A copy of a copy, mapping of sf

So this whole mapping exercise has reminded me a lot of this philosophy/art history course I had taken. A portion of the course talks about Plato notion of art as a form of imitation (a concept of reality vs simulacrum, kind of what I am gearing towards in my project) further explains it in his two theories.

"One may be found in his dialogue The Republic, and seems to be the theory that Plato himself believed. According to this theory, since art imitates physical things, which in turn imitate the Forms, art is always a copy of a copy, and leads us even further from truth and toward illusion. For this reason, as well as because of its power to stir the emotions, art is dangerous. Plato's other theory is hinted at in his shorter dialogue Ion, and in his exquisitely crafted Symposium. According to this theory the artist, perhaps by divine inspiration, makes a better copy of the True than may be found in ordinary experience. thus the artist is a kind of prophet."

http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm

Came across a few interesting mappings of san francisco

text and image taken from

http://blog.rhondafriberg.com/2010/05/san-francisco-maps/

The second has seen a lot of press lately and is one of the maps from the Geotagger’s World Atlas by Eric Fischer:

This map represents Flickr photos taken around the city. Using the photos’ timestamps and geotags, Fischer could determine where and at what speed the photographers were traveling – black lines represent speeds less than 7 mph (walking), red is less than 19 mph (biking), blue is less than 43 mph (motoring), and green is faster (jetpacking) – all plotted on an OpenStreetMap base layer.

Eric Fischer is responsible for another great San Francisco map, A day of Muni, according to NextBus:

This map uses the same color scheme to show average speeds of Muni vehicles over 24 hours. Data was pulled from the SFMTA website.

This fourth map was created by my colleague, Tim Sinnot over at The Swordpress:

Sinnott used address data from DataSF to shade locations based on their address number. As you walk down a block, the color changes as the address numbers change. Cool map based on a cool idea.S

http://blog.rhondafriberg.com/2010/05/san-francisco-maps/