Kathleen Dowling, Dana Hart and I presented on Folksonomies in Museums, our final project for our Knowledge Organization class. Below are the presentation slides and poster.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Friday, November 30, 2012
Archiving Digital Maps
An excerpt and presentation from an academic paper on archiving digital maps:
I have been a member of the Geographic Information System (“GIS”) community in New York City, since the early 1990s when I was a real estate researcher at Price Waterhouse. In those days, except for certain Federal departments, like the US Census, geographic data was largely held by the institutions that created it. Datasets were static, finite and, until the advent of DVDs and the World Wide Web, difficult to share, due to their often massive file size and the slow speed of internet file transfer. The sharing that did happen was informal, occasional, and often blocked, inadvertently or deliberately, by agency policy or licensing terms that restrict third party distribution. Census data and commercial products, such as demographics tables from Sales & Marketing Magazine, were available at the New York Public Library on tape, microfilm and later on DVD, but more proprietary data sources were often obtained through expensive licensing agreements or barter and a network of “who you know.” The GIS user group, GISMO, formed in 1990, was one place where such sharing occurred.
GISMO was originally created as a software user network where GIS professionals shared information on GIS tools and applications and presented projects at informal bi-monthly meetings. At the time that GISMO was formed, NYC agency geographers were frustrated with the lack of centrality of geographic data at the City level. There was no common base map of New York City on which to overlay geospatial data and no City library where geospatial resources were archived and available for extensive employee use. To address this problem, GISMO offered the following data advocacy statement:
In this paper, I will take a look at the access issues that led a group of geographers to work toward developing a centralized data repository for New York City and how these efforts were mirrored and extended at the national level. While I learned a lot about GIS metadata and software, I will focus more on policy issues around the management of geographic data collections and then discuss archiving management issues more generally. I will avoid delving deeply into political themes around data access and control, though they do have a role in the history of geographic data and how public release and archival decisions are made. I will present information on early data clearinghouses and website archives which provided examples for more robust archival programs at local and national institutions, including NYPL, the Library of Congress, Data.Gov and the NYC Open Data initiative. I will also look at the cost of data, economic limitations on access and the promise of open data.
Full paper (.DOC 145.9kb)
I have been a member of the Geographic Information System (“GIS”) community in New York City, since the early 1990s when I was a real estate researcher at Price Waterhouse. In those days, except for certain Federal departments, like the US Census, geographic data was largely held by the institutions that created it. Datasets were static, finite and, until the advent of DVDs and the World Wide Web, difficult to share, due to their often massive file size and the slow speed of internet file transfer. The sharing that did happen was informal, occasional, and often blocked, inadvertently or deliberately, by agency policy or licensing terms that restrict third party distribution. Census data and commercial products, such as demographics tables from Sales & Marketing Magazine, were available at the New York Public Library on tape, microfilm and later on DVD, but more proprietary data sources were often obtained through expensive licensing agreements or barter and a network of “who you know.” The GIS user group, GISMO, formed in 1990, was one place where such sharing occurred.
GISMO was originally created as a software user network where GIS professionals shared information on GIS tools and applications and presented projects at informal bi-monthly meetings. At the time that GISMO was formed, NYC agency geographers were frustrated with the lack of centrality of geographic data at the City level. There was no common base map of New York City on which to overlay geospatial data and no City library where geospatial resources were archived and available for extensive employee use. To address this problem, GISMO offered the following data advocacy statement:
GISMO supports freer access to data through interaction between NYC area GIS users as well as the following long range initiatives:
|
In this paper, I will take a look at the access issues that led a group of geographers to work toward developing a centralized data repository for New York City and how these efforts were mirrored and extended at the national level. While I learned a lot about GIS metadata and software, I will focus more on policy issues around the management of geographic data collections and then discuss archiving management issues more generally. I will avoid delving deeply into political themes around data access and control, though they do have a role in the history of geographic data and how public release and archival decisions are made. I will present information on early data clearinghouses and website archives which provided examples for more robust archival programs at local and national institutions, including NYPL, the Library of Congress, Data.Gov and the NYC Open Data initiative. I will also look at the cost of data, economic limitations on access and the promise of open data.
