By Andy Woodruff on 1 June 2009
There’s a lot of information on the internet, if you haven’t noticed. Far too much for any mere human to wade through. And that’s why we find simple beauty in Google. Instead of overwhelming us with links and content, its home page provides a single search field. “Remain calm,” it says in a soothing but vaguely sinister voice, “just tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll bring it to you.” But God help you if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
Okay, it’s not that bad. Research and debate about searching versus browsing behaviors have played out over centuries (assuming that measurement of time in this information age is something akin to dog years), and it seems safe to say that most of the time information can be accessed by either means. Back in the wild days of the 1990s, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen found that “half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant [browsing], and the rest exhibit mixed behavior” and argued that “[d]espite the primacy of search, webdesign still needs to grounded in a strong sense of structure and navigation support” for the sake of not only those link-dominant users but everyone else too (link). Most of the web seems to adhere to that principle, but it’s a search-based world out there.
And I kind of hate it.
Sure, it’s obviously crucial to be able to search for what I’m looking for, but I’m not always looking for anything in particular. I want to explore or, to frame it (perhaps more accurately) in terms of mental lethargy, to avoid having to think of something to look for. It’s like Christmas shopping for all my relatives: as torturous as it already is, if I weren’t able to browse store shelves and instead had to think of specific gifts to ask the shopkeeper for, I’d probably collapse and bust into tears. (I titled this post after Steve Krug’s wonderful “common sense” book on web usability Don’t Make Me Think, not that I’m quite what he was talking about.) It bugs the hell out of me whenever I go to check out the newest Coolest Web Tool or Visualization Ever, only to find that I must think of something to search for in order to see it in action.
So it goes especially with maps. Obviously I speak from the perspective of a hardcore map nerd, but for me a map is something to experience and explore, not simply a canvas on which facts are presented. In any cartography work I’ve been a part of, we have tried to ensure that information can be attained either directly by search or by browsing the map. Consider the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus map, for instance. The same information is visible via both the search box and clicking things on the map.
That’s great for single-purpose, limited-scope maps where all the data can pretty easily be organized within view. What about maps that contain massive amounts of data of every conceivable sort, such as Google Maps? These maps justifiably revolve around searching. But ideally they’d be able to answer not only the question “where is X?” but also “what is here?”.
The easy solution is of course to just list every data point within certain location bounds, either the current map view or a specific chosen area. I find Yelp to be a good example of a site that has a lot of data and offers a way to browse it all via map. I can click on my local neighborhood and thumb through all 1175 businesses therein, filtering as desired.
Google et al. offer some similar capabilities, suggesting some categories of data to explore within the extent of the map you’re looking at, particularly user-generated content. Google has its photo, video, and Wikipedia layers. Microsoft provides categories in its sidebar and lets you explore user “collections.”
Those options are useful, but they still don’t allow you to get at everything. They’re using the normal top-down browsing approach in which results are refined by category; in this case location is like another category. What I think would be an interesting addition is a bottom-up approach, where all available data are presented, but only within very short range of a specified point. Google has a start at this. After searching for an address, a list of businesses at that address is provided.
This kind of thing is a pretty useful way of exploring a place, I think. Say you were thinking of moving into an apartment and wanted to find out what’s on the same block. You could zoom in very close and tirelessly search for every category you can think of, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to just click once and be shown everything that’s on the block? I’d bet that in most cases the amount of information returned for such an extent would be manageable.
(Update, June 19: How ’bout that? Google has just added a feature that is almost exactly what I was wishing for below. Read about it at the Google LatLong blog. At least I got this post out just before that was added, so I don’t look entirely like a fool.)
There are a couple of ways in which the Google Maps browsing approach would be improved in my eyes. First, don’t make me search! It would be helpful to be able to click the map and find out what I clicked on. In addition to Google’s current right-click menu (”Directions to here”? Where the F is “here”?)…
…simply do a reverse geocode on the click location and give me the street address if possible. (As one who often uses Google Maps just for reference, this would be immensely useful in general.) Clicking on that would be the same as having searched for the address, as in the screenshot before last.
Second, in addition to the “All businesses at this address” link that appears in the results for a specific address, a “Businesses near this address” link would allow the user to explore beyond the single point while limiting the volume of data to a reasonable level, assuming a small enough radius like one city block. Obviously the amount of data depends on the density of the place, but I’d guess that most of the time it wouldn’t be overwhelming if it were grouped by address.
In my master’s thesis work, one way of describing online map reading was a continuum from map as tool to map as answer, where on one end the user interacts with and explores the map to eventually arrive at some end goal, and on the other end the user asks the map a question and is given the answer. The major online map services lean toward map as answer. But me, well, as people are always telling me, I’m a total tool.
Tagged interactive maps, map browsing, online maps, search | 2 comments
By Andy Woodruff on 26 May 2009
Forgive the crummy phone picture.
Having been on a subway map kick for a while, and having yesterday fallen victim to an odd smoothie craving, it seemed right to snap this picture and post it here. This is the window of Boston Tea Stop in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s wordplay, see? You know you love it. (For those who don’t know, the transit system in Boston is commonly known as the “T” and is signified by the letter T in a circle, much like in “Tea” above.)
