Many thanks to Ellen Gehring of Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken for the Dutch translations. Ellen with the ELO wanted their own warper and because of this, support for locales, internationalisation and translations was added to the codebase. Huge thanks to Kamata Ryo for the work on the Locale Changer and the Japanese translations.
If you would like to see your own language, let me know. We’ve used both LocaleApp and normal Github pull requests.
This year, with Leeds City Council I developed LeedsAdultLearning.co.uk which is a course finder for about 300 courses by the City and run by a number of providers and dozens of venues. It offers a range of first step courses for adults, such as basic IT skills, ESOL, caring and crafts. Within the first 24 hours of launch it received over 3000 visits, in the first month, it had over 25,000 visits, with the average user spending three minutes on the site. The code’s up on my LearningInLeeds GitHub repository.
The project evolved from a LCC Innovation Lab – similar to the Leodis project I also worked on. The key idea is that it was designed to be a pilot or prototype project, small in scope and quick to develop, it would aim to be an aspirational example of how the City can work with the Council and open data to make good IT products. The adult education department were fully engaged with the development and design of the project, giving feedback, priorities. This engagement was really welcome and I think the experts say its crucial to any successful agile project. The department didn’t have any online course finder before so this was bringing something new, and needed to them.
It was featured in the Government Technology News site, the Yorkshire Evening Post, on Made in Leeds TV, and was shown on the big screen in Millennium Square.
The project could be altered for other organisations, and it could be altered to include the whole range of courses on offer for adults across the city region. I think usage metrics would need to be done to see what users actually do on the site, and whether the journey planning is useful. Adding extra information about course duration, how many times a week / month etc would be good. Making it more mobile friendly could be looked at, including making a mobile only app.
It’s two months since the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography held in Huddersfield in 2017. The Friday and Saturday sessions in the main auditorium were streamed live and now we are happy to have the recorded videos on VideoHud.
Friday: https://videohud.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=35b7f952-f43e-4f52-a777-28524e5b3e9a
Saturday: https://videohud.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=33167394-753d-4497-acdf-559963c81513
Of special interest is the recording of the controversial Fenella Brandenberg & David Bollinger on Friday morning which many have expressed their wishes to see, and which a few people had trouble hearing on the day.
Note that you can change the camera in the video viewer from slides and main camera (with extra video of the camera of the screen and the computer too) which might be useful for some presentations.
The Irish national radio station’s RTE 1 Inside Culture show featured the World Congress, interviewing a number of participants and covering a wide range of things, amongst a rather good show about Psychogeography in general. If you were at the Congress you might have met and chatted with Regan, or at least noticed a fella walking around with a large microphone – this is his work!
Sonia Overall, Morag Rose, Gareth Rees, Kevin Boniface and Barbara Lounder were featured, as well as the voices of Graeme Murrell and Dave Smith that I could hear.
The 4wcop specific content starts at 19 minutes, but give it all a listen!
Inside Culture http://www.rte.ie/radio1/inside-culture/
You can find the button to Listen at the end of the Inside Culture page. I think you have a month from Nov 20 2017 to listen to it. Or you can listen to the show here:
For the fifth year running I’ve been co-organizing the series of World Congresses of Psychogeography. You can read up about last years congress here. From 8-10 September in Huddersfield, the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography http://4wcop.org/ took place. The three days had around 200 people attend, with over forty events from the loony, the jolly, the thoughtful, to the sublime. I led three things, two participations, The Centre and Algorithm Walks and I represented the newly formed West Yorkshire Traipsers in hosting Derive Day. Here is my brain dump of the event as a whole and the things I went to.
Read more:
Otley Walking Festival – Psychogeographic Sound Walk. Notes from a talk.
For the second year in a run I took part in leading a psychogeography walk for the Otley Walking Festival. The festival runs for a week and has dozens of varied walks from 20 mile hikes up fell and dale, walks looking for cup and ring marks anf from local history walks to walks around allotments, and people’s gardens. I did the “Psychogeographic Sound Walk”. Here is my notes for the introduction for the walk – I expected around half a dozen folks – but we had up to 20 people with a wide range of attendees.
Mapwarper.net has been updated with several months of the latest code. Some of these features are directed towards the rectify map interface with the addition of keyboard shortcuts and the new search and add custom layer tool. If you want to support mapwarper.net donate to paypal.me/timdevelops!
Search for warped maps and mosaics (previously called layers) to add to the reference map.
Instead of searching for maps, paste in a map template string into the box. In the animation below, we get a template from another warper and add that in. You can use any tiles so long as they are in the ZXY ordered scheme e.g. https://example.com/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
Use 1, 2 and 3 on your keyboard to change mode from place point, add point and move map modes.
Press “q” to place a point at the mouse cursor – regardless of the map mode. This enables you to quickly move around and add points
In this animation, the user has the move map control mode activated, and they move the mouse of the maps, and click “q” to quickly place point at mouse location. They then hit “e” or “return” to save that point – that saves you clicking the “add control point” button!
Here the “a” key is pressed to (similar to the q key) drop a point where the mouse is, but crucially, another point on the other map is added. This works if the point you add is on either map. The other map is zoomed to that new point. You’d need at least 2 points to give this a go.
(It uses a helmert transform to work out, based on the existing points, where to add the other point – so it’s a simple 2D transform and won’t be accurate for very warped maps)
Tubesign – was a fun service information sign maker that that I made in 2013 and in 2015 TfL demanded me delete it. It has reappeared in the news, with a sign created by a Windsor doctor (around my age) being read out on the news, a few TV programmes and in parliament, and lots of media discussion about it – with the bias towards the popular “fake news” narrative.
CC-BY-SA Tubesign.uk @tube_sign and John Moore
Mapwarper.net is getting an upgrade of code early this first week in April.
New things:
You might particularly enjoy the keyboard shortcuts:
The “a” shortcut does some auto-magic where if you have 3 or more points, it will automatically place the other point at the place where it thinks works best.
Quick place “q” and save point “e” then Auto place “a” twice and save point “e”. Click the image for bigger
To try out these latest features yourself visit http://mapwarper.net
Let me know what you think!
If you wish to support the hosting and development of this project, you can donate to Tim via PayPal here: paypal.me/timdevelops
Lincoln Mullen has written a great series of workshops on the Spatial / Digital Humanities over five days. Day 3 is focused around Georectification with Mapwarper.net and is a very good tutorial.
The full workshop contents are here, and I recommend you to check them out:
Day 1: Introduction and Setup | Map Literacy | Narrative Maps
Day 2: Data Maps | QGIS
Day 3: Georectification | Working with Spatial Data
Day 4: Deep Maps | From Manuscripts to Maps
Day 5: Programmatic Maps
Lincoln is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, working on the history of American religions as a digital historian.
The link to the Georectificaiton Workshop is here: http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/spatial-workshop/georectification.html
The screenshot of the tutorial is below the fold. Continue reading
Doing Digital History 2016 is a two week Summer institute sponsored by National Endowment for the Humanities and was held at George Mason university in DC/Arlington earlier in the year. It was attended by “mid-career” historians and the focus was on digital humanities and history – making visualizations, mapping, sound and vision, and more.
I was happy to see that the participants had a workshop Georectifying maps with Map Warper.
Here’s the screenshot of the tutorial:
thinkwhere 