Full paper (.DOC 145.9kb)
Monday, September 10, 2012
Presidential Libraries
My presentation on Presidential Libraries, featuring the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
Monday, July 23, 2012
GeoSprocket Live Survey on GIS Tools
The first round of results of a recent GIS user poll from GeoSprocket, asking about GIS tool used and frequency of use, are available:
Bill Morris surveyed GIS users via several feeds including a Vermont GIS listserv, ESRI and O'Reilly conference hashtags and the author's social media accounts. An interesting survey, but difficult to get a good read on who the sample represents. Not knowing how many people follow a specific Twitter hashtag, it is difficult to measure how many of the respondents might have found the survey via the ESRI versus the O'Reilly hashtag.
With those caveats, let's look at the numbers.
In the first release, 55% of the respondents are primary ESRI users, 24% use open source GIS tools, 16% are Google Map users and 8% use some other tool, including FME, MicroStation, ENVI/IDL, GIS Cloud, AutoDesk, Maptitude, Idrisi, Mapserver, Geocortex and others. Bill noted surprise at how many Google users there are. Frankly, I would have thought there would be more, but perhaps Bill's social network skews toward ESRI or that more people follow the ESRI hashtag than the O'Reilly one.
Overlap in product use is what I find most interesting about this survey. It seems a larger proportion of people who use non-ESRI tools like Google Maps or open source products also use ESRI tools (80% versus 40%). However, 75% of ESRI users also use Google Maps. This indicates that there is value for a lot of people in using a mixed approach.
The second round of Bill's survey remains open and live results indicate that there are indeed more Google users than the first round suggested. As of today, ESRI users remain the majority with 48% of users versus 30% Google Maps. The other categories are relatively the same.
It will be interesting to see how these numbers change as more people enter the survey.
It would also be more interesting and indeed useful to see why certain tools are used over others as opposed to simply which tools were used. Clearly with up to 80% overlap of use there must be reasons why certain tools are chosen for certain tasks. Hopefully, Bill will add that question in a subsequent survey.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Information Architecture of Emergency Response (for Designers)
My IxDA July 12 presentation on Information Architecture of Emergency Response (for Designers) is now available at: http://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/information-architecture-of-emergency-response-for-designers. Thanks to IxDA and Pivotal Labs for hosting, Peter March for MCing and Jennifer Kilian at Hot Studio for bringing the pizza.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
The Information Architecture of Emergency Response
Now that I have been accepted into the Pratt Institute Masters of Library and Information Science program, I have started a journey to document the convergence between two of my favorite disciplines, Geographic Information Systems and Information Architecture. In the past few months, I've noticed an explosion of conferences and meetups addressing the geolocational aspects of digital applications for the web and especially mobile. I am a member of 16 different Meetup groups, eight of which address some aspect of the User Experience umbrella, four of which specialize in mapping and/or GIS, two somewhat general technology groups and two more that approach these disciplines from the fascinating perspectives of digital semiotics and data visualization and infographics. Each have hosted topics on user experience and location based design at some point. Many maddeningly scheduled for the same evening.
Commiserating with some of my colleagues with whom I helped create the NYC GeoSymposium 2001-2011-2021 back in November, we have found that in each of our practices, cartographers, GIS specialists and those working with visualizing location based information are finding a great need for design assistance. This seems natural, if somewhat belated and perhaps even surprising. Think of some of the most beautifully designed images and one must of course reflect on the maps of National Geographic magazine, those gorgeous squares of folded paper that come in every issue. Certainly, there is a longstanding sensibility around the design of useful and pleasing maps. Increasingly, these maps are in our hands on tablets and smart phones, so optimizing the display of information that used to be represented in enormous, rolled or folded pieces of paper is a challenge for our community.
I reprised the presentation, modified somewhat for an emergency responder audience for the Office of Emergency Management's annual Women's History Month Breakfast, where I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Dr. Irene Osborne of Mount Sinai Hospital, who treated patients' internal injuries during the Haiti earthquake, and IA Institute founder and Development Manager, Bev Corwin, who presented on language translation in crisis situations, in particular a handheld Creole language translation device that she developed with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University.
