The Economist Noticed!

The Economist magazine has a short feature on the power of presenting information through maps. In Mapping a better world, the magazine looks at some recent successes in the use of maps and on-line map presentation to address social and political challenges.

For most people it is merely a handy tool to find a nearby pizzeria or get directions to a meeting. But mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice. Whether it is to promote health, safety, fair politics or a cleaner environment, foundations, non-profit groups and individuals around the world are finding that maps can help them make their case far more intuitively and effectively than speeches, policy papers or press releases.

The story details uses of mapped information for a variety of purposes, including political activism, law enforcement, and social science applications.

And it includes a quote from NSGIC member Jeff Vining, of Gartner:

“Today you are allowed to visualise data in ways you couldn’t even understand just a few years ago,” says Jeff Vining of Gartner, a consulting firm.

With thanks to ESRI and GotGeoInt, on twitter, for the link!

This Looks Worth Watching

Penn State Public Broadcasting is working on what they are calling the Geospatial Revolution Project, "an integrated public service media and outreach initiative on the brave new world of digital mapping."

The project team is looking for support and partners to help develop a full-length television program, outreach materials, a web site, and a program to work with educational partners. Based on the trailer posted on the main web page, this will be a high-level look at geospatial data and tools and their proliferation and importance in everyday life.

Frankly, it looks very slick, comprehensive, and fascinating. I look forward to firing this program up as a way to answer my Mom and Dad's curiosity about what exactly it is that I do with "all this fancy computer mapping stuff."

Extending NSGIC into Social Media and Stuff Like That

As a result of discussions at the recent NSGIC Conference (you may have heard about it), we have staked a NSGIC claim in a few social media spaces this fall.

A basic introduction to NSGIC has been added to Wikipedia. The material for this was mostly drawn from the About NSGIC page, with some expansion based on personal experience. We have tried to include material and references from outside of NSGIC, as a way of cementing the new article in Wikipedia. Any NSGIC folks who are Wikipedians should feel free to keep and eye on the new entry and edit or add as they see fit.

There is also now a new NSGIC Group on the business networking site LinkedIn. A number of NSGIC folk who are on LinkedIn have already linked to the new group. The rest of the NSGIC community is invited (encouraged? urged? peer-pressured?) to join as well.

Someone mentioned a NSGIC profile on MySpace or FaceBook. We'll have to think about those, though I will note that if we go that route my teen-aged daughter will be horrified.

Another Map-Based News Aggregator

The Online Journalism Review has an interview this week with "noted journalist/programmer/Web guru Adrian Holovaty" about his new project EveryBlock, which filters local news by neighborhood and presents it in several formats, including a simple map view.

Mr. Holovaty was behind the recently ended chicagocrime.org which looked at one data stream for one city. He describes EveryBlock as an attempt to provide a full news feed for each individual block in three major cities: New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

While the graphic map-presentation aspects of this site are interesting -- Holavaty and his team created their own version of a base map, for example, instead of using Google or Yahoo -- what may be more interesting is their work on finding new sources of interesting information and new ways to extract location information where it is not already embedded.

"...we're detecting geography in narratives -- "blobs," so to speak -- and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them."

It is also interesting to note that the project is funded under a grant from the Knight News Challenge that requires the source code to be released under an open-source license at the end of the 2-year grant period.