Big Data by Timandra Harkness

Author:Timandra Harkness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Making maps

I’m standing on a street corner in Brooklyn, surrounded by graffitied brick buildings and yards, frowning at my New York subway map, already battered and torn from all the times I’ve unfolded it the wrong way. As well as the spaghetti of coloured transit lines, it includes just a few key road names.

On the island of Manhattan, that’s enough. The great thing about a grid of Streets crossing Manhattan roughly East to West, and Avenues running North–South, both numbered in order, is that it’s very easy to work out how to get from station to street address. Most people will helpfully say, ‘23rd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenue’. Point yourself in the right direction, count the blocks, and you’re there.

Here in Brooklyn, all that breaks down. Roads here just have names.

I know, I know, I should be using Google Maps on my smartphone. But I didn’t want to pay my mobile provider’s exorbitant roaming data charge, so I’m relying on this bit of folding paper. And yes, I’m aware of the hypocrisy of researching a book about big data while refusing to pay for data use.

There is a local street map in the subway station, which I thought I’d memorised well enough to get me where I’m going, a couple of blocks away. But now I can see the real streetscape, an apparently deserted jumble of industrial units and parking lots, the map I had in my head doesn’t make sense any more.

A man who looks as baffled as I feel comes over to ask me for directions that I can’t give. Forced to admit defeat, I go back down the subway stairs and translate the wall map into a mental list of directions. Left alongside the station, right at the end … I keep rehearsing the turning points as I walk between fashionably shabby lofts, hip new eateries and apparently empty warehouses.

One of which houses my destination, CartoDB, where they use big data to make maps.

They’ve just moved into this place, a sleek conversion that’s now all steel, glass and the compulsory polished-concrete floor. Outside, the graffiti covering the parking lot walls is so gorgeous that I ask who did it for them. It was there before they moved in, they say, but I think they plan to keep it.

I’m visiting Stuart Lynn, a map scientist, which, as he says, ‘is a pretty good job title. It’s better than geographer, which I feel quite good about, because after leaving astronomy I wanted to still think of myself as a scientist.’

He’s a cheeky, self-deprecating Scot, though his accent’s veering towards Canada, possibly the effect of a few years working in Chicago on a project called Zooniverse. That enlists citizen scientists to help analyse the flood of data pouring into research projects, from astronomy to zoology.

Stuart is surprisingly sympathetic to my story about not being able to find my way to a mapping company. He says he finds navigating around New York confusing after Chicago, where the streets have numbers but the avenues have names.

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