In preparation for this weekends WhereCampPDX I wanted to get together some of the mapping stuff I have worked on / thought about over the last few years and put it together in one blog post.

CULTURAL EPIDEMIOLOGY

Scraping data from Facebook profiles one can easily create a map of who has dated or married who and where they have moved over the years. As a sketch of a proof of concept I made a map of a dataset I am personally familiar with.

BIOREGIONALISM / ECOREGIONS

The Following two maps are prints I made that show the Ecoregions of the US and India that bleed across politically created borders.

I got very interested in creating maps that used EcoRegions / BioRegions rather than political boundaries. I was surprised to find that there is no standardized, or agreed upon data set for BioRegions (as far as I could figure). Some of the competing standards include:

WWF’s EcoRegions
Bailey’s Model for the U.S. Forest Service
The Commision for Environmental Cooperation North American System

PLUGFINDER

This was my MFA thesis. It was basically a drupal install with a very early GoogleMaps API (2006) that was designed to help people find use electricity outlets. Early attempt at read/write urbanism, with electricity the sites of exchange.

The question was could access to free(ish) electricity be the site of impromptu cultural production. I am also wondering if in the face of radical changes in economy / urbanism due to peak oil / climate change, people will create mapping networks for finding resources that used to be delivered directly to them. Post-Collapse geo-tagged distributed resource extraction for cyberpunk-industrial-ecologists anyone?

COMMENTS ON HEADMAP MANIFESTO

A write up is here.