[Geowanking] Cool Temporal Animations

Mon Feb 16 14:17:17 PST 2009

Thanks Tom - lots of cool stuff there.

Forgot this paper by Mark Harrower on temporal animations that is recent:

http://www.geography.wisc.edu/~harrower/pdf/Harrower_Fabrikant.pdf

FortiusOne Inc,
2200 Wilson Blvd. suite 307
Arlington, VA 22201
cell - 202-321-3914

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Carden" <tom at tom-carden.co.uk>
To: "Sean Gorman" <Sean.Gorman at fortiusone.com>
Cc: "Mikel Maron" <mikel_maron at yahoo.com>, geowanking at geowanking.org
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2009 2:23:14 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Cool Temporal Animations

Can't believe I missed this thread!

I've also adopted Mikel's timenav tag:
http://delicious.com/TomC/timenav but I'm not a librarian so you'll
probably get slightly different lists at
http://del.icio.us/TomC/information_visualisation+time and
http://del.icio.us/TomC/maps+time too. Be thankful for the visited
link styles at del.icio.us!

My favourite / standout / canonical web-based temporal map is the
NYTimes' Casualties of War:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20061228_3000FACES_TAB2.html

In general, I'd consider any interactive map with a slider for time to
be a temporal animation, so long as it updates quickly enough. But
obviously if you've implemented the logic for a slider then putting it
on a timer and adding a play button is relatively simple - I'm seeing
a lot more sliders with play buttons on these days. (The opposite is
also true... a lot of animations and videos become interactive if you
scrub the playhead back and forth).

You have three of our projects already (cabspotting, hindsight,
mysociety travel time), but I might humbly claim that maps and time is
quite a bit of *what we do* at Stamen. So if you'll forgive the
listing of commercial work, the other things I think are relevant are:
 - http://stamen.com/clients/indigital (noteworthy because it's
realtime, sadly not public although there's a video here
http://vimeo.com/1158094)
 - http://snapshot.trulia.com (the Post got some ideas here, I reckon!)
 - http://london2012.com/map (new work launched this month)
 - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26295161 (msnbc's hurricane tracker
begins with an animation)
 - http://vimeo.com/1653627 (a video of the hurricane tracker as the
forecasts roll in, so you can see how the predictions change)

I suspect there's a whole thread we could do dedicated solely to
weather maps! Sadly play buttons and a scrubbable timeline dropped off
the feature list for the hurricane maps as the deadline closed in, but
what I really wanted to get working was a direct manipulation
interface that would allow you to move the hurricane position and
adjust the timeline, as well as the more conventional opposite. (I was
inspired by DimP http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/ - good demo at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib_g7F6WKAA)

And then there's Oakland Crime, which isn't client work so I hope
you'll forgive me for continuing... http://oakland.crimespotting.org

Our work on animating the shapes in Oakland Crime (and Trulia
Hindsight) was sparked by Mike Migurski's blog post musing on the
shape a crime takes in a  neighbourhood over time
http://mike.teczno.com/notes/oakland-crime-maps/IV

Jon Udell referenced those animations of arrests from Oakland
Crimespotting earlier this week
http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/02/11/time-space-and-data/ and asks
"Where, for example, is the general-purpose visualizer for map data
over time? In the spirit of Many Eyes, I'd like anyone to be able to
upload a simple comma-separated dataset and create an animation like
FlowingData's Growth of Target, 1962 - 2008."

Zeitgeist indeed,

Tom.

2009/2/14 Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com>:
> A couple more oldies..
>
> http://worldkit.org/population/
> http://worldkit.org/wmstimenav/
>
> some old thoughts..
>
> http://www.slideshare.net/mikel_maron/its-about-time-for-time
>
> I love temporal maps and keep some tabs on them at
> http://delicious.com/tag/timenav+geo
>
> -Mikel
>
> ________________________________
> From: "Sean.Gorman at fortiusone.com" <Sean.Gorman at fortiusone.com>
> Cc: geowanking at geowanking.org
> Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 10:09:04 AM
> Subject: [Geowanking] Cool Temporal Animations
>
> Hi -
>
> I was doing a bit of work to try and catalog the best temporal animation
> approaches for interactive maps.  I'm sure there is lots of stuff I'm
> missing and thought folks might have some suggestions or personal favorites:
>
> To get it started a few of my own:
>
> http://cabspotting.org/
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/wild-britain/migratingbirds.shtml
> (2:30 on th3e video)
> http://hindsight.trulia.com/map/
> http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/
> http://www.obleek.com/iraq/
> http://homeless.cartifact.com/
>
> Happy to aggregate and post back to the list with the final catalog.
>
> Many Thanks,
> sean
>
> _______________________________________________
> Geowanking mailing list
> Geowanking at geowanking.org
> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Geowanking mailing list
> Geowanking at geowanking.org
> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
>
>