Bomb Sight

As a child growing up in East London in the early 1970s I vividly remember the scattered derelict plots that were the vestiges of bombed-out buildings of the Blitz and the family stories that accompanied each, so and so was killed here, this bomb fell on such a date, the day the house was bombed, my mother pursued along the High Road by a marauding Messerschmidt. In our sideboard we had a scrapbook that held a copy of the bomb census map, published in the local paper just after the War ended. Fascinated I poured over it, looking for all the bombs that fell near our family home. So here is something rather special and evocative for me. Bomb Sight is an interactive map of the London Blitz, resulting from a JISC funded research project led by Dr Kate Jones in the Department of Geography at the University of Portsmouth. As well as being a fascinating piece of research, it is a great example of the power of GIS and web mapping to mash together disparate data to generate new insight and meaning, and has some really nice, clean cartography to boot.

Available via the project website and soon as an Android Ap with added augmented reality function, this is a very clever use of technology and personally carries me back to those childhood days of parental reminiscence and a not so distant and ominous past.

Beyond Red: MS Remote Sensing of Landscape

Greatly enjoyed speaking at the Irish Quaternary Association annual symposium on Remote sensing: Applications in Quaternary Science, Archaeology and Landscape Management at the Geological survey of Ireland in Dublin.  Among some outstanding contributions the work of the Geological Survey of Ireland on mapping Quaternary sediments stood out.  The draft digital mapping was of exceptional quality and the maps themselves highly effective cartography.  GSI make much of their digital data freely available for use via their website, which is an example to all providers of public data.

My own presentation,on work using multispectral and hyperspectral airborne imagery for archaeological prospection and mapping is on slideshare and available below.

Mind Maps

I remember first coming across the idea of mental maps, maps that reflect how we perceive and negotiate the environment around us, rather than reflect real space or concrete spatial relationships as a geography undergraduate.  I like this TED talk by graphic designer and cartographer Aris Venetikidis that elegantly describes how we mentally process space and movement through it and applies these concepts to the chaotic muddle of public transport in Dublin,  The results are elegant, meaningful visualizations of movement through the real and mental space of Dublin.  Impressive.

Found some stones in a field: A day of Stonehenge

September 11th 2012, one day at Stonehenge, one day of visitors, one day of tweeted pictures.  Found some stones in a field, definitely made by aliens...