The Shape of Alpha
Aaron Straup Cope Where 2.0 May 2009
Hi, my name is Aaron
“The problems they have with labeling and handling contested
categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the
world began. Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act. [...]
would love to avoid those problems if they could – who needs
the tsouris? — but they canʼt. No one gets cataloging “right” in
any perfect sense, and no algorithm returns the “correct”
results. We know that, because we see it every day, in every
large-scale system we use. No set of labels or algorithms solves
anything once and for all; any working system for showing data
to the user is a bag of optimizations and tradeoffs that are a lot
worse than some Platonic ideal, but a lot better than nothing.”
Clay Shirky
Metadata is worldview
“Location versus place”
Reverse geocoding
Bounding boxes
Inappropriate touching
Whoʼs on first?
The reality
The “reality”
Synthetic telepathy
continent
country
region
county maybe
“metropolitan area”
locality and airports (and “hollywood”)
neighbourhood
North America 24865672
United States 23424977
California 2347563
San Francisco 12587707
“San Francisco Bay Area” “we suck”
San Francisco 2487956
The Mission 2452334
Buckets of points
Connect the dots?
Alpha shapes!
the
“mastro”
Bag of optimizations?
IF YOU LIVED HERE!!!
(Corrections)
Clustr
$> clustr -h
clustr 0.21 - construct polygons from tagged points
written by Schuyler Erle
(c) 2007-2009 Yahoo!, Inc.
code.flickr.com
Usage: clustr [-a <n>] [-p] [-v] <input> <output>
-h, -? this help message
-v be verbose (default: off)
-a <n> set alpha value (default: use \"optimal\" value)
-p output points to shapefile, instead of polygons
You are here
Donut holes
The absence and the anchor
No, really
No GIS data was harmed
api = Flickr.API(...)
req = Flickr.API.Request(method='flickr.places.getInfo', woe_id=3534)
res = api.execute_request(req)
SHAPES
xml = elementtree.ElementTree.parse(res)
shpfile = xml.find(“.//shapedata/url”)
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