Has everything been discovered?
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When I was a kid, my world seemed so large. I remember drawing intricate treasure maps, tracing lines that would lead me to crawl under tables, jump between couches (and above hot lava), and travel long hallways to reach the spot marked by the “x”. The vast expanse of my world? My parents’ tiny Parisian apartment.
It is fascinating how our mental maps and ways we navigate to the places we know best inform the perceived scale of our surroundings. As children, our universe is mostly composed of big memorable things, the ones we can locate on our own. Dylan Moriarty’s “Foggy Spaces” describes it best when he writes about what the “known world” looked like to him as a 6-year-old. “Sure, I knew there was an Olive Garden somewhere in the aether, but where it was relative to my home and how to get there were beyond me,” he explains. As a child, everything in between our known world is just a mysterious fog waiting to be unveiled.
Contrast that to today, experiencing the growing use of navigation applications and location data, and the world seems finite, with very little left unexplored. One thing that caught our attention in Dylan’s essay is his questioning around our sense of discovery. We travel from point A to B following a path calculated by algorithms. To get lost, we’d have to be very intentional about it.
Satellite imagery gives us access to the entire surface of the globe and even ocean floors. Telemetry data reveals the way and the speed that we navigate cities, nooks and crannies included. And beyond location, mapping technology provides us with invaluable information like the digital scans of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
In some ways, one might find that all of this information is an obstacle to discovery and creativity. What would the next version of Notre-Dame look like if we didn’t have accurate scans of its former architecture? We have plans laid out for us, sketched from the millions of data points our technology silently gathers every day.
With this shift in how we explore, so too has our sense of discovery changed. It isn’t as much about distance anymore. It’s about depth. From scientists who explore location through molecular patterns to explorers diving deeper than ever before to capturing every street with AI and AR technology, discovery is about processing, analyzing and, utilizing the enormous depth of information we now have access too.
We’ve already covered the surface of the earth. Now we get to explore its multifaceted layers. This shift challenges our understanding of what location means, and the discoveries that exploration now makes possible.
What we’re checking out
- “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century”, by William Rankin
- “A Pirate’s pilfered atlas”, from National Geographic
- “The Advent of Architectural AI” and “AI & Architecture”, by Stanislas Chaillou
- “The Power of Ten”, by Charles and Ray Eames
- “How Sticks and Shell Charts Became a Sophisticated System for Navigation,” from Smithsonian Magazine
- “A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves”, from Brain Pickings
- “How Leonardo da Vinci made a ‘satellite’ map in 1502”, from Vox
Who we’re following
- Olivia Jack, coder, cartographer, and the artist behind “Maps for Getting Lost”
- Giorgia Lupi, Information Designer. Partner at Pentagram. Founded Accurat. Advocating for #datahumanism
- Dylan Moriarty, Mapping & good tunes over at the Wall Street Journal Graphics team
- Stanislas Chaillou, Master candidate in Architecture and Fulbright fellow at Harvard University
What we’re building
- Mapbox introduces new pricing, offering new ways to build without friction
- Traffic Data supports HERE and TomTom maps with OpenLR
- Building with isochrones
- URL restrictions for access tokens
- Build your own 3D map with LIDAR point clouds
- Clustering Properties with Mapbox and HTML markers
- Powering mapping and geographic visualization in Tableau
- Dark maps for Dark Theme in Android Q
Developer Spotlight
Clare Trainor is a Map Designer on the Studio team at Mapbox. She loves taking spatial data and transforming it into beautiful maps. Her current work includes making new styles for Mapbox users. Before joining Mapbox, she worked at National Geographic where she visualized data to tell important stories on topics like climate change, exploration, and urban expansion.
Events
- #VizRisk: Understanding + communicating risk data | May 29
- #VisRisk Challenge: Open Build Night, SF | Jun 4
- #VisRisk Challenge: Open Build Night, DC | Jun 5
- Live Coding a Machine Learning Model from Scratch | Jun 13
- Mapbox Hack Night for Homobiles + Juneteenth | Jun 19
Jobs
- Director of Field and Event Marketing
- Email Marketing Manager
- Communications Manager
- Salesforce Administrator
- Web Developer
- And more!
Location is Personal is a monthly newsletter by Mapbox, from the desks of Lo Bénichou and Amy Lee Walton. We’re exploring how the human experience shapes the spatial experience. Want to start getting this newsletter in your inbox each month? Sign up here.
You were wrong, Michael Bluth:
Location is Personal: Issue 5, May 2019 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.