Getting started with OpenStreetMap: Making your first edit

If you want to contribute but aren’t familiar with OpenStreetMap (OSM), here’s a tutorial to get you started. There are two quick ways to begin with OSM, you can edit the map with local information or armchair map for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT.) Either way, you’ll need to create a free account here. This LearningOSM guide is also worth a look.

Method one: Edit what you know

Once you’re logged in, choose your editor. The easiest one for beginners is iD. You’ll be asked if you want the walkthrough before editing – take it! There are more details on settings below in the humanitarian tutorial. Continue reading

Making digital maps with pen and paper: Meet Field Papers

Field Papers is a great low-tech solution for mapping. You chose an area to map, print it, walk outside with the paper copy and mark things up, then scan or take a pic of it with the QR code and it’s added as a layer to OpenStreetMap (OSM). From there you can add your data to the largest public, editable map in the world.

It’s the handiwork of venerable design firm Stamen, who later got together with U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for improvements. Because it’s an open-source project whose last major changes were made five years ago and many tutorials showed the previous interface, it seemed like a good idea to test drive it.

The quick slide show above shows how it works — even if you make rookie mistakes like leaving the clipboard in your photo, duh! — the test run taking about an hour total, from figuring out how to position the map to editing in OSM.

It’s been used around the world for large mapathons, where people don’t have smartphones or OSM knowledge — you hand them sheets, they go out mapping, then they hand in the sheets and they’re done. It can be a potential bottleneck for OSM data entry after collection, but surmountable. Potentially it’s also an advantage — you can get a lot of people out mapping but only need a few with OSM knowledge or who want to learn.

Geographer maps San Francisco’s bike politics

Copenhagen has a lot more in common with San Francisco than most people think, says San Francisco State geography professor Jason Henderson.

While many look to the capital of Denmark as a Nordic idyll where the drin of bicycle bells outnumbers the blare of car horns, Henderson says it went through the same political fights to get there. “It’s not a magical unique place, actually, and that opens up the doors to possibility,” says Henderson, who spent a 2016 research sabbatical in Copenhagen and has a forthcoming book about the two cities.

Speaking at a recent Nerd Nite, Henderson gave some gears to grind as San Francisco heads into June 5 elections. Politics matter – how streets are configured, how much car ownership is taxed, how much space is allocated and protected for car parking and who decides these issues – and the daily habits of politicians matter, too.

“It’s important if we’re going to have not just a bicycle city but a truly sustainable transportation city,” he says. The problem? Few San Francisco politicians are really behind the bike as a method of transportation. Continue reading

Why OpenStreetMap matters: Where did Dokdo go?

One of the rocky outcrops under dispute. Photo // CC BY NC

Battle lines have always been drawn over maps. Place names are political, cultural, temporal: from Constantinople to Istanbul and Burma to Myanmar what a place is called matters.
In the digital age, however, you have no idea who is behind the changes and why.  The companies that make the maps millions of people use every day change names following opaque processes that appear to depend on who lobbies loudest at the moment. It’s a strong argument for free, public, editable maps like OpenStreetMap where both the changes and the debate are transparent.

About a week ago, I spotted this poster petitioning Google to put Dokdo back on the map at San Francisco’s Korean American Community Center of San Francisco & Bay Area.

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Quick preview of forthcoming book “All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey”

Most of us have swerved a few wrong turns or hacked through some questionable trails and cursed the map. Most of us, though, wouldn’t spend seven years and engage dozens of experts to make a better one.

Then again, most of us aren’t Bradford Washburn. This climb-every-mountain polymath was let down by the sketchy trail maps of the Grand Canyon available in 1969. At the time, age 60 and director of the Boston Science Museum, he knew what made a good map. Washburn was the first climber to scale 20,320-foot Denali and his map of the peak is still considered the definitive map of the region. A pioneer in aerial photography, he’d go on to map Mount Everest and the Presidential Range.

But it’s his National Geographic Grand Canyon map, finally published in 1978, that illustrates his “extreme dedication to the craft of map making” says Betsy Mason, co-author of Nat Geo’s All over the Map blog. Mason previewed one of the 80 stories and showed off some of the 200 maps from forthcoming book she wrote with colleague Greg Miller titled “All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey” at the recent California Map Society spring meeting.

It was the best of crowds (people who readily chime in with the correct pronunciation of “theodolite” and already grasp the merits of hachuring) and the worst of crowds (after lunch on a warm Saturday) but the story behind the Grand Canyon map kept people mostly awake and ready to push over the 45-minute session limit with questions.

Mason and Miller first started the Map Lab blog back at Wired, then moved it over to National Geographic in 2013. Mason, taken with Washburn’s Grand Canyon map the first time she saw it, went archive diving at her new employer’s and found a “huge trove of boxes” about the making of the map.

Photo brewbooks on Flickr. // CC BY NC

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Mapping UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage spots

Looking at the most recent UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity it’s clear that these “elements,” as they’re called, are all over the map.

There’s painting, weaving, pizza making and spring rituals: but while they offer up videos, photos and text — there’s no actual map of these landmarks in sight.

