

Mapmaker, Artist, or Programmer? - godisdad
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/08/mapmaker-artist-or-programmer/3132/

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godisdad
Btw, the flickr in question: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/>

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C0d3r
Hi, I finaly registered to hacker news only to congratulate you and ask how
did you make these? I love Data and love to see new ways of displaying it,
this is an awesome idea, I'd like to try and make things like these for a
hobbie, care to show me some pointers?

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themanr
I'd love to see some of the code behind these maps. Are they rendered with
mapnik? How practical would it be to make some of them live and interactive?
Especially now we have vector graphics in the browser.

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enf
I really should clean up the source code and release most of it. The toolchain
for most of them is kind of ridiculous: giant flat text files feeding through
Unix pipelines and Perl scripts into PostScript files and Ghostscript. A lot
of them would be better if they were interactive in the browser but I need to
do the work to make it happen.

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themanr
Wow, that sounds quite scary. I'd love it if you did release the source
though, it'd be a great project for me to build an interactive version.
(Whether or not it would get further than any of my other side projects is
another matter :) Anyway, my email is in my profile and I'd be very interested
if you did release something.

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001sky
Are these evergreen? ie, can the data-sets be updated, etc. FWIW, I think they
are conceptually intersting.

My immediate second thought was, what more could be done? [in a good way]

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enf
I've tended to make them statically, but I really ought to go back and update
some of them with more data.

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sgarbi
programmer == artist

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noirman
It's really beautiful. But it's practically useless.

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enf
Thanks, and sorry the maps aren't useful to you. They're artifacts of the
process of trying to understand the world, and maybe someday I'll make it all
the way there.

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primitur
The maps are _not_ useless. In fact, they are tremendously valuable. If that
is not observable, the fault lies in the observer.

I believe LIVE versions of the maps are a tremendous idea .. would you
consider building a site replete with such an effort? Live versions of many
(if not all) of your maps would make a tremendous contribution to the way our
mobs conceive themselves.

(Perhaps this is something for ifft&co..)

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enf
I would love to make live versions of these, but the rate of data coming in is
slow enough that they don't work very well in real time—even New York only has
one geotagged tweet every 4 seconds, so using it would mostly be sitting and
waiting for something to happen. A retrospective of the past day would
probably be practical and might be useful, though.

