The Distant Librarian

Google Earth timelapse of Fort McMurray

Google just announced what they're calling Google Earth’s biggest update in years.

With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change.

It's pretty neat! A number of years ago I took a look using a different product at how quickly the tar sands around  Fort McMurray grew, so I thought it'd be neat to look at the same area with Google Earth. Here's the animated GIF. Timeline is in the upper right corner, and we're looking this time at 1984 - 2020. How have things changed in your neck of the woods?

 

A map of the most spoken languages in every Canadian Province or Territory besides English and/or French

I saw this post on BoingBoing earlier today: A fascinating map of the most spoken languages in every US state besides English and Spanish and wondered what an equivalent map for Canada might look like. So I made one.

Data was pulled from the 2016 Canadian Census, looking at the variable "Language spoken most often at home - Both sexes", but throwing out English and French, the two official Languages of Canada. In third place for each Province or Territory you have:

Kinda neat! If I look to fourth place, German appears in Manitoba and the Yukon, and Punjabi floats up in Alberta and BC. Otherwise, no new languages appear.

After I threw this together I thought to search to see if it had already been done and found one showing quite different results from the 2011 census.

Witchcraft and OpenRefine

Last September I learned about a fabulous resource called Places of Residence for Accused Witches.

Map of Scots women accused of witchcraft published for first time https://t.co/vOxIlv6g24 ht @ResearchBuzz Fascinating stuff! #GIS #witches #witchcraft #mapping pic.twitter.com/nOWNHiUlw4

(@ppival) September 26, 2019

At that time I didn't realize how much work had been done using OpenRefine, one of my favourite tools, but earlier this week came across a series of videos on the background of the project, and one of them was all about how Emma Carroll (Witchfinder General) used OpenRefine and WikiData in the project. Great stuff, and I love listening to her accent!

Trolling around some of the other pages related to the project, here's a link to a map showing the different methods of torture that were used. Yeesh!

Archives in the news

I've recently become more involved in a project to digitize historical maps held at the U of Calgary, so this article really spoke to me (thanks @achurrell!) Yukon geologists raid the archives to aid ongoing search for gold. And because it seems so often news reports like this don't seem to include a link to the actual resource being reported on, I'm pleased that the CBC did provide a link directly to YCGC Historic Placer Data, which is fascinating to poke around. I wonder whether our (currently small) collection of Oil and Gas maps will be used in the same way, some day?

Also recently crossing my path is a news release talking about the use of an archival collection from the Glenbow Archives, which are now held here at the U of Calgary. The Imperial Oil Files: New Collection Adds to Climate and Energy Research Archives On Science and Denial. And the collection itself: Introduction to the Imperial Oil Archival Document Collection. The U of Calgary has no affiliation with this organization, I'll add. We just hold the archives. I'm curious to know whether these images were captured on the sly, or in an open fashion. It's almost like an analogue version of scraping a website!

Search Google Maps via shortcuts

Lifehacker has a post describing how to Map Anything From the Chrome Address Bar. Sounds great, except I recently switched back to Firefox after many years away, so found that there are a pair of extensions for FF that allow you to do pretty much the same thing. Map with Google Maps takes care of the highlight searching, and GoogleMaps adds Google Maps to your list of search engines, allowing you to map addresses w/o starting at the site itself. And if you prefer Open Street Maps...

Shape file and .KML for First People's Language Map of British Columbia

I spent a couple hours today helping a student look for a shape file of the First People's Language Map of B. C. (or anything even close to it). No luck, but feel free to chime in if you know of something we missed! Finally while Inspecting and Viewing Source, I tripped across an embedded (or linked, I can't even remember now) .kml file that included the coordinates for all the polygons. Yay! 

I thought this would've been information that was much easier to find, so in the interests of saving the time of anyone else who might be looking for that same info, here you go:

Language_Boundaries .kml file for Google Earth

Contemporary Languages Boundaries shape file for ArcGIS etc. (.zip)

The student had emailed the owner of the site and got no response. Obviously I'll take this down if asked...

Oh, and while I was able to convert the .kml to the shape file within ArcGIS, I had a cleaner experience using the MyGeodata Converter.

Hope this is helpful to someone else!

Before and After - Calgary and Ft. McMurray

The other day Google Earth released updated historical imagery, so I thought it'd be neat to take a peek at two spots I know have grown a lot since 1985, the date of the earliest imagery.

I also wanted a quick and dirty way to make a before/after image slider, as shown on the above post, so I found JustaposeJS, which does just the trick! There are other options if you do want to get fancy. 

So here's Calgary:

And here's Ft. McMurray:

From the original post, "Note that the new data is created by blending all Landsat/Sentinel 2 data for a whole year to remove clouds and snow cover. The result is that changes that happen on timescales less than a year, such as seasonal changes, will not be visible."

I could look at stuff like this all day!

Related articles

Google Timelapse shows how any location on Earth has changed over the past 32 years

Google Earth VR Lets You Take a Virtual Vacation

Google Earth brings its breathtaking views into VR

Grab Your Red Cape and Fly Around the World With Google Earth VR