Last week John took me to see Highland Wood Energy, Scotland’s largest biomass heating company. While the idea of burning wood is not particularly new, modern chip and pellet furnaces provide a uniquely sustainable solution for regions with a natural overabundance of wood (whether from natural growth or industrial waste). In particularly isolated regions like […]
Category Archives: maps
The Food Tastes Better
It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog – not out of laziness, but because the Sourcemap project has taken hold of all my attention. That’s how I forgot to mention this video, shot with Matthew Hockenberry this past August, which depicts our first users ever: Robert Harris of Season to Taste Catering […]
Also posted in food, supply chain, traceability, visualization
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Prison Flight Maps
At the MoMA last week I stumbled across the elegant map-based visualizations of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia’s School of Architecture. The Million Dollar Block project (pdf) explores the impact of incarceration on specific neighborhoods of New York City and Brooklyn in particular. The staggering visualizations at once depict the incredible expense of […]
Also posted in 2d, conviviality, supply chain, traceability, visualization
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ticketing cops
At this year’s Future of News and Civic Media conference I learned about The Open Planning Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to civic empowerment through public space and transporation reform. They have produced a number of interesting web-based projects to catalyze change in the urban landscape, including ‘Uncivil Servants,’ a website for citizens to report […]
Also posted in blogogracy, conviviality, free & open, traceability
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water map
This week Scot Frank showed me his pre-alpha of Citizen Water, a cohesive effort to monitor water quality around the world in order to empower community advocacy and direct development efforts. The effort is two-pronged: Scot’s team has been on the ground in numerous locations to help locals test their own water quality using low-cost […]
Also posted in blogogracy, conviviality, food, visualization
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map embroidery
The web has transformed maps into a dorm of personal expression: once used exclusively for personalized directions, online maps have become tools for scrapbooking and sharing our experience in social networks. We can see the influence of distributed online cartography in our real-world communications, such as these stitch cards that encourage the tourist to delineate […]
Also posted in futurecraft, visualization
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renaissance map
While visiting the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence last year, Director Paolo Galluzzi treated us to a sneak peek inside a new feature on his musem’s media-rich web site: maps drawn by Leonardo da Vinci scanned and posted in a Google maps interface so we could compare the renaissance originals […]
Also posted in art, blogogracy, free & open, visualization
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fish map
The world’s fisheries are being depleted at an alarming rate, but they don’t have to be. Unregulated and unsustainable fishing practices pollute waters, decimate fish populations and co-dependent species. Recently a number of leading Ocean groups have released guides to help consumers select sustainable fish – notably the environmental defense fund’s pocket sushi selector (pdf), […]
Also posted in food, open objects, possessed products, traceability
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