notes.husk.org. tagged navigation.

“ She is disoriented – and yet her progress is a perfectly plotted trajectory through urban space: she looks into the glowing multifaceted jewel in the palm of her hand and here other parallelograms interleave, shuffle and montage in response to the tweezer motions and baton-flicks of her fingers. It tells her where to go, the jewel, and when she places it to her ear it speaks to her, so that in turn she can command her own faltering legs to carry her to the right, to the left, straight ahead ”

Will Self: Walking is political in The Guardian.

2012-03-20

post/19614782251

photo 04:40:05

A recreation of an image from HAL’s displays in 2001, as seen on a modelling community’s forums.

2011-09-22

post/10511627545

quote 06:46:01

“ Some locals called for fees for non-resident vehicles, while others demanded that satnav companies omit the neighbourhood from their systems. ”

Hollywood sign neighbours voice anger as tourism grows by Andrew Gumbel in The Guardian.

2010-10-16

post/1323625347

quote 01:19:37

“ There’s no convention for whether “previous” means “items from the past” or “items from the future, which you read in the past” and whether “next” means “items from the future” or “items from the past, which you will read in the future”. When I click on “next” or “previous”, I have no idea whether I’m going forward or back in time. ”

Daily Meh: How about earlier/later, past/future?

He’s right, and websites are all over the place. It’s worth reading the whole post, for his (correctly) noting Tumblr’s internally inconsistent template language.

As a reply to this post (which seems to be invisible) noted, the direction of previous/next (let alone older/newer) also varies from site to site (and even within them). Sigh.

(Source: dailymeh)

2010-09-06

post/1077415528

quote 22:22:01

“ I find it unsurprising that the paper concludes that the tube map plays a large role in structuring people’s image of both under and over-ground London. More interesting to me was the particular use of the map to structure areas of London which were personally unknown to the individual. This seems to suggest that the tube map is used to structure the ‘mythical space’ described by Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place as spaces existing outside of personal experience. Does this make zone 6 a mythical space to most Londoners? ”

Karen M Martin commenting on Mind The Gap: The ‘Tube Map’ as London’s User Interface on Mr Watson

post/1077329778

quote 22:02:00

“ London above ground is a terrifically complex and chaotic entity with few visible principles of organization. London under ground, in contrast, has been represented for over seventy years as an organized, understandable and navigable city, by paying no mind to the city’s actual, unmanageable geography. ”

Janet Vertesi in Mind The Gap: The ‘Tube Map’ as London’s User Interface (PDF). The whole thing is well worth a read. (Hat tip: the Human Transit blog.)