Mapping Regional Language Use
So for the thousandth (or so it seems) time I’ve gotten into this discussion with my friends from the East Coast and Midwest (I’m from Texas) about the correct way to refer to a sweet carbonated beverage, and I have finally got to thinking about ways to map locally spoken slang and jargon using GIS. Starting a database of ‘events’ where a person uses unique language in reference to a common-place item or occurrence (I have a friend from Wisconsin who calls the drinking fountain a “bubbler”) would be an insightful way to examine how jargon or slang starts and spreads geographically.Read more…
Peer Review for Visual Aids?
How frustrating is this: You sit down to take in some form of scholarly work (be it a book, an article, or a talk) and you find yourself increasingly confused with a bombardment of information from graphs and figures and maps which don’t make sense because they either have too much or too little information contained within them or the information is poorly labeled (if at all). Or even worse, you are the person writing the book/article or giving the talk and instead of fielding questions on your scholarly processes, you are repeatedly explaining to the audience what your visual aids actually represent.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but if it is not a language your audience speaks, where have your efforts gotten you?Read more…
Map “Vocabularies”
For the past year, I have been working on the Scholars’ Lab Geospatial Data Portal, the lab’s effort to make our GIS data sets readily available to UVA students, faculty, and staff via the world wide web by using a suite of open source, open standards-based applications. A particular aspect of this project that I have enjoyed exploring is the way in which we display our visual information.
Stop to think about the last paper map you used. Minor roads were probably displayed with a line of a certain color and thickness, highways with another. Green spaces were colored differently from open water and buildings etcetera. Cartographers have long toiled to develop visual representations of our environment and make them identifiable for the greater use. Read more…
