Urban Scentsations

Odor investigators engaging in a smell hunt. source

Let’s take a minute to recognize this exceptional olfactory artist, Kate McLean. She works with human perception and the urban smellscape. She basically turns the city into her own little laboratory, running perception experiments on the people there, and coming back with sensory analyses that you just can’t get in an actual lab setting. She does smellwalks, smell sketches, and all kind of other activities to both help people explore and appreciate the most overlooked aspect of their urban environment. As a result of her work, we get these Smellmaps, something not taken up by Google yet…yet. Please check out her site here, and get upset that she already came to your neighborhood, or excited that she didn’t yet!

Sensory Maps

Research, analysis & design of Sensory Maps by Kate McLean

Music, Maps, and Categorgonzola

Screenshot from Genealogy and History of Popular Music Genres from Origin till Present (1870-2016)

(highlighting my own personal favorite genre-neighborhood, the drum n bass part of town)

A Dizzying Infographic Traipses Through 146 Years of Music

WIRED, June 2016

A polymathic Belgian architect named Kwinten Crauwels has created a map worthy of praise for anyone who stays up at night thinking about how to articulate vast networks of cultural products.

The Music Map is an “interactive infographic that maps the definitions, relationships, and sub-genres of the last 146 years of pop music.

 It’s formally called “Genealogy and History of Popular Music Genres from Origin till Present (1870-2016)” and it’s creator certainly echoes my own struggles to organize the language of smell:

“You can never create the ultimate genre map—there is no such thing, because it’s a sociological reality, not a scientific one,” Crauwels says. “But you can at least create a very good approximation, so people can learn more.” He’s right; Crauwels has built a chart that’s actually chart-worthy.

-quotes taken from WIRED

POST SCRIPT

On Vague