Tonight, still searching for the answer to my photo-mapping needs, I found that I *was* able to create a KML file from my Flickr photos, and view it in GoogleEarth, thanks to a nifty script created by Adam Franco. For those unfamiliar with KML (keyhole markup language), these files contain “geolocated” data (think: Flickr photos with geotags). KML files can be opened using GoogleEarth, and viewed as points on a globe. If you haven’t personally experimented with GoogleEarth, you’re missing an amazing tool, a 3D browser which allows you to zoom “from space to street level.” Download this KML file if you would like to see my photos in Google Earth, and explore them on a 3D terrain!
I’ve tested several times — basic, but working great!
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After verifying that the KML file works, and contains ALL the photos (as of 3-25-10), I also imported it into a traditional (2D) GoogleMap. On the GoogleMap, every photo becomes a linked place, listed in the left-hand sidebar. You can click a photo, and the map will relocate to show you the photo’s location. Unfortunately, there is a limit to how many items can be listed, so you need to scroll down the list, and click to see the next page. I believe there are 8 pages. Here’s that map, set to initially show the locations of photos from page 4, just to get you started. Enjoy!
Bonus for those unfamiliar with GoogleEarth: here’s a youtube video created by the multimedia gurus at Backpacker Magazine, featuring a spectacular hike in the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. The live video clips are spliced with movie clips recorded in GoogleEarth, moving the viewer quickly through and into the 3D terrain being discussed. Great little video, I’m sure you’ll agree!
It’s time to test out some tools for “visualizing” the visual data I’m working with from this residency.
Phase #1: I’ve taken the time to add geotags to all my photos, using the Flickr map tool. Many of the photos include brief (or long!) text descriptions, and the majority were manually retitled (otherwise they’d get boring camera-assigned numbers instead of names).
Phase #2 involves trying to “see” the photos as a layer of info, on a map. I’ve researched a number of tools for doing this. Here’s a brief summary — I’d appreciate feedback.
Flickr has internal mapping and set-viewing tools, but each interface has limitations, and some are downright tricky. Currently, for example, there are 1,451 geotagged items in my set “Badlands Artist Residency.” You can view the set this way, through a humble link:
The set can also be embedded as a Flickr slideshow:
Some folks love Flickr slideshows; others find them frustrating. You be the judge (and please let me know what you think). The Flickr slideshow has some nice points (like hiding/showing the descriptions) but doesn’t show the map data.
Flickr can show photos on a map, but please note: like most geomap tools for photos, the count keeps changing, depending on your level of zoom. It seems to recount every time you move or zoom, based on the portion of the map visible. Hard to get used to. Flickr also aggregates the number of images: at an overview level (eg: all of South Dakota visible), you will see a single pink dot — meaning: there are over a thousand photos here, come closer and we’ll give you more info. As you zoom in, more dots appear, but again they are aggregated, or clustered, until you get much closer. I feel you need to get TOO close before dots appear. Important: as you zoom/move the map, there is a small green (circling arrows) “reload” icon, near the “Search This Map” box. Click to reload icons and recount. I click it repeatedly. As I see it, there is a problem with this: the user sees dots representing larger numbers of images, but where there are just a few scattered photos, no dots appear, leading you to think none are there. Well, enough caveats, I still think it’s an amazing visualization tool. You can also navigate using the preview bar of images, arrowing through, or doing a subsearch for tags like “bison” or “paleosols.” Here’s the link to viewing all photos tagged with “abookmadeofsoil” as a Flickr Map:
Here’s a test of the Loc.alize.us interface, which pulls geotagged photos from the set “Badlands Sketches” and drops them onto a googlemap layer, which you can click/zoom to navigate. At a glance, it will tell you there are 22 sketches, for example. As you zoom in, the number gets smaller. This can sometimes be confusing. What do you think? Here’s the direct link: http://loc.alize.us/#/user:miss_distance/tag:sketch/geo:43.572432,-102.296448,9,k/
Another visualization tool is Fluidr, which thinks of itself as an alternative format for viewing Flickr images. The map view, in Fluidr, can be clicked next to each photo, showing you a clean detail of the location I assigned in Flickr. Here’s a snapshot (static — just to show):
Here’s the link to viewing the “Badlands Artist Residency” set on Fluidr (no embed yet, but that feature will be coming, I think). Important tip: think of Fluidr as a bottomless window… it loads medium-sized images, approximately 8 at a time, and loads more as you move through. To jump to the next image, just tap the SPACEBAR on your keyboard.
I’ve also tried this small hack of GoogleMap. Instead of entering a location to search for, I’m giving it geofeed (RSS) data from Flickr, and specifying the unique tag “abookmadeofsoil.”
It seems limited to showing just a few items — the most recent uploads — but I like the way the image balloon pops up on the map, and I know how to modify that (if I want to go with a Flickr map interface, stylized text, adding quotations, fragments of poems I’m working on, etcetera). Simple but perhaps I will be able to tweak it further.
Finally, I’ll make note of a wonderful mashup tool I’d intended to use for my project, called iMapFlickr. Unfortunately, there is currently a limit of 500 photos per iMapFlickr map, making it difficult for me to use. But here is an example (500):
Returning from a hike at Saddle Pass, I found several emails with comments and questions about my trip on the White River Road. So! Just to give some better details, I’m going to cross-post the map snapshot and my original description, as well.
