Geography as art

Friday, February 18, 2011 at 2:05 PM

While maps are often considered guides to get from here to there, on the Google Maps and Earth team, we’re constantly thinking of innovative ways to express geographic information. From helping you see the world from a street-level perspective with Street View, to enabling you to dive into the Ocean layer in Google Earth, new geographic visualizations are top of mind for the team. With that mapping mindset, Group Product Manager Lior Ron was struck by the abstract landscape paintings he saw at the Sausalito art festival.

Ben Joyce’s painting of San Francisco caught his attention: “The color scheme, brush strokes, and the open frame prompted my imagination freely to think about San Francisco and what I love about this city. What a wonderful way of visualizing spaces!”

San Francisco at Night by Ben Joyce

Ben describes his work as Abstract Topophilia: “The affective bond between people and place. The Love of Place,” and explains how cities like San Francisco inspire his artwork: “There is great beauty and intrigue in the layout of a city - from your everyday drive to work, to the historical creation of the streets, to your personal relationship with the town."

When Lior shared Ben’s work with some teammates, we too were fascinated by the bold color schemes and dramatic visualizations of geographic information, and were thrilled to learn that Ben has consulted Google Earth to create his city artwork. To share these creative visualizations with the team, we invited Ben to show some of his artwork in our team building, with depictions of cities ranging from Florence to Moscow.

Moscow by Ben Joyce

When we first hung up the paintings, we omitted location descriptions and opened a contest for the team: who could identify all of the paintings first? Google Earth Community Program Manager Robin Ziegler identified all of the locations about 30 hours after we started the challenge, and even plotted all of the paintings in Google Earth. Here you can see how Robin aligned Ben’s painting of Miami with the corresponding imagery in Google Earth.

Ben’s artwork will stay in our team’s building for the next three months, and will continue to remind us of the creative potential of geographic information.

Posted by Emily Henderson, Administrative Assistant, Google Maps & Earth

Explore our U.S. Presidents on a map

When I was in elementary school, I got two days off every February; one for George Washington and another for Abraham Lincoln. I remember classrooms were usually wallpapered with a potpourri of decorations left over from Valentine’s Day and token silhouettes of these two Presidents thumb-tacked to the bulletin board. My teachers would talk about the significance of the holiday during class but with lack of visuals to pique my interest, it was always hard to retain (and fully enjoy!) the information. With that in mind, we’re pleased to celebrate the President’s Day holiday in the U.S. by letting you go back in time to learn more about our past presidents in a visually fun and interactive way.

We’ve created a U.S. Presidents Showcase to map the birthplaces of all 44 presidents, and provide details about their presidential terms, using the Google Earth plug-in. You can also see the states that voted during each president’s election by clicking on the tours in the left column of the showcase.


Whether you’re a history buff or simply curious to learn more about U.S. presidents, we hope you enjoy exploring a little further using Google Earth. In addition to the U.S. Presidents map, educators can use some of our other resources in their classroom to explore more aspects of history. Here are a few ideas:

• Explore the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and other historical monuments in 3D and have students explain how architecture is used to honor people, concepts and establishments
• View a 3D model of Valley Forge National Park in Google Earth
• View a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and map the areas where slavery ended, as well as the areas that were not initially covered by this executive order
• Discuss the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and use the ruler tool in Google Earth to measure the width of the Delaware River
  

We hope you have fun exploring and learning a little more of the history behind the President’s Day holiday. And when you’re done, go out and enjoy your day off!

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Geo Education Program Manager

Mapping favourite romantic movie scenes

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 2:25 PM

Last weekend, I was enjoying my favourite movie, Love Actually, which is a very appropriate movie to watch during the most romantic week of the year! The majority of this movie was filmed in and around my hometown of London, and as the ending film credits started rolling up the screen, I had a "eureka" moment. "I love this movie and I love Street View and Google Maps, so why not combine the two?" My virtual voyage of discovery began.

For those who like this movie, join me in this film tour across London. For those who haven’t seen the movie, I hope this blog post will help show how geography can help you to feel connected to something you are passionate about, such as places mentioned in your favourite songs or poems.

