Tag Archives: geography

Spaces of Democracy: An evening with Doreen Massey at the Humboldt University

Think & Drink

Think & Drink

by Ares Kalandides

Reading Doreen Massey’s numerous essays that now span a 40-year career, one phrase sticks out regularly: “Geography matters!” It is sometimes put as simply and poignantly as that; sometimes in an more implicit, but still very straightforward way. For Doreen Massey this is not only an intellectual pastime. Place and space are the very materials on which her political activism is based, the stuff that keeps her going. And it’s about space that she talked again at the Think & Drink Colloquium of the Humboldt University yesterday, Monday 28th January 2013.

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How’s life? Mapping Happiness

NYC Happiness heatmap - onehappybird.com

Where is the happiest place in New York?

by Hans Pul

Where is the happiest place in New York? The above diagram maps “happiness” in the city based on the content of geotagged tweets. The diagram is structured according Manhattan’s grid, where red blocks represent “happy tweets”, while blueish blocks indicate a lower grade of happiness. It was created by researchers of the University of Vermont and is part of a fascinating post (read it, it makes you happy).

After the break I will introduce “Mappiness”, an iPhone app designed to collect data about how happy people are, taking into account their activities, the people they are with and the type of environment they’re in.

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Alternative Mapping – Another Type

By Renard Teipelke

In my last article, I wrote about alternative mapping. I referred to somewhat ‘weird’ maps showing France illustrated by various wines or the London underground presented as 100 years of music. My main arguments were that these alternative maps are fun, offer new viewpoints, need to be interpreted by the user, have some kind of soul as well as constitute and make a space or a place special. This time, I will deal with another type of alternative mapping: Maps of the ‘augmented reality’ period we are currently experiencing (cf. Valentin Schipfer’s recent article). I will point out some important aspects – some of them were presented by French economics sociologist Franck Cochoy in a recent lecture titled “Exploring the commercial space with a smartphone: Curiosity, geotraceability and self-marketing” (Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, 11 January 2012). Continue reading

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Alternative Mapping

Worldmapper: Absolute Poverty (up to $2 a day) (Territory size shows the proportion of all people living on less than or equal to US$2 in purchasing power parity a day.)


by Renard Teipelke

This article is about maps. If you are thinking back to geography classes in school or your last trip with a roadmap, you will be misled. There has always been more to maps, more in maps, and more about maps than ‘standard map bureaucrats’ would ever want to admit. Let us start with a simple question:

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