It may also be interesting for my UX friends to hear (as I've heard through the grapevine) that ESRI, leader in GIS software, is developing an internal UX practice and should be hiring soon.
Slide decks of my IA of Emergency Response talks are now available at Slideshare:
March 23:
March 28:
Commiserating with some of my colleagues with whom I helped create the NYC GeoSymposium 2001-2011-2021 back in November, we have found that in each of our practices, cartographers, GIS specialists and those working with visualizing location based information are finding a great need for design assistance. This seems natural, if somewhat belated and perhaps even surprising. Think of some of the most beautifully designed images and one must of course reflect on the maps of National Geographic magazine, those gorgeous squares of folded paper that come in every issue. Certainly, there is a longstanding sensibility around the design of useful and pleasing maps. Increasingly, these maps are in our hands on tablets and smart phones, so optimizing the display of information that used to be represented in enormous, rolled or folded pieces of paper is a challenge for our community.
Let's Talk About Maps
So I am doing my part in continuing this discussion of the place for design in online mapping. In March, I presented a talk in New Orleans at the 2012 IA Summit on The Information Architecture of Emergency Response. The presentation explored the evolution of technology in emergency response, with a special focus on advances in geographic systems, incident management, social media and policy in New York City since September 11, 2001. In it, I cover questions like:
- What technologies do emergency responders in NYC use?
- How have events like 9/11 and other incidents influenced technology advances?
- What effect, if any, has the change from a Law Enforcement Mayor to a Media Mayor had on data policy?
- What are the challenges and opportunities of open government data?
- How is social media being used in NYC and elsewhere to engage the public in emergency preparedness and response?
- And, finally, are app contests and hackathons an effective way to improve public services in difficult economic times?
I reprised the presentation, modified somewhat for an emergency responder audience for the Office of Emergency Management's annual Women's History Month Breakfast, where I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Dr. Irene Osborne of Mount Sinai Hospital, who treated patients' internal injuries during the Haiti earthquake, and IA Institute founder and Development Manager, Bev Corwin, who presented on language translation in crisis situations, in particular a handheld Creole language translation device that she developed with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University.
Continuing the Discussion
I have been asked to present another redux of Information Architecture of Emergency Response at the IxDA NYC's July meetup. I hope to conclude the IxDA with a Town Hall discussion of how the IA community can support emergency response efforts throughout each of our own neighborhoods. I ran out of time in New Orleans and would like to get a good conversation going with the UX community on issues and ideas for further exploration. My daughter's 6th grade graduation is June 7, so I will be missing the IxDA meeting that focuses on the Social Lives of Maps, with UX designer Ray Cha and Green Map's Thomas Turnbull. But I understand the GIS community will have someone there. If you attend, please introduce yourself to Jack Eichenbaum, who founded GISMO, a 20+ year old, NYC-based GIS user group. In the meantime, stay tuned for RSVP information for the July event.It may also be interesting for my UX friends to hear (as I've heard through the grapevine) that ESRI, leader in GIS software, is developing an internal UX practice and should be hiring soon.
Slide decks of my IA of Emergency Response talks are now available at Slideshare:
March 23:
March 28:
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Towards a 9/11 GeoArchive
Imagine if the most graphic and expressive artifacts from one of the most historic events in New York City lay rolled in tubes in a dusty corner. What if millions of bytes of geographic data, produced through an unprecedented, community collaboration, were dispersed, disconnected and hidden from public view? If you had the opportunity to preserve them, how would you do it?
During the September 11, 2001 rescue and recovery operations, I volunteered to help recruit geographers through a NYC-based GIS user group, called GISMO. The need was critical and overwhelming. The Mayor's Office of Emergency Management had been evacuated and no longer had access to maps and data necessary for the rescue effort, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they lacked the number of skilled hands to produce the hundreds of maps per day required by the unprecedented event. At this point, GISMO had been working for years to advocate for data sharing and cooperation among city, state, non-profit and private entities, and developed into a 400 strong social network. Hundreds of volunteers, many from GISMO, stepped forward. This effort served as a highly regarded, if anomalous, model for unified response in years to come. But the artifacts from this effort have not been preserved in any curatorial sense. I'd like to change that.