Making that map shines a spotlight on why organizing data is crucial — and how every organization is a data trove and should be its own best data detective. Plotting visually can inform decision making and highlight patterns – inside trends to be worked into deeper groves or used to recalucate course. The list, according to UNESCO, is “made up of those intangible heritage elements that help demonstrate the diversity of this heritage and raise awareness about its importance.” Continue reading

Five-minute map: San Francisco’s proposed Uber/Lyft loading zones

Update: March 23, 2018. A pilot zone geofencing Lyft drivers from picking up passengers on Valencia Street has been added in the Mission. Source: Examiner.com

If you drive, walk or bike in San Francisco you know what a nightmare the ride-hailing services can be.

And if you use them often you’re probably in the habit of trying to pin yourself on a side street or a big empty parking space/driveway and pray they don’t double park while trying to find you. (Zipping past the anecdotal, it’s been calculated that 45,000 Uber and Lyft vehicles now operating in San Francisco account for more than 200,000 trips a day.)

So now the city is interested in adding ride-hailing passenger pick-up zones in a horse- trading effort to wring more data from these startups.

The San Francisco Examiner reports there are seven proposed “loading zones” and maybe one or two will be piloted. It’s a well-reported story — except that it’s missing a map. The neighborhoods are Hayes Valley, Inner Richmond, Inner Sunset, Noe Valley, North Beach, Marina and downtown.

Five minutes later with Google Maps:

A few things jump out — there’s nothing in the traffic-choked Mission district (see update above) and two “maybes” downtown. (The mapped one on Howard Street above and another potential one left unmapped since it’s described as “between Howard and Third or Fourth streets.”)

Also, once they’re mapped, if you zoom in it’s apparent that the length of these zones varies widely. The North Beach one looks like road rage waiting to happen.

San Francisco does have passenger loading zones already — white curbs with a time limit of five minutes — which in my armchair estimation (and the name “curbs”) says they’re mostly shorter than the approximately 600 feet (two blocks) of the shortest ride-hailing zones in the Richmond and Sunset…

Thoughts?

Full story over at The Examiner.

What’s under the canals of Venice? Old boats, tires and a few surprises

Image courtesy Ismar-Cnr.

Most visitors to Venice drift through the canals on gondolas taking selfies. But a group of researchers spent seven months puttering along pointing high-resolution multibeam echosounders into the waters instead. About 30 of them in all worked aboard the powerboat Litus, intent on mapping the Venice lagoon to gauge the effects of climate change on one of the world’s most improbable cities.

Research boat Litus, courtesy Ismar-CNR

While what’s under those gray-green waters isn’t exactly surprising — boat parts, old tires and containers — scientists say the underwater elevation mapping (that’s “bathymetry,” for the technically minded) comes at a critical time.

Old boats, tires and containers. Image courtesy Ismar-Cnr.

The last 100 years have radically altered the shape and ecological makeup of the lagoon, researchers say: for starters, salt marsh areas shrunk by half and underlying sediment has radically shifted. The “floating city” already struggles to stay above water in the spring and summer floods and relative sea level rise is expected to increase their frequency. The Mose system, with its 78 mobile gates that can hold back almost 10 feet of water, construction launched in 2003 and is said to be near completion in 2018.

Entrance to Malamocco port 1) Mose gate 2) 48-meter (157-foot) trench 3) the oil refinery canal. Image courtesy Ismar-Cnr.

“Before the Mose system begins to function, it was important to have a full picture of the bathymetry and currents of the tidal channels and inlets, which are the most dynamic portion of the lagoon,” researchers say in a paper published in “Nature.” They caution that the relatively rapid erosive process could threaten the stability of the “hard structures” (read: priceless palazzos) in the near future and should certainly be periodically monitored.

If you want to dig into the datasets, the scientists from research groups (Ismar-Cnr and Iim) have CC-licensed and made them available online with the paper.

A scour hole found where two channels meet. Image courtesy Ismar-Cnr.

“The data also allows us to identify areas with large dunes at the bottom and adjacent erosion sites that document the most dynamic points in the deep lagoon, where it’s important to cyclically repeat these studies to quantify the movement of sediments,” head of the study Fantina Madricardo says in the press release (translation mine.)

Part of the reason these Venice maps look so trippy (or alarming?) is due to the city’s curious geography, perching atop 118 islands bridged by canals. On most bathymetric maps, deeper waters are represented by soothing darker shades (green, blue, violet) and warmer colors (red, orange, yellow) represent shallower waters. A bathymetric map of the San Francisco Bay by comparison looks, well, a lot more soothing despite its notorious currents.

How to investigate your government through algorithms

Some kinds of reporting-by-the-numbers are anything but lazy. Take investigations looking into algorithms — examining the formulas used by the government to determine who is more likely to commit a crime or how likely your building is to have a fire inspection.

Speaking at the recent International Festival of Journalism, Nick Diakopoulos, assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and a member of its Human Computer Interaction Lab, gave a solid primer on how to get started.

He’s been studying the wider reach of algorithms in society, government and industry for about four years, coming at it from a computer science background as a “techie who worked my way into journalism.” Boyish, bespectacled and occasionally prone to professorial turns of phrase like “algorithmic accountability,” Diakopoulos offered a look into the numbers that shape our lives. Continue reading