You may recognise this location as the London area home of the character "Jamie", played by Colin Firth, who meets his true love Aurelia while working on his novel in the south of France.

This next location is where Juliet, played by Keira Knightley, marries her husband Peter at the The Grosvenor Chapel‎ in Mayfair. Mark, Peter's best friend and a long suffering holder of unrequited love for Juliet, videotapes the ceremony.

When Juliet watches the video of the ceremony, focused entirely on her, she realises that Mark has feelings for her. Mark needs to get some fresh air, and this My Map I created shows the actual route Mark took for his walk.

This next spot, in Notting Hill, is where my favourite scene of the movie takes place. Yes, that's the one - where Mark holds up a series of cards to communicate his deepest feelings for Juliet.

This is where the film begins to build. The film’s British Prime Minister David, played by Hugh Grant, finally finds the courage to declare his feelings for Natalie, played by Martine McCutcheon. Knowing only the name of her street, her arrives to find what "must be the longest street in the world.” Driven by his desire to be with Natalie he starts to knock on every door, and eventually finds Natalie at number 102.

I hope this tour has inspired you to go and geographically organise what matters to you, just as this Jane Austen enthusiast did when she created a Google Earth project to geographically organise locations mentioned in Austen's novels.

Posted by Phil Verney, Program Manager, Google Earth & Maps

Using My Maps for your summer sublet

[Cross-posted from the Google Student Blog]

Today's guest author is Katie Corner, an Electrical and Computer Engineering student at University of Colorado, Boulder and a Google Student Ambassador. Check out more tips from students on the Google Student Blog, or submit your own to share.

The spring semester ends, and the frenzy begins: Quick, everyone find someone to sublet your apartment for the summer!

Hundreds of students in your university town will be simultaneously advertising their apartments to potential summer subletters. How can you help your apartment stand out among the crowd? Bring in Google Maps to save the day. Google Maps has a feature known as My Maps, which enables you to quickly and easily build a personalized map highlighting the locations you care about -- all on one map! Simply share the map link with your family or friends to let them see it too.

Everyone knows that when looking for a summer sublet, it’s all about location, location, location. Where are the closest grocery stores? What’s fun to do nearby? There’s a running path along the creek just two blocks away? And the local bus picks up on the corner? Nothing sells these points better than an easy, personalized map.

It only takes minutes to create your own My Map. To start, sign in to your Google account and go to maps.google.com. Click on the link in the upper-left corner labeled “My Maps.” By clicking the “Create new map” link, you can pick a title and get to building your housing map.

To start finding locations of interest and placing them on your new My Map, search for those places in Google Maps, for example “park in boulder co.” After finding the location you are interested in, simply click on the red pin on the map, followed by the “Save to...” link. From here you can easily select the new My Map you created.

After adding a number of specific locations to your map, you can also customize and edit the map to fit your style preferences. To access your map thus far, click on the “My Maps” link in the top left corner of the page, and select the map you are interested in editing. By clicking the “Edit” button, you are now in editing mode on the map and can easily make changes to the names of locations or the style of icon. To make a change to a specific place, just click on that location. On the map, an editable box appears where you can easily make changes, such adding as some notes about the place.

The end product is a unique map showcasing why your sublet is the right option to pick. Here’s an example I used for an apartment in Boulder, Colorado.

Stand out in your next apartment rental posting with My Maps today!

Posted by Katie Corner, University of Colorado

Act Locally in Sudan with New Imagery & Maps

Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 4:30 PM

After years of conflict, Southern Sudan overwhelmingly opted to secede from the country's north. Many challenges lie ahead as the newly independent state negotiates the rocky path towards independence. We believe that access to high-quality, up-to-date and locally relevant maps will assist humanitarian organizations working in the region.

