olfactory responses to waste and its disposal, public toilet provision in urban areas. Additionally, the role of hidden infrastructures such as CCTV and underground infrastructures such as utilities networks will be considered in this seminar.

EPFL Choros group “Penser l’espace” seminar with a focus on the “critique de la raison cartographique” and the multiple perspectives to think about space.
Quelles habitudes de pensée sont charriées lorsqu’on cartographie ? Quelles sont les implications de la réduction cartographique de la complexité de l’espace ? De quelle façon peut-on contrôler le passage des données à la carte ou le passage de la pensée à la carte ? Comment cartographier de l’espace contemporain – ce « space of flows » et hyperurbanisé - où la mobilité et la digitalité sont les caractéristiques fondamentales ? Quelles sont les implications du passage de la carte sur papier à la carte sur écran ? Le GPS et Google Earth transforment-ils notre rapport à la carte, et, partant, notre rapport à l’espace ?

Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability workshop at Pervasive 2008
The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold: 1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information, 2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings. 3. digital divide between humans and the environment (e.g. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides?

Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems
A science of socio-technical systems is emerging from research in the fields of HCI, social computing, social informatics, CSCW, sociology of computing, and other domains. The Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST) is a new organization devoted to advancing research on socio-technical systems. A primary goal of the institute is to build a new cohort of faculty and graduate students who are interested in research on the design and interplay of technology and humans at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and larger communities.

ifgi Spring School 2008
Two weeks of short block courses with innovative topics in GI such as: geospatio-temporal information: issues in representation and reasoning, usability and user-centred systems, location-aware systems, information visualization & presentation, and research methods

Last Friday, at the Salon ImmoTICs DomoTICs Agora in Sophia Antipolis, France, I was very fortunate to present some of my work in a slot between the french “paleanthropologist” Pascal Picq and the italian architect David Fisher and later the economist/thinker Michel Godet. My talk (in french) entitled “Révéler le pouls de la ville” was a duplicate of what I presented at Mobile Monday Barcelona, with a stronger emphasis on the implications of the use of “digital footprints” by urban planners, local authorities and designer of urban digital infrastructures such as location-based services. The slide are available online: Révéler le pouls de la ville.

Thanks to Dominique Thibault for the kind invitation.

Relation to my thesis: testing my ideas + practicing public speaking (it is definitively either in my mother tongue) + getting in touch with french academics who do not always communicate outside of the boundaries of the “hexagone”.

Last night, I participated to the Mobile Monday Barcelona event on Location-Based Services. My talk entitled “Mapping of City Dynamics” covered some innovative ways to use mobile and wireless technologies to sense the city and reveal its pulse (i.e. its activity in space and time). I also discussed their underlying concepts (real-time, history, feedback loop, implicit and explicit acts, experience of the city, consequences of our activities) and their implications in relation to the design of location-based services that raise. Finally, I exemplified these ideas by introducing the ongoing project lead at the SENSEable City lab, named WikiCity, that aims at offering an instrument for city inhabitants to base their actions and decisions upon in a better informed manner.

Thanks to Rudy and Carles for the invitation! (Flickr set of the event)

The slides with my notes are available: Mapping of city dynamics

Relation to my thesis: Pushing the ideas on urban computing and the design of LBS (granularity, areas of influence/relevance, uncertainty) and getting good contacts to understand the partitioners perspectives. and past experiences. I will do a similar talk on Friday at the ImmoTICs DomoTICs Agora event in Sophia Antipolis.

Humans think and talk about regions imprecisely in terms of vague concepts (e.g. downtown). While administrative regions such as area codes and land parcels have sharp boundaries imposed on them, other regions concepts used by people are more fuzzy. The use of vague spatial concepts in geospatial communication have been studies for many years (see for instance Daniel Montello’s Where’s downtown?: Behavioral methods for determining referents of vague spatial queries). However, the understanding human’s perspective of the space hardly translates to its digital definition stored geographic information systems. As a consequence, the local search and location-based services industry has invested a large amount of energy and money in obtaining neighborood expertise. Companies such as Urban Mapping sells its extensive user-centered neighborhood datasets to major search engines. New approaches profit from people submitting their own version of the boundaries for the same neighborhood. WikiMapia is an example of this kind of community editing. It defines specific areas (roads, parks) with polygonal entries (see Matt Jones’ Wikimapia Invades Google Earth!. Similarly, the Intelligent Middleware project at the MIT aims at providing a mechanism for accumulating local knowledge about neighborhood-scale land use. This people-generated content helps re-interpreting the administrative datasets and develop customized analyses of neighborhood conditions.

A classic Neighborhood areas & census block groups (2000) by the Seattle City Clerk’s Office neighborhood map atlas (right). People-defined neighborhoods and areas of Barcelona in Wikimapia

Nowadays, there are new sources to implicitly reveal the crowd “mental maps”. This has mainly been done by via tag maps such as the ones generated by WorldExplorer. In Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, I am currently taking this idea a bit further and try to generate the “area of influence” of monuments and points of interest. This work should reveal a spatial relevance of geographic objects as zones (i.e. neighborhoods) instead of administratively-defined points or rectangles (like the ones provided by GeoNames). Inspired by Jonathan Raper’s concept of “Geographic relevance” (match between area of attention and area of influence). For instance, areas defined implicitly by people’s behaviors (mobility, digital traces) and activities (geotagging) could help provide more relevant answers to queries based on monuments and proximity such as “what is close to the Empire State Building?”

A crowd’s mental maps of Barcelona in WorldExplorer

Update: I forgot about the The Neighborhood Project (mentioned previously), as an attempt to map what street addresses people on Craigslist consider to be within certain neighborhoods. One problem with, though, it is that Craigslist provides a certain list of neighborhood names and they aren’t necessarily the same ones that people use in real life.

Neighborhoods defined by people using Craigslist.

Jonathan Raper’s Geographic Relevance presented at LBS2007

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the relationship between people’s perception of neighborhood and the concept of location information granularity.

On the kind invitation of Juan Dürsteler, I contributed to the InfoVis.net newsletter with a text on current approaches to visualize urban activities and their evolution through space and time: “Visualising the Pulse of the City” and in Spanish “Visualizando el Pulso de la Ciudad“.