Jo Wood

Collection of notebooks used for exploratory analysis of the 2022 VAST challenge dataset.

VAST Challenge 2022

These notebooks are great, Jo!

Reminds me of an idea I played around with in 2012. I was exploring a lot of San Francisco with my dog, looking for new parks, beaches, woods, and neighborhood to walk him in. I realized my dog-less friends had a much smaller footprint than I did, and probably just took the same routes to the same few places again and again (home-work-grocery-coffee). I thought they might be surprised if they could see how little of the city they actually visited, year to year.

I came upwards with a few variations on the idea:

1. A black map that "scratches off" the black to reveal the routes you've travelled, encouraging you to explore the uncovered, dark places. This turned out to be similar to a mechanism used in games called "Fog of war".
2. A white map that drew in the paths you took, so you had a record of where you'd been at the end of the year. I thought this would be nice to print out.
3. A trip planning app that noted the roads you'd been on and recommended routes that only took new roads (where possible) so that your journeys got increasingly long, but you'd see more and more new places.

Original tweet:
https://twitter.com/dunstan/status/207207276942069760

Link someone shared to a someone who'd had a similar idea:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120816010859/http://theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/08/choosing-paths-less-traveled-theres-app/2928/

An actual iOS app someone made:
https://fogofworld.app

Just thought that might be of interest to you. I chatted with the nice people at Stamen about the idea at the time, but I didn't have the technical ability to take it any further than that.

Dunstan Orchard

p.s. feel free to delete both these comments if you don't want them on here. I just wanted to pass on the story to you!