The Exposed City: A Brief History of Mapping the Urban Invisibles

From Ptolemy to MIT, or what Edward Tufte has to do with Google Earth and the future of understanding cities.

Cities, maps and data visualization are frequent obsessions around here, and the intersection of the three hits a sweet spot of the finest kind. But how did urbanism, cartography and information visualization first come together, and where are they going as bedfellows? That’s exactly what Nadia Amoroso explores in The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles — an ambitious study of the invisible elements of the city, from demographics to traffic patterns to crime rate to environment, through “map-landscapes.” With a foreword by iconic information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, the book traces the work of pioneers across cartography, information design, urban planning and other disciplines that have historically shaped our understanding of place and spatial relations, alongside bleeding-edge projects from contemporary innovators across data visualization, open-source mapping and other facets of technology-empowered urbanism.

It’s Man’s Ability to Perceive, it’s the MAP. It’s also the map through time with the ease of quick time and computer graphics and morphing, changing one pattern with another. Time telling a story through a day, a week or a year. Time showing change, it’s the transparency of information combined with other information creating a third piece of information.” ~ Richard Saul Wurman

(Sound familiar?)

From the ancient maps of Ptolemy, to the seminal work of legends like information design pioneer Edward Tufte, cognitive mapping trailblazer Kevin Lynch and father-of-pictograms Otto Neurath (remember him?), to the latest insights from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and Google Earth co-founder Mark Aubin, Ambroso covers an incredible spectrum of chronology, subject matter and techniques, appropriate for the interconnected, dimensional complexity of cities as living organisms.

One particularly interesting pioneer examined is artist and architect Hugh Ferriss (1889-1962) and his depiction of New York City zoning laws, touching on the potential of drawings to explore and reveal the “invisible” dimensions of cities — something we’ve previously considered in the Invisible Cities transmedia mapping project, which uses social networking data in 2011 to do what Ferriss did with paint, paper and imagination in 1916.

Not only did his drawings become expressive vistas into the future of Manhattan’s architectural and urban design conditions, as legacies of one of the most talented artists of the period, Ferriss’s depictions also synthesize the positivist and progressive spirit of their era. These drawings foreshadowed a city which, due to its threatening qualities, was destined to remain as only pictorial.” ~ Nadia Ambroso

What made Ferriss’s drawings so successful, Amoroso notes, is that they were able to garner the attention of a wide and cross-disciplinary audience — artists, architects, urban planners, developers and city officials alike — which raises an interesting question about the nature of contemporary urban innovation and the need for cross-disciplinary engagement.

This month, Amoroso launched DataAppeal, a web-based visualization tool for creating 3D and 4D data maps and animations, based on concepts from The Exposed City.

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Circles of Influence: Visualizing Creative Debt Across Time

What 48 hours of sleeplessness have to do with Kafka’s influence on Lemony Snicket.

UPDATE: The flowchart is now up on Etsy as an 11×14 high-quality digital print on matte paper, with over 50% of proceeds going to support Longshot! (Behold the first-ever exclamation point in Brain Pickings’ six-year history, that’s how excited I am.)

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of partaking in Longshot Magazine, a brilliant grassroots collaborative project enlisting some of the country’s top publishing talent — writers, editors, art directors, designers, photographers, radio producers — and unreasonable amounts of coffee to put together — write, edit, lay out, publish and distribute — a full-fledged magazine in 48 hours. Those of us who have worked in the traditional magazine industry, with its two-month publishing cycles and massive budgets, instantly get the utter insanity and audaciousness of what’s indeed a long shot of the most daring kind. (Not in the least alleviated by the fact that, besides the print magazine, we also have a beautiful website and a radio station with behind-the-scences stories and featurettes, produced by the crew at WNYC’s Radiolab.)

This issue’s theme was Debt and, in the spirit of combinatorial creativity, I collaborated with Michelle Legro of the wonderful Laphams Quarterly and illustrator-extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton on Circles of Influence — a visualization of literary, scientific and artistic influences. It’s designed to illustrate the enormous creative indebtedness that permeates humanity’s proudest intellectual output, while also demonstrating the cross-pollination of disciplines across science, art, literature, film and music. While some of the connections might be more obvious (Shakespeare to Victor Hugo? But of course!), others (Marie Curie to J. J. Abrams?) may require some thinking, some Googling, and some general neuron-flexing — and that’s the point, to challenge you to examine how these creators might have influenced each other, tickling your curiosity with the urge to look something up, learn something new, and end up more attuned to creative cross-pollination as an agent of intellectual progress. (And, of course, a timely wink at Google Circles.)

For more on the thought and creative process behind Circles of Influence, catch Michelle, Wendy and myself talking about it in this Longshot Radio interview.

Longshot is the brainchild of my dear friend and freelance rockstar-writer Sarah Rich, Mat Honan, senior editor at Gizmodo and former Wired staffer, and Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, also a Wired alum.

Longshot, like Brain Pickings, relies on the pay-what-you-will model, so be sure to chip in if you find any delight and illumination in the 42 wonderful stories and, better yet, grab an actual print puppy for just $12.

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Digital Decluttering: 3 Ways to Visualize Your Mac’s Hard Drive

How to spot RAM offenders, or what data visualization has to do with the workings of your second brain.

Our hard drives are our satellite brains, vital extensions of our intellectual and creative input and output. But our informationally voracious habits also mean that our second brains get inevitably overwhelmed, slowing down and spasming under the weight of our tastes and interests. To combat the issue, here are three fantastic visualization tools — playing on today’s running theme of data visualization — that help declutter your hard drive without requiring any programming knowledge, visually track down what takes the most space and memory, and allowing you to optimize accordingly.

GRAND PERSPECTIVE

GrandPerspective is a Mac OSX utility for graphically showing the file disk usage on your computer using tree map visualizations. It developed by Erwin Bonsma and is released for free as open-source under the GNU General Public License. You can support the project with a donation.

Direct download link.

DAISY DISK

DaisyDisk scans your hard drive, as well as any external drives you have mounted, and visualizes the contents as interactive maps, allowing you to easily spot unusually large files and delete or move them to an external hard drive to get more free space. The program’s scanning engine is surprisingly fast even with drives as large as several terabytes. You can get a copy for the rather reasonable $19.99.

Free demo direct download link

via Swiss Miss

DISK INVENTORY X

Disk Inventory X, developed by Tjark Derlien, is very similar to GrandPerspective — same tree map visualizations, also a free download and under a GPL license, also supported by donations — though with a slightly different and more intuitive interface. It was inspired by WinDirStat, the hard drive visualization utility for Windows.

Direct download link

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