There’s not much to say about this, but it’s always nice to see interesting uses of maps. Here they’ve arranged their flavors on a map of most of Boston’s rapid transit lines. There appears to be some attempt to adhere to the color designations of the actual subway lines: for example, strawberry is at the end of the Red Line, green apple is at the end of one of the Green Line branches, and orange is at the end of (naturally) the Orange Line. But otherwise there doesn’t seem to be any meaning to the arrangement of flavors or topology, which makes this only a kind of cool map rather than a totally awesome map.
I chose passion fruit, by the way, which is the real-life equivalent of the State station on the Orange (and Blue) Line. I’ve yet to use that station to see if it is as tasty and contains as many balls of tapioca.
Tagged interesting maps, metro maps | No comments
By Andy Woodruff on 12 May 2009
At Axis Maps, in our march toward indiemapper, we have made indieprojector, a tool for creating projected maps of your geographic data and exporting them to vector graphics for further design work. Part useful tool and part demo of indiemapper functionality, indieprojector fulfills one of the cartographer’s most basic requirements. In my experience trying to make maps on my home computer without complicated or expensive GIS, not being able to start a map by projecting my data has always been the most frustrating barrier, as the prior (finding data) and subsequent (graphics editing) steps can easily be accomplished. We hope that indieprojector can help out.
We’ve started with eleven global and continental projections to choose from, support for most shapefiles and KML, and export to SVG. Give it a try!
Tagged axis maps, indiemapper, projections | 1 comment
By Andy Woodruff on 7 May 2009
Oops, this isn’t what an azimuthal equidistant map projection is supposed to look like.
I’ve been working (occasionally fighting) with map projections a lot recently, pumping latitude and longitude coordinates through equations that mathemagically shape the world. Occasionally a small error in a projection equation results in an incorrect but fascinating map. So why not try deliberately introducing some errors and see what happens? Here are some maps I created by tossing random modifications into ordinary map projection equations.
Take a simple plate carrée projection, and give it a couple of twists.
Winkel Tripel becomes some sort of beverage vessel.
There’s a certain elegance to this one, an Albers equal area conic projection, also with a couple of twists.
We can also take that a bit further.
Put some ripples in this (very modified) sinusoidal map projection.
My favorite, a warped polyconic projection.
But most of the time, messing with a projection just breaks the world.
Tagged math, projections | 4 comments
By Andy Woodruff on 23 April 2009
Just for kicks, here’s everywhere I have been in my local area since the first of the year. Yeah, I know every nerd with a GPS receiver records their tracks around town, but I outnerd them by breaking it down by mode of transportation (and by doing it without GPS).
All movements, all modes of transit. Brighter means more frequent travel over a given path.
By foot. Same map extent.
By car.
By bus.
By train.
Sweet animation to come following more months of data collection.
Tagged Boston, map projects | 8 comments
By Andy Woodruff on 16 March 2009
I’m catching up on some of the reading I meant to do a couple of years ago, when I was a geography/cartography student, beginning with the original intersection of urban geography, planning, and mental maps: Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960). The subject of the book aside, something cool here is what’s going on in the margins.
Lynch made use of many sketches and diagrams in the margins of the book. These are small, about an inch or less, and appear beside the section of text with which they are associated. They don’t break up the text, and the text doesn’t even include any references to them; they’re just right there next to the words you’re reading. Above, for example, are the paragraphs defining paths, edges, districts, and nodes, which along with landmarks (next page) are Lynch’s elements of the city image. Next to each paragraph is a little illustration of the concept described within. I really like this idea. Naturally, most interesting to me are the occasions where the margin diagrams are actually maps of real places.
Tiny, non-intrusive supplemental maps bring to mind the Tufte-championed sparklines, hence the post title. (I don’t care if “spark map” refers to something else; I make my own rules around here.) Most maps, unless they are linear and horizontal, are substantially more difficult to insert directly into text than is the archetypical sparkline, of course, but I think the spirit is at least similar. As a sparkline provides at a glance a reasonably clear picture of numerical data, so can a small map provide context and clarify otherwise confusing or vague text. For example, in the image below Lynch mentions Boston Common’s “peculiar shape, difficult to remember: a five-sided, right-angled figure.” Peculiar and difficult? What better way to give that sentence meaning than to include a little sketch map right beside the text, toward which your eyes will be moving anyway?
The interactive interweb equivalent, it would seem, might be some map—Google or what have you—embedded in a small pop-up revealed on mouse over of the text. I’m sure I’ve seen something like this, but handy examples escape me at the moment. This suggestion, however, can surely be much less effective than the old-fashioned marginalia approach, because any automated map is likely to contain too much detail for the purpose and because the effort of interaction can easily break the narrative just as well as a big image that breaks up the text. Other interactive suggestions and examples are welcome, but as far as I’m concerned these little maps in the margins are as good an idea on the web as they are in books.
Tagged books, interesting maps, sparklines | 2 comments