I recently participated in the NYC GeoSymposium 2001-2011-2021, which took a look at the advances and challenges of Geographic Information Systems in emergency response since 2001. Around this time I had been thinking very hard about my career goals and ways to combine my past experience in research and design with the grassroots efforts of the geographic community. I had been working with colleagues at GISMO for many years to draw attention to the important role geographers played in the 9/11 rescue and recovery. The GeoSymposium was a great experience, because it intended not just to honor those who participated in these efforts, but also to highlight the need to preserve the thousands of maps that tell the story.
My own contribution to the GeoSymposium was to explore the legacy of these efforts by examining the technological improvements at the Office of Emergency Management in the context of emergency events that had occurred since 2001. I was looking for a way to present time-based information in a map format and also to start a conversation with attendees about the history of emergency response technology and the importance of the preservation of geographic artifacts. My project contained a map of New York City with events plotted and color-coded by discrete periods, characterized by a common group of new technologies. An online version of the map is available at ArgGIS Explorer Online.
Map Detail Slides
The map highlights how the events surrounding 9/11 prompted improvements in incident management technology. Attendees, including the keynote presenter and eminent information designer, Edward Tufte, gathered around to discuss their experience with the events I had mapped and to offer advice on ways to enrich its design. (Some of Mr. Tufte’s comments led to further improvements which you can see via the links above.)
Simply talking about how to improve the map was an exercise in exploring history and memory: how people understand what happened, how events are related to one another, how what you choose to include and what not to include can influence a person’s understanding of the events, how the description of one event can bring to mind another similar one, etc. It was thrilling to observe the spontaneous conversation that started all because of a three by four foot piece of foamboard.
And that’s just one artifact. In the aftermath of 9/11, hundreds of maps were produced – Every Day – for months. The 9/11 geographic effort represented a level of cooperation not seen before or since, but whose legacy, coupled with improvements in technology platforms themselves, informs the open data initiatives we are now seeing throughout the U.S.
Of course, the artifacts of the 9/11 response have historical value by themselves. And that is where the images of dusty, neglected rolls of paper come in (even though most of the maps are on disks and hard drives). Several of my GISMO colleagues and I are exploring a plan to create a 9/11 Geographic Archive, featuring the maps that were produced during the rescue and recovery effort. I plan to present an outline of the 9/11 Geographic Archive and my map of emergency response technologies at the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in March 2012. Such an archive would be an important contribution to the history of emergency response in this country.
I have always loved presenting information in meaningful and digestible ways, whether through maps, market research reports, drawings, websites or online resource libraries and intranets. From very early in my career, I have been driven to present information in a coherent way and to seek out tools and processes that make coming to understanding easier. I am thrilled by the convergence that today's state of technology allows between geographic tools and the digital storytelling of the user experience discipline. What is really great about this project is that I will be able to combine aspects of two fields that I love into an end product that would have meaning for many now and in years to come.
So, if you had the opportunity to preserve artifacts from an important event in New York City history, how would you do it? Some of the groundwork has already begun. I have been working with a mentor to explore relationships with organizations that support technology projects in the digital humanities, and with museums and libraries that share an interest in geographic artifacts and 9/11. I am building on my relationships with the City’s amazing geographic community through GISMO, the thirty Geosymposium presenters who told the 9/11 story and senior staff at the Office of Emergency Management and other consultants who have expressed interest in an archive. (I have even applied to an information science program where I hope to explore this project further). Finally and perhaps most importantly, I have the support of members of the GISMO Steering Committee to pursue further resources and trainings to develop the framework for an archive entity. With that grounding, I can turn the question "How would you do it?" into "When can I start?"
