Tag Archives: maps

#Maps Film and TV Show Locations | BusinessInsider + City Sound Maps | Gizmodo + 67,000 Historic Maps | Open Culture

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Film and TV show locations around the world | Business Insider
[I]nteractive map shows you where your favourite films and TV shows were filmed — including ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Game of Thrones.’

Beautiful Maps Let You Explore How Your City Sounds | Gizmodo
The urban aural landscape has a huge impact on our lives—from the roar of traffic and clatter of jackhammer, to the groove of music and lullaby of birdsong. These maps roll that information together to let you explore how cities around the world sound.

Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection | Open Culture
The historical map collection has over 67,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific and the World.

There’s also a new feature for many maps called “Georeferencing,” which matches the map’s contours with other historic maps or with more accurate, modern satellite images.

 

Gregory Heyworth: How I’m discovering the secrets of ancient #texts | TED.com #historical #manuscripts #maps #libraries #tech #culture

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Gregory Heyworth is a textual scientist; he and his lab work on new ways to read ancient manuscripts and maps using spectral imaging technology. In this fascinating talk, watch as Heyworth shines a light on lost history, deciphering texts that haven’t been read in thousands of years. How could these lost classics rewrite what we know about the past? Source: Gregory Heyworth: How I’m discovering the secrets of ancient texts | TED.com

A 17-Year-Old Artist Created This Incredible #Map Of #Literature | BuzzFeed #maps #books #art #culture

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Martin Vargic is a 17-year-old artist from Slovakia who specialises in creating intricate maps drawn from modern data and pop culture. READ MORE: A 17-Year-Old Artist Created This Incredible Map Of Literature | BuzzFeed

[Interactive] Map of American Literature’s Most Epic #RoadTrips | Atlas Obscura #literature #maps #books

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The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature's Most Epic Road Trips | Atlas Obscura

The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times. READ MORE: The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips | Atlas Obscura.

This Massive, Open Source Map Makes the World More Wheelchair Friendly | Gizmodo #maps #accessibility #disabilities

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The world is tough place to navigate in a wheelchair. But finding ramps and elevators can be easier thanks to this handy map app that anyone can edit.

It’s called Wheelmap, and it tells you the accessibility status of public places all over the world. It’s free and grades locations in a traffic light-style, red-yellow-green scale of wheelchair accessibility. Developed by German nonprofit SOZIALHELDEN e.V., it’s now celebrating five years since launch. Since 2010, users have added nearly half a million entries across the globe.

“Accessible” means you can enter the place without steps, and that all rooms inside a building can be entered without steps, as well. “Limited accessibility” refers to entrances with a max of one step no higher than seven centimeters, and that the “most important rooms” can be entered without steps.

Wheelmap launched back in 2010, and since then, has become available in 22 languages. It’s available for both iOS and Android users.

READ MORE: This Massive, Open Source Map Makes the World More Wheelchair Friendly | Gizmodo

A Dead-Simple Tool That Lets Anyone Create Interactive Maps | WIRED

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Data surrounds us. It’s everywhere, in the most micro sense small gadgets that track calories we’ve burned, or how much water our plants need to the most macro analytics companies that can monitor, for instance, the health of entire populations. But there are precious few companies actively working on helping us make sense of all that data. One of them is Tableau, a software company that turns heaps of data into visualizations for the common man: teachers, doctors, journalists, you name it. To make those tools clearer and cleaner, they recently partnered with Stamen Design, to release three new map templates, which anyone can play around with by downloading Tableau’s free software.

READ MORE A Dead-Simple Tool That Lets Anyone Create Interactive Maps | Design | WIRED.

For the First Time Ever, Explore Angkor Wat With Google Street View | Travel | Smithsonian

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[T]hose interested in exploring the wonder of Angkor don’t need to make a trek to Southeast Asia—and risk contributing to the damage of the site—to enjoy what the ruins have to offer. For the first time ever, Google Maps is granting users an up-close view of Angkor, through Google’s Street View project.

The move is an extension of Google Maps’ mission to make sure that its maps are the most accurate, comprehensive and useful available to users. While to most people, this might materialize in the form of directions—using Google Maps to get you from Point A to Point B— the company doesn’t see this as the limit for the product’s technology.

“Increasingly, if you look at the amount of power we have in our cellphones, the ability for those phones to know your location and customize an experience around you, they are becoming fairly good at making sure that people are able to explore the world around them,” says Manik Gupta, Google Maps Product Manager. “We want to make sure that we have the ability to share all these places with users all over the world.”

Read more: For the First Time Ever, Explore Angkor Wat With Google Street View | Travel | Smithsonian.

Middle Earth comes to life in epic Chrome experiment | Engadget

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We’re go out on a limb here and say that the Venn diagram of Engadget fans and Tolkien fans looks something like this. So, we figure you’ll probably want to hear about a brand new Chrome experiment that brings various parts of Middle Earth to life, including the Trollshaw and Dol Guldur. It starts with a pretty simple interactive map, but from there you’re able to dive into several locations and learn about Hobbit lore through text, animations and audio. At the end of each lesson on Tolkien’s fantasy world, you’re challenged to complete a simple mini game that has you causing flowers to bloom or avoiding troll attacks. While the WebGL-powered games are pretty impressive, its the HTML5 audio and animations that are the real eye-candy here — doubly so since they work just as well on a phone or tablet as they do your desktop. As you swipe through slides in the story, camera angles change in coordination with your finger and characters dart across bridges. Honestly, even if you’re part of that tiny sliver in the diagram that can’t stand Tolkien, it’s worth checking out the latest Chrome Experiment, if only to remind yourself of the growing power of the web browser.

Middle Earth comes to life in epic Chrome experiment | Engadget

Canada’s parks and historic sites now on Google Street View | CBC News

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Google/Parks Canada

The Google Maps team visited Banff National Park and about 70 other Parks Canada sites this past spring and summer, collecting imagery using its Street View cars and on foot using its Trekker backpack technology. (Google/Parks Canada)

Hikes through spectacular national parks such as Banff and tours of historic sites such as the Viking settlement at L’anse au Meadows in Newfoundland are now available on Google Street View.

Google and Parks Canada announced today that more than 70 Parks Canada locations across the country can now be explored online.

“From planning a summer vacation to augmenting classroom lesson plans, the partnership between Parks Canada and Google will better connect Canadians to the amazing places and geography that defines this country,” wrote Parks Canada’s Michael White on the Google Canada blog.

Read: Canada’s parks and historic sites now on Google Street View | Technology & Science | CBC News.

Google Maps becoming more context-aware and ’emotional’ | CNET

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Snip

SAN FRANCISCO — For Google, the map of the future is taking everything it knows about you and the world and plotting it in real-time as you move through your life.

“We can build a whole new map for every context and every person,” said Bernhard Seefeld, product management director for Google Maps, speaking at the GigaOm Roadmap 2013 conference. “It’s a specific map nobody has seen before, and it’s just there for that moment to visualize the data.”

Like the early days of map making that told stories of discovery and created more of an emotional connection with the unfolding world, Google wants to build what Seefeld called “emotional maps that reflect our real life connections and peek into the future and possibly travel there.”

Google’s context-aware maps will require refining and extending the underlying map data, and combining it with the kind of personal data from applications that powers Google Now, the company’s personal digital assistant technology.

Read more: Google Maps becoming more context-aware and ’emotional’ | Internet & Media – CNET News.