This is the first release we consider to be useable by the general public; as such we are releasing a video to demonstrate how to download Cartagen, get a data set, and write your own GSS stylesheet in just a few minutes:
More information and setup instructions are on Cartagen’s wiki, and our live demonstration site at cartagen.org has been updated.
Cartagen is still incomplete: it needs more optimization for slower browsers and devices like the iPhone and Android phones, it can make better use of HTML5 features such as Web Workers for multi-threaded JavaScript for a more responsive UI, and we hope to continue our early efforts to combine it usefully with OpenLayers and other mapping platforms.
Special thanks to Ben Weissmann who’s joined the Cartagen team and has been instrumental in bringing it this far.
In this third tutorial, we scrape the incoming text messages for pairings of strings in the format “key:value value …”, which we parse out with a regular expression and store in a separate Keyvalue table. This allows us to intelligently search and manipulate the data, as well as to geocode addresses submitted along with data. This yields latitude & longitude data for a given text message.
Here we actually batch import the messages, saving them in a local model. I also demonstrate a script to perform the imports, and set up a table to store key:value pairs for more advanced usage – I’ll finish that feature up in a subsequent tutorial.
Saving the messages locally is important for not exceeding the Twitter rate limit, as well as for performing more complex searches and manipulations with the data. It also provides a common message storage if you’re importing from multiple sources, say, FrontlineSMS, Clickatell, and Twitter.
In this tutorial I cover how to set up a basic Ruby on Rails 2.2.2 application and how to connect it to the Twitter API. Then I demonstrate receiving and sending Tweets, i.e. text messages through Twitter. I’ve also shared the code in Google Code.
This code requires Rails 2 – if you have OS X 10.5, it ships with 1.2; you can upgrade with the commands sudo gem update --system and sudo gem install rails
“The Graticule Ruby gem makes it super easy to geocode addresses using multiple services. One thing I’ve found in developing Unthirsty is that sometimes a geocoding service either fails to be reached or the address couldn’t be found. So as a precaution, I’ve set up a way for Graticule to failover to another service if a lookup fails. Here’s how.”
The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible "Do-It-Yourself" techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.
Tools and techniques for participatory grassroots mapping, emphasizing subjective and narrative mapping as a form of expression. By using low-cost tools like kites and balloons along with inexpensive digital cameras and mobile phones, communities can explore, document and assert their own local geographies. We are developing a map-making curriculum for kids and digital tools to publish grassroots maps in standard formats such as KML, Shapefile, and GeoJSON.
Cartagen is a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.
NEWSFLOW is a dynamic, real-time map of news reporting, which displays both the latest top stories as well as the news organizations which covered them. All articles are from the last few minutes. Viewing news in this way lets us see how the choice of 'top stories' by news bureaus is geographically unequal, or rather, what areas of the world are neglected by various national news sources. Built with HTML5 on the dynamic mapping framework CARTAGEN, NEWSFLOW draws on real-time data from over 200 news organizations as well as Google, Yahoo, and other sources.
WHOOZ is a project to map urban wildlife in realtime with SMS messages throughout Manhattan, the Bronx, and Cambridge, MA. Users can request realtime 'safaris' to find animals recently seen near their current location.
ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year's exports) and 228 government entities.
Kogbox is a communal programming site where users write short re-usable snippets of code and run them in the cloud. Snippets can be shared and combined to create more complex applications.
A project mapping the flow of coffee on global, urban, local, architectural, biological, and personal scales. The full collection includes over 50 pieces on cardboard, paper, and chipboard in ink, paint, graphite, chalk, charcoal, and coffee.
Other work:
I was a partner at Vestal Design, where worked with Dave Pitman and Mike Lin on lots of stuff like Xobni's user interface and branding and information design for Intel, General Electric, and others. I also taught information design workshops for General Electric and Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai.
I work occasionally and excitedly with Natalie Jeremijenko as part of her xDesign Lab at NYU.
Weardrobe is a site for tagging and organizing clothing online, which I created with Suzanne Xie and Richard Tong.
Cut&Paste Labs was founded by Diego Rotalde and me; we taught workshops on web design and development with open-source tools in Lima, Peru in 2006-7. Some of our students went on to found their own firms...
I've also designed a few zany things which people have enjoyed, like the DoubleSpace Kitchenette:
