Saturday, May 28, 2022

The Highway Exits of Massachusetts

The animated GIF above shows aerial images of highway exits across Massachusetts. The images were taken from Bird's Eye Cards, a collection of categorized aerial observations of the Massachusetts landscape, created by the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.


Lots of round water bodies in Massachusetts

Bird's Eye Cards was created by Garrett Dash Nelson, who has developed some processing tricks for clipping out recognizable patterns in satellite imagery.Using these tools he has put together a number of different collections of these overhead views including the largest buildings in Massachusetts, US state capitol buildings, the roundest water bodies in Massachusetts and highway exits. 

Gerret's Bird's Eye Cards of each category are presented in a grid of images. He states in his write-up that this is a more interesting way to present the images (rather than using rapid animated GIF's which cycle through the images) because it "allows the viewer to identify and explore each one of the images". Perversely I immediately hacked Garret's highway exit images to create the GIF at the top of this post. If you do prefer your aerial images in GIF form Garrett Dash Nelson has actually created an animation of the largest 200 buildings in Massachusetts.

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