The annual scholarly meeting of the Association of American Geographers takes place next week in New York City. In edition to paper and poster presentations, there will be a mapping contest, IronSheep, that mimics the Iron Chef TV program. Teams will work under stringent time limits to create maps and other visualizations from “crowd-sourced” data to answer questions like “What is the most ‘out of shape’ location in the U.S.?” or “How can we visualize the Occupy Wall Street movement?” or “Where is the most likely place for the zombie apocalypse to start?”
For more information and lots of interesting maps, see the IronSheep contest at the Floating Sheep website.
Anna,
After lamenting the lack of cheap and informal geo events in the Midwest, I decided that we needed to pull together an event here in Minnesota. On May 18th, we are hosting Spatial Hotdish in St. Paul. It is a free, half-day event loosely modeled after IronSheep.
Please sign up if you are interested.
You can find more information about the event here: http://cocomsp.com/2012/04/spatial-hotdish/
David Fawcett (’89)
Great idea (and great name)! I’ll encourage our students to participate. I heard the IronSheep event was a lot of fun.
Anna