Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualisation of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa.
Tag Archives: cartography
London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map
Nowadays our orientation is very often not longer based exclusively on the actual geography and their landmarks. There are loads of alternatives, from street numbers to GPS routing in our smartphones, to guide us to a destination. All of those wayfinding devices have in common that they are abstracted projections of the real world’s spatial arrangement. Which brings us to two interesting implications: First, because abstraction means in this case a decrease of information, something is lost. And second, the longer you are using a device the more you accept it or get used to it. For instance the geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.
‘Metrography’ attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.
Benedikt Groß: Metrography – London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map
mySociety cache of OS OpenData and more
This is the mySociety cache of OS OpenData, released 1st April 2010, and other related similarly-licensed data, as allowed under the licences.
A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain
This website is an essential resource for the precise Global Positioning System (GPS) user in Great Britain. It also contains useful information for ALL users of GPS, both recreational and professional.
Ordinance Survey: A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain
Free The Postcode!
The postcode database — which turns a postcode to a latitude/longitude and back — is not free in the UK. In fact, it’s very expensive. The Post Office owns it and sells it to various companies that make use of it for things like insurance or parcel tracking. There are however many people who’d like to use it for non-profit purposes. Say you want to lay out events like free concerts / gigs on a map and you only have the postcode… you have to buy the database.
Instead, wouldn’t it be nice if it was free like zipcodes are in the US? To do this, you have to have a number of people collaborating with GPS units who note positions and postcodes. Hence this site to collect that data.
GPS Coordinate Converter, Maps and Info
Here’s a really useful GPS Coordinate Converter. Geographic coordinates and mental arithmetic aren’t a comfortable fit.
Association of British Counties
The Association of British Counties (ABC) is a society dedicated to promoting awareness of the continuing importance of the 86 historic (or traditional) Counties of Great Britain. ABC believes that the Counties are an important part of the history, geography and cultural life of Great Britain. ABC contends that Britain needs a fixed popular geography, one divorced from the ever changing names and areas of local government but, instead, one rooted in history, public understanding and commonly held notions of cultural identity.
Greenwood’s Map of London 1827
If you need to know London better, you may well find this fascinating.