{"id":497,"date":"2009-02-16T16:14:36","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T21:14:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=497"},"modified":"2009-02-16T16:14:36","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T21:14:36","slug":"map-apps-of-the-day-islands-of-music-and-the-continental-zodiac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2009\/map-apps-of-the-day-islands-of-music-and-the-continental-zodiac\/","title":{"rendered":"Map Apps of the Day: Islands of Music and the Continental Zodiac"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two interesting uses of maps today, one is a completely non-geographical map that illustrtaes data while the other is a completely artistic use of geography.<\/p>\n

Islands of Music<\/h3>\n

Last.fm is\u00a0 a great service – I’ve written about it before<\/a>.\u00a0 The best thing about it is the copious and collection of interesting data on music tastes (you can even see how geeky your taste in music is<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Like many other web sites Last.fm has a tagging system, and so it interesting to see how different tags relate to each other – are hip-hop fans more likely to listen to ambient or heavy metal?\u00a0 One very cool way to do this is with a map<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"islands<\/p>\n

See the orginal version here<\/a>, complete with mouseover descriptions of the different islands.\u00a0 Visualizing music tatses as a map makes some interesting findings pop out – the long continent of folk, psychadelic, and metal in the northeast, for example.\u00a0 Deathcore and emo are on the same continent, just on opposite sides of what I call You-Don’t-Understand-Me-Dad Bay.<\/p>\n

This is an alternative to more conventional tag cloud or word cloud representations, though I’m not sure which presents information more clearly.<\/p>\n

Another thing that strikes me is the similarity to video game maps – perhaps because of the iconic color palate.\u00a0 Though we might think of them geographically, video game maps are equally artificial ways to relate to a big pile of numerical data.<\/p>\n

World maps as Chinese zodiac<\/h3>\n

Artist Kentaro Nagai<\/a> has used the continents (and major islands) as a medium to create the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac.\u00a0 See all of them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I particularly like the economy of arrangement in the rooster:<\/p>\n

\"Rooster<\/p>\n

…and the sheep for it’s nice use of negative space.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Thanks to Chris<\/a> for the link to the Zodiac<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two interesting uses of maps today, one is a completely non-geographical map that illustrtaes data while the other is a completely artistic use of geography. Islands of Music Last.fm is\u00a0 a great service – I’ve written about it before.\u00a0 The best thing about it is the copious and collection of interesting data on music tastes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[93,320,96,475,114,106,591,588],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-lastfm","tag-map-app-of-the-day","tag-maps","tag-spatial-maps","tag-tag-clouds","tag-tagging","tag-visualizing-music","tag-word-clouds"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":503,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions\/503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}