We are encouraging users to add their local knowledge to this mapping effort through a campaign to build a better map of Sudan. Recent satellite imagery is key to building up-to-date maps, and we are continuously acquiring fresh and historical imagery of Sudan. Our latest imagery update is now live on Google Map Maker, Google Earth, and Google Maps, with nearly fifty percent of the UN priority areas over Southern Sudan covered with high resolution imagery. Thanks to our satellite partner GeoEye, we will continue to acquire and publish high resolution imagery of the remaining UN priority areas, as well as to refresh areas that we have previously covered as the need arises. This new imagery, such as the one over Melut, will directly benefit the many organizations working in Sudan and ultimately support the building of a solid basemap of Sudan to achieve long-term socioeconomic objectives.

Town of Melut (before 2/16/2004, after 1/30/2011). In Melut, there is a humanitarian hub where many services are delivered to at risk populations, including food, water, health care, education, and more. Given the varying needs of each of these services, maps can provide a variety of planning benefits for expansion, staff safety, and emergency procedures.

Google is also contributing to various humanitarian efforts, including the Satellite Sentinel project, by helping to build an active and self-sustained Sudanese mapping community -- locally and among the Sudanese diaspora. This community will help improve maps of Sudan by using Google Map Maker, a product that combines the power of mapping with community engagement.

Dedicated mappers have started building the foundation for a Sudan mapping community, resulting in high quality maps of Sudan. But this is a long term process that requires deep commitment from various stakeholders and community groups. To join the Sudan mapping efforts, and offer feedback, please join our Sudan community mailing list or visit our team site.

France Lamy, Program Manager, Google.org

Pin your love on the map

Monday, February 14, 2011 at 2:43 AM

[Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog]

This Valentine’s Day, tell your friends, family or significant other that you love them with a fun message from Google Maps.

Location can be a powerful trigger of memories—from the Italian place in San Francisco where you went on your first date to the cabin you rented at Lake Tahoe with your roommates. For that reason, we thought it would be great to create a Valentine’s Day card that’s tied to a specific location. As long as there’s a place that means something special to you and the ones you love, mapping your valentine is a great way to make Valentine’s Day a little more special.

One of my favorite memories is from a family trip we took to Eilat in Israel (check out my awesome fashion sense, I’m on the far left...), so I sent my parents this card:

I hope you'll take a moment to remind the people you love of the places you've shared with them. Visit www.mapyourvalentine.com to get started.

Happy Valentine's Day from Google!

Posted with love by Aaron Weissman, Google Maps & Earth Team

Geotagging photos with Panoramio and Google Latitude

Friday, February 4, 2011 at 7:45 AM

[Cross-posted from the Panoramio Blog]

It is 9 a.m. and the thermometer shows -15°C. I have a Nexus S with Google Latitude in my left pocket and my new Lumix LX-5 in the right one. I am in Davos and I am ready for a fantastic day of skiing when I decide to use the new feature of Panoramio: geotagging photos with Google Latitude.

Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs -- and to view those photographs in Google Earth.

Google Latitude allows you to share your location with friends and view their location on a map. When enabled, Google Latitude History allows you to store your previous locations and this allows you to match your photos with the locations stored in Google Latitude History.

By combining Panoramio and Google Latitude your photos get geotagged automatically as the time stamp of the photos is matched with your location record in Google Latitude History. To use this feature you need to explicitly enable it in your Settings page in Panoramio. With your permission, Panoramio will access your Google Latitude History to find out your location at the time when your photos are taken, so make sure the time in your camera is correct and it matches the value you entered in the Panoramio Settings page.

Using Google Latitude while skiing allows you to find your friends when you get lost on the slopes, and at the same time it allows you to focus on taking nice photos not worrying about the location where you are taking them.

Mapping photos within the city is normally not a problem as you can easily remember street names, points of interest, etc. It is much more difficult to do it in the countryside and that is why I decided to give the feature a whirl while skiing in Davos:

Thanks to Google Latitude, my photos were geotagged just after uploading them in Panoramio. The day was great, snow was perfect, weather was amazing and when I arrived home my photos were already geo-positioned.

For more information about this feature please check our help content and as always we will be happy to hear your feedback in the Panoramio forum.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager