Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. โค๏ธ

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

kottke.org posts about mikemigurski

Folding experience into paper maps

Two recent projects that incorporate the experiences of map users into the subsequent versions of the maps:

1. For the Salone di Mobile event in Milan, The British Council commissioned a map of the event that would be augmented each day with information flowing in from Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and people’s physical scribbles on the maps.

One thing that’s very interesting to us that is using this rapidly-produced thing then becomes a ‘social object’: creating conversations, collecting scribbles, instigating adventures - which then get collected and redistributed.

More information about the project is available on The Incidental site.

2. Walking Maps, produced by Mike Migurski at Stamen, encourages people print out maps from OpenStreetMap, annotate them with missing information, and scan them back in.

In some places, participants are creating the first freely-available maps by GPS survey. In other places, such as the United States, basic roads exist, but lack local detail: locations of traffic signals, ATMs, caf’es, schools, parks, and shops. What such partially-mapped places need is not more GPS traces, but additional knowledge about what exists on and around the street. Walking Papers is made to help you easily create printed maps, mark them with things you know, and then share that knowledge with OpenStreetMap.


Stamen interview

Short interview with Mike Migurski and Tom Carden of Stamen about their projects and process.

We try to start from a position of great abundance and information, to show the vastness or the liveness. I think live, vast, and deep is some of the terminology that we’ve been using lately in a lot of our talks.


BLDGBLOG posts a series of maps showing

BLDGBLOG posts a series of maps showing how, through the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates, North America came to its present position and shape. Full set of maps here.

Update: Mike Migurski combined the maps into an awesome movie spanning 550 million years. It’s….wait for it…..the longest movie ever made!