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I didn’t have a map that showed it, but I knew it was there: a gravel road that wriggled across the 40 miles of grasslands, drainages and badlands between Kadoka and Interior. It turned out to be a beautiful drive. I missed one critical turn because I stayed on the branch that looked most used (and dry!) and it led me down to a ranch down on the White River! Whoops. Rather than alarm folks (I saw a dog by the buildings) I drove backward until I could make a 3 point turn. I might as well have driven right in with Johnny Cash blaring on the radio, however, because the dog had alerted a nice young fellow in a mudcaked pickup who followed me out, to see what I was doing there. He assured me that he knew “some locals were making it across now.” I’m sure there were drainages where the road was in water just a week and a half ago, when the White River was in full flood. There was one bad spot — on a hillside no less! — where I was really afraid I’d get hung up, once I was into it. Stopping and turning around there was not an option, trust me. At the crest of the hill, seeing nice dry road stretching ahead of me, I stopped to scratch my head. Earlier, I’d seen a muddy, low-riding sedan, and it must have come down through the same mudhole, but how? Then I noticed some flattened grass, and realized that some folks had been making a wide “off-road” detour in the field. The light ranged from overcast to overlit hazy. Hard to capture how open and empty that landscape feels. Every so often, the road followed the old railroad grade.
In the news! The UK’s Global Poetry System project (which featured one of my contributions a few months ago) was one of the Guardian Guide’s top websites in December, and The Times featured an article by Lemn Sissay on how poetry is finding itself on our shared map:
“It ain’t where you go, it’s where you’re at. Global positioning system (GPS) is a mere five years old in the UK. Now you can locate where you are, wherever you are, whenever you want. Things move fast, and now GPS represents more than directions. GPS is “Global Poetry System” — a call to action that uses Google Maps to locate the poetry that surrounds us.”
My photo “Survival Cache” (from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica) was mentioned in this month’s post from GPS, a Global Poetry System — a project hosted by the South Bank Centre of London. This month’s theme: “See the World like Ed Ruscha.” Here’s a link to my contribution to GPS:
While doing some research into artists who are working with landscape and mapping, I found this compelling video called “Primary and Other Remote Locations” which documents a project in the remote salt flats of Utah. Although the process was technical (algorithms, topographical data, pattern-matching, GPS tracing etc.), I found the explanation concise, and the results thought-provoking. In a nutshell: an artist utilizes data and pattern-mapping to select the “scene” that will be painted. How does this change the tradition (artist using their senses to select a scene), and how is the final work of impacted? My sense is that the artist continues to make a thousand small intuitive decisions along the way, and “finding” the scene is just one of many steps. I feel this is a great example of a collaboration between art and data.
Two weeks ago, I participated in an amazing 3-day training session for NatureMapping, sponsored by the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve, which will be the first site in Michigan officially working with this tool. This course was led by the dynamic Karen Dvornich, co-founder and National Director of The NatureMapping Program, and Outreach Coordinator for the Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Washington. (See: brief history of NatureMapping). Here’s how YDWP describes NatureMapping:
There is a new way for outdoor enthusiasts and nature lovers to get involved in the scientific community… the goal of Nature Mapping is to encourage citizen scientists to collect baseline information on a variety of flora and fauna types, send the data to a central database, and to create visual displays of the records collected. (…) The idea behind Nature Mapping is to create a system that allows individuals that have an interest in nature but not necessarily a degree in Biology to still be able to collect useful information. The program is designed for laypeople, school children, landowners, and other users that might not have the technical expertise to run more complicated programs…. The benefit is that it can be used for a variety of projects and is easy to use. NatureMapping works by providing users with a handheld PDA with a built in GPS. When the user wants to record information, such as a bear track or bird sighting, the PDA takes you through a series of questions to help collect the right information. Once the user is done surveying or observing, the PDA is brought back to our central database and the information is uploaded locally and nationally (… providing) educators, non-profits, the scientific community, and any others with a tool that can be used by all.
Exciting! Now that I’m certified to work with NatureMapping, I am already planning how to use it to develop a biodiversity inventory (for a large forested property in Marquette county). I will be starting with the timber management plan, figuring out the habitat codes, and adding ground data (either aerial photos available from the county, or working with GoogleEarth sat images). Something to do this winter! The daily observations and PDA work will have to wait until spring.
Bi-Polar Photographer Stuart Klipper sent me this NPR story about Ice Bridge, NASA’s new polar imaging project, with planes now taking the place of a dying satellite (Stuart would like to be taking photographs from the flight deck of those planes). Listen to NPR: NASA Launches Mission To Track Polar Ice By Plane (by Jon Hamilton)
The article was fascinating to me for another reason: the scientist quoted in the story is the same Thomas P. Wagner who was such a terrific liaison for me while I was in Antarctica! At that time, he was working for the National Science Foundation (Earth Sciences division) — but it seems he has since made the jump to NASA! Wow. There were NASA scientists sharing our lab at McMurdo that season, working on core-sampling equipment. Perhaps he was being recruited? Great guy — wonderful to work with. Here’s a NASA video featuring Wagner:
“NASA climate scientist Tom Wagner provides a look at the state of Arctic sea ice in 2009 and discusses NASA’s role in monitoring the cryosphere.”
