Brain Off
Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet

Mapping True Nature of Political Borders?

Most any map of the political division of the planet use heavy thick lines to designate borders. This gives the impression that borders are absolute entities with true unarguable reality. It’s really more complicated, and I wonder if any geographers or political scientists have ever attempted mapping political borders with political reality?

Most obvious are territorial disputes (and Wikipedia does a great job here of categorizing these disputes): from Kashmir to Gibraltar to Western Sahara to South Ossetia. Some borders are very loose to the movement of people and stuff, like the European Union member states, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Others are extremely tight, like the fortified and scrutinized US/Mexico border. (Though San Diego and Tijuana have lately been cooperating cross border in interesting ways).

Technically, borders exist within airports; prior to immigration is international territory. Territorial waters are often in dispute, and have been arbitrarily extended to encompass oil reserves and fishing grounds. I wonder, if sea levels rise under climate change, will states argue that there territorial waters are defined by their prior coast lines plus 12 nautical miles, or will this territory shrink as well?

Anyone standing on a border can see the deep imprint different state policies have on the landscape. But we know these borders are porous, and often assymetrical. Economic refugees one way, pollution the other. Ultimately pollution knows no borders and we must be aware of their arbitrary construction.

Ukraine

Inspiring action on the streets of Orange Revolution Ukraine. Wish them the best. I won’t ever tire of seeing people spark peaceful revolution.

It looks like Ukraine will be an exciting destination this summer. Post-Revolution euphoria. Eurovision. Wild Dances!.

A to Z in the Sky

A line of skylights down the length of Oxford St. shoots beams against the clouds for Chri$tma$ this year. Not too great from the ground on Oxford St. (guess you should be looking in the shops) but interesting from a distance. When all lights are directed vertically, it’s like Oxford St. is projected onto the everpresent clouds.

My hallucinating, post-future, geo mind imagines all the streets of London projected onto the sky, a 1:1 map is the territory A to Z (Or even better, London Free Map), omnipresent, tangible, floating.

Mapping True Nature of Political Borders?

Most any map of the political division of the planet use heavy thick lines to designate borders. This gives the impression that borders are absolute entities with true unarguable reality. It’s really more complicated, and I wonder if any geographers or political scientists have ever attempted mapping political borders with political reality?

Most obvious are territorial disputes : from Kashmir to Gibraltar to Western Sahara to South Ossetia to…

some more flickr images

geo.licio.us : geotagging hosted services

Following on from I Have Seen The Future of Annotating Space, and My, Is It Del.icio.us!…

This worldkit app is an experiment in using del.icio.us as a collaborative geo-annotation database.

To annotate: activate the map by mouse click. Hold “i”, then click location to annotate.

The del.icio.us tags field is overloaded and stuffed with arbitrary key/value metadata; in this case, “geo:lat=* geo:long=*”. This map pulls all del.icio.us entries with the additional tag geolicious. So any entry published with these tags will be plotted.
Tags are published in the RSS 1.0 feed in <dc:subject>. worldKit has been modified: now parses RSS 1.0, and will accept geotags in the dc:subject.

geo.licio.us could be like a collaborative geourl, though I’m sure proximity search would bring it to a crawl. Another problem is that the RSS feed only lists the last 30 entries.

This is a hack, but it’s motivated. To get geo-annotation moving, have to go to where it’s already super easy to publish. Majority of people opt for hosted services to publish links,blogs,photos. These places aren’t extendable by plugins (wonder if there’s any safe way to allow this) to enable clean arbitrary metadata publishing (Metadata publishing could be built in, but I’m not on the inside). So hack it. del.icio.us has tags. flickr has tags .. but they don’t publish the tags in the syndicated feeds (why not flickr?). flickr geo-annotation would allow easy photo maps. typepad has a “keywords” field, but you can only directly edit the syndication feed templates at the Pro level. blogger? no idea. Come on services, let the metadata flow!