Chris McDowall on the “Seeing Data” section of SciBlogs reports: Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter. He notes that Jakarta glows brightly 24 hours, day and night…

(see full animation at SciBlogs)

Mark Graham on Floating Sheep notes:

As Chris points out, we can see Indonesia (particularly Java) producing an unexpected amount of content. Well, at least unexpected until we realise that Twitter is enormously popular in Indonesia. The country apparently has world’s highest proportion of internet-users on Twitter.

From the CNN article linked to:

Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest user of Facebook and has been dubbed the most Twitter-addicted nation on the planet by online research firm comScore. The country beat every other nation in the percentage of online Twitter users. […] Most people use their mobile phones to access the web.

(via Floating Sheep)

Maandag 14 december om 20:00 in De Balie is er een kenniscafé over “Hogere kaartenkunde”. Ik zit in het panel en zal het hebben over de invloed van locatieve media op cartografische representaties.

We maken al eeuwenlang kaarten, om landsgrenzen vast te leggen of veilige routes aan te geven. Een kaart is een model van de werkelijkheid, en het terrein van een fascinerende tak van wetenschap: Cartografie.

Kaarten vormen de weerslag van sociale en politieke keuzes, die vervolgens hun eigen waarheid gaan vormen. Zo is de Perzische Golf niet overal in de wereld de Perzische Golf, ziet de wereld er op z’n kop of met China als middelpunt opeens heel anders uit en lijken kaarten tegenwoordig minder compleet te worden door een toenemend aantal ‘witte vlekken’…

Martijn van Calmthout gaat in gesprek met cartograaf Ferjan Ormeling, met Henk van Houtum, hoofd van het Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud Universiteit en met Michiel de Lange, promovendus aan de faculteit van Wijsbegeerte in Rotterdam.

Zoals elk KennisCafé zijn ook columnisten Maarten Keulemans en Jelle Reumer van de partij.

Het KennisCafé is een coproductie van De Balie, De Volkskrant, KNAW en Science Center NEMO.

Meer info: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=politiek&articleid=327853

Recently I stumbled across two examples that explore its very edges. The first is a fascinating map of the remotest place on earth.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.

(image source)

The map is created by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. It is part of a research that measures urbanisation from the new perspective of travel time to 8500 major cities. Key findings are:

• we passed the point at which more than half the world’s populations live in cities around the turn of the Millennium (2000) – much earlier than the 2007/8 estimate;
• more than half of the world’s population lives less than 1 hour from a major city, but the breakdown is 85% of the developed world and only 35% of the developing world;
• 95% of the world’s population is concentrated on just 10% of the world’s land; but
• only 10% of the world’s land area is classified as “remote” or more than 48 hours from a large city.

The map beautifully shows just how incredibly connected the world has become – not only via telecommunications but also by physical mobility – and how even the remotest regions are now closely tied to the urban sphere. The fact that 10% of the world is more than 48 hours from a large city raises questions about the definition of ‘urban’, as states the news release. More nice maps here.

A second example is the Reuters news that a Nepali telecom firm is planning to expand its mobile phone service to the top of the Mount Everest. The Mount Everest is one of the busiest high mountains. Each year hundreds of climbers attempt to reach the summit. Until now they were dependent on expensive satellite telephones to call family and friends from the top. Now even the highest peak on earth will become connected to the worldwide communication networks.

The question of course remains whether this potential for mobility and connection to ‘the global’ actually contributes to a worldwide “imagined community”. What this map does not indicate is that mobility and connections are unequally divided. Doreen Massey has called this “the power-geometry of time-space compression” (see article). While for global and digital ‘neo-nomads’ the world may indeed seem one homogeneous ‘smooth space’, for others it remains firmly divided by barriers and obstacles.

The project raises questions around the changing ways people may experience (urban) space under influence of new (pervasive) technologies.
BTW, it is certainly not true that ‘”For the first time ever we are able to visualize the full dynamics of a city in real time,” said project leader Carlo Ratti’: Waag Society has already done a project in 2002 called Amsterdam Realtime.

Here’s the MIT project site.