During the September 11, 2001 rescue and recovery operations, I volunteered to help recruit geographers through a NYC-based GIS user group, called GISMO. The need was critical and overwhelming. The Mayor's Office of Emergency Management had been evacuated and no longer had access to maps and data necessary for the rescue effort, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they lacked the number of skilled hands to produce the hundreds of maps per day required by the unprecedented event. At this point, GISMO had been working for years to advocate for data sharing and cooperation among city, state, non-profit and private entities, and developed into a 400 strong social network. Hundreds of volunteers, many from GISMO, stepped forward. This effort served as a highly regarded, if anomalous, model for unified response in years to come. But the artifacts from this effort have not been preserved in any curatorial sense. I'd like to change that.
I recently participated in the NYC GeoSymposium 2001-2011-2021, which took a look at the advances and challenges of Geographic Information Systems in emergency response since 2001. Around this time I had been thinking very hard about my career goals and ways to combine my past experience in research and design with the grassroots efforts of the geographic community. I had been working with colleagues at GISMO for many years to draw attention to the important role geographers played in the 9/11 rescue and recovery. The GeoSymposium was a great experience, because it intended not just to honor those who participated in these efforts, but also to highlight the need to preserve the thousands of maps that tell the story.
My own contribution to the GeoSymposium was to explore the legacy of these efforts by examining the technological improvements at the Office of Emergency Management in the context of emergency events that had occurred since 2001. I was looking for a way to present time-based information in a map format and also to start a conversation with attendees about the history of emergency response technology and the importance of the preservation of geographic artifacts. My project contained a map of New York City with events plotted and color-coded by discrete periods, characterized by a common group of new technologies. An online version of the map is available at ArgGIS Explorer Online.
Map Detail Slides
The map highlights how the events surrounding 9/11 prompted improvements in incident management technology. Attendees, including the keynote presenter and eminent information designer, Edward Tufte, gathered around to discuss their experience with the events I had mapped and to offer advice on ways to enrich its design. (Some of Mr. Tufte’s comments led to further improvements which you can see via the links above.)
Simply talking about how to improve the map was an exercise in exploring history and memory: how people understand what happened, how events are related to one another, how what you choose to include and what not to include can influence a person’s understanding of the events, how the description of one event can bring to mind another similar one, etc. It was thrilling to observe the spontaneous conversation that started all because of a three by four foot piece of foamboard.
And that’s just one artifact. In the aftermath of 9/11, hundreds of maps were produced – Every Day – for months. The 9/11 geographic effort represented a level of cooperation not seen before or since, but whose legacy, coupled with improvements in technology platforms themselves, informs the open data initiatives we are now seeing throughout the U.S.
Of course, the artifacts of the 9/11 response have historical value by themselves. And that is where the images of dusty, neglected rolls of paper come in (even though most of the maps are on disks and hard drives). Several of my GISMO colleagues and I are exploring a plan to create a 9/11 Geographic Archive, featuring the maps that were produced during the rescue and recovery effort. I plan to present an outline of the 9/11 Geographic Archive and my map of emergency response technologies at the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in March 2012. Such an archive would be an important contribution to the history of emergency response in this country.
I have always loved presenting information in meaningful and digestible ways, whether through maps, market research reports, drawings, websites or online resource libraries and intranets. From very early in my career, I have been driven to present information in a coherent way and to seek out tools and processes that make coming to understanding easier. I am thrilled by the convergence that today's state of technology allows between geographic tools and the digital storytelling of the user experience discipline. What is really great about this project is that I will be able to combine aspects of two fields that I love into an end product that would have meaning for many now and in years to come.
So, if you had the opportunity to preserve artifacts from an important event in New York City history, how would you do it? Some of the groundwork has already begun. I have been working with a mentor to explore relationships with organizations that support technology projects in the digital humanities, and with museums and libraries that share an interest in geographic artifacts and 9/11. I am building on my relationships with the City’s amazing geographic community through GISMO, the thirty Geosymposium presenters who told the 9/11 story and senior staff at the Office of Emergency Management and other consultants who have expressed interest in an archive. (I have even applied to an information science program where I hope to explore this project further). Finally and perhaps most importantly, I have the support of members of the GISMO Steering Committee to pursue further resources and trainings to develop the framework for an archive entity. With that grounding, I can turn the question "How would you do it?" into "When can I start?"
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