"Found" Crowd-Sourced Geography

The information aesthetics blog has an interesting post today (Mapping the World's Photos: Extensive Flickr Photo Analysis) about an academic paper presented last week at the WWW 2009 Conference.

A group from Cornell University used some 35 million geotagged photos from Flickr to map where and when photographers were snapping pictures.

Their approach used in Mapping the World's Photos [www2009.eprints.org, PDF] combines content analysis based on text tags and image data with structural analysis based on geospatial data.

Based on that analysis, the researchers were able to tease out a large amount of information about the places being photographed.

While individual users of Flickr are simply using the site to store and share photos, their collective activity reveals a striking amount of geographic and visual information about the world.

This is a great example of re-purposing data that is not originally geospatial into geo-enabled information.

Pre-Conference Palate Cleanser

As we get ready to head out to Colorado for the 2008 NSGIC Conference, here's an interesting new experiment in art, culture and geography from Yahoo and Flickr: the ybike.

Librarian-activist and web-stuff speaker Jessamyn West posted the photo at right recently in a post titled "the internet got you a bicycle?"

It’s basically a purple bicycle with a cell phone and a solar powered battery charger. The cell phone has a camera and a GPS unit and is mounted behind the handlebars. The bike takes a photo a minute when it’s moving.

The photos are posted to flickr, with a "ybike" tag and geospatial information that feeds flickr's photo map application.

A number of these bikes have been passed out. Aside from Jessamyn's, I have found bike photo's from Eddie (who also posted pictures of the bike and its auto-camera components), Josh, dogseat, tarikh, and folks at the flickr offices.

It looks like they have covered Vermont, New York City and San Francisco (at least). If they want a steady stream of photos of beautiful downtown Dover, Delaware, at Lunchtime, maybe they should send me a bike too.

My doctor and my blood-pressure monitor would approve.

More Roots of Photogrammetry

The blog Modern Mechanix offers another glimpse at the history of photogrammetry today with a scan from the May, 1939, edition of Popular Science. This is the same blog that gave us a glimpse of terrestrial photography-based surveying earlier this month.

The article, Flying Cameras Map America for War, takes a look at the whole process, including collecting imagery from the belly of a military plane, survey parties recording reference points, and stereoscopic photogrammetry back at the base.

The statement of purpose that opens the article feels oddly familiar to a 21st-century geospatial data coordinator:

From aerial photographs snapped by giant bombers soaring four miles above the earth, U. S. Army engineers are compiling maps that will serve as eyes for our armed forces if they ever have to wage a defensive war on American soil.

The image above is a reproduction of "a stereoscopic image of the kind produced by the multiplex aeroprojector used by U. S. Army engineers in making contour maps from aerial photographs." The image at right is an illustration of how one might make sense of "this seemingly meaningless blur of colored lines" to create a topographic map.

I don't think the second image is an actual illustration of a U.S. Army engineer.

The Roots of Photogrammetry?

I am not a surveyor and know almost nothing really of photogrammetry, but I was intrigued when I spotted a very brief piece on what may have been early photogrammetry in a scan of a page from the March, 1924, issue of Popular Mechanics magazine.

This was on the blog Modern Mechanix, which posted the page because it also contained a story, with pictures, on novel iconography of the new (in 1924) Church of St. Christopher, in Paris; iconography that included detailed paintings of the saint protecting the operators of plains, trains, and automobiles.

The next headline down the page, however, caught my eye:

Camera for Surveying Saves Both Time and Labor
For registering ground dimensions, a photographic system of surveying, recently devised by a London, England, man, is said to produce results of greater accuracy that the ordinary methods.

I find it helps to read that in the voice of the narrator of a 1920's newsreel.

IndianaMap Featured in Television Report

Indiana's Jill Saligoe-Simmel reports on her Professional Geographer blog that the Indiana Geographic Information Council's IndianaMap is featured on the series "Across Indiana" on Indianapolis' WFYI Public Television station.

Dr. Jill reports that the segments are the result of several months of work by members of the Council and feature information on the uses and benefits of Indiana's 2005 very high resolution orthophotography project.

The blog entry includes a few highlights.

When We Get Hi-Res Local Imagery Out to as Many People as Possible

Indiana is one of the states that has gotten their high resolution orthophotography added to Google's Earth and Maps systems. The photos are hi-res enough that the image-hunters at the Google Earth Community have spotted an Amish horse and buggy on a rural Indiana road.

As communities will, they looked deeper, researched the presence of the Amish in Indiana, and have collected and published a series of placemarks showing photographic evidence of where a few members of the Amish Community happened to be on an unspecified day in late winter/early spring of 2005.

While I was interested to see Amish folks visible on Google Earth (they are a part of Delaware culture as well), what was coolest about this for me was to see "IndianaMap Framework Data" credited on Google Earth.

Well-played, Indiana Geographic Information Council! (Via Google Earth Blog)

Looking Ahead to Madison

State Street Madison
Originally uploaded by puroticorico.

While most of our focus is, appropriately, on the NSGIC Mid-Year Meeting at Annapolis in just under a month, here's a chance for a brief look ahead to the 2007 NSGIC Annual Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.

The FlickrBlog this morning includes an entry on the most active city-focused groups of photographers on the photo-sharing site. Madison's group is right up there near the top of the list.

With a population of just 221,551 (only the 83rd largest city in America), the Madison, Wisconsin Flickr group has 473 members (or one member for every 468 citizens).

So, those thinking about attending the Annual Conference (and you should) can get a preview of the views to be seen around the conference site.

This also raises the question of NSGIC shutterbugs. I'm known as a picture-snapper at conferences, and there are others who help take photos to record our gatherings. We can always use more, though. Are you an amateur photographer as well as a GIS pro? We might need your help.

Photos from the 2006 NSGIC Conference

A handful of photos from the 2006 NSGIC Conference are posted to flickr in two photo sets.

One is focused entirely on the NSGIC Conference itself. The other is the result of a few short walks around downtown Little Rock, during breaks.

The former includes a few shots of the Peabody Ducks.