So I haven’t blogged for a bit, and I should have, there’s been a lot to talk and draw about. I need to share the adaptive design and slow software chat at the Arnolfini and Black Mountain seminar day. I need to discuss the Open Mute Userland workshop day. I need to re-capture a conversation with Jaromil regarding finite resources and the inefficiency of Ubuntu.
But, I haven’t got time; I have to get ready to go to Galway again. I leave tomorrow to carry out a small stack of work with Emmet, (which also needs to be posted). So, for the moment, I wish to dwell briefly on the Dymaxion projection and keep these other posts in reserve.
Dymaxion versus other projections
Looking at some Bucky bits at the Arnolfini took me to imagining being with him at Black Mountain College and asking questions. Wow. A seemingly simple one would be, “Do you think it’s hard for people to understand your Dymaxion map in 2D? The map (globe) is easy to read in 3D but I have been told people get confused when reading it otherwise.” Out aloud, I reiterated this question to other people (to get it out my head whilst looking at Bucky’s portrait) at the Arnolfini. Now I am thinking about how to back up the fact that people can’t read the 2D projection; is it a true fact? I might use the map in one of the theirwork workshops and do some tests.
Revisiting the map, and Bucky’s goal for it, - “Fuller hoped that this map would be widely used for sharing global data, but discouraged people from marring it with national political boundaries” http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/map/dymax.html - made me realize how important it is that Emmet and I communicate clearly why we are trying to enable people to make their own maps and how it doesn’t matter if the maps look different than standard maps online. And that it must be explained, the map base is different because of copyright issues.
Next question, what if I could ask Bucky: How can we use GIS data on your map when, in countries like the UK and Germany, the data is held in a closed copyright environment?
Locative versus GIS data
Emmet made me think further since, by sending a really great Joe Walsh post - GIS data versus locative - ‘Which is better, a limited high resolution data set, or a crappy data set with universal coverage?’ There is much to say here, but for the moment, I will just make it a small statement, - we can’t go data perfect because we can’t access GIS data because of Ordnance Survey copyright issues, so theirwork data will have to be dirty or rather not precise.
Since my meeting with the Environmental Records Centre for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, I have learnt that even most of the Loe Pool fauna data is kept in polygon format. I thought it was kept as point data. I knew flora data was polygon data but I hadn’t thought through the fact that all animals, as well as us, move around, and so you have to mark a space, not a point, where they are likely to be hanging out. We can’t use the polygon data because it is directly attached to the lay of the land, and so an Ordance Survey map. I could ‘rant’ on about this, in addition to agreeing about the inaccessible (inexcusable?) user interface of GIS…Anyway; Emmet (and of course the Joe Walsh crew) have opened my eyes wide to the fact that theirwork is going locative. Before this post, I was still squinting in a land that was about mixing clean precise GIS data with dirty locative data. Now I think it’s dirty locative with a bit of clean GIS point data if we’re lucky.
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