Mapping Time and Space

Culture - Code - Cities - Cells is an interesting examination of how cultural production in the modern day may be shaping our conceptions of time and space. The premise of the map's creator, Chris Henrick, is 'that mobile devices and the web now mediate how many people experience their lives'.

Chris argues that in the digitally connected world "the way we define place is no longer limited to local geographies". He also claims that the way we experience time is shortening as technology progresses and cultural ideas spread much faster than ever before.

The map is therefore an attempt to visualize how the effect of these changing perceptions of time and space may impact on how we represent time and space cartographically. Chris argues that time zones and our use of solar time as a measuring system may change in the future. He also suggests that our concepts of geographical boundaries may also change.

On the map Chris has created country and state boundaries using Voronoi cells generated from Flickr data. The cells are created from how Flickr users have tagged the locations of photos (in a given place do Flickr users think it's administrative area A or B?). The map also animates through ten minutes of Twitter activity around the world. If you hover over the map you can view a visualization of the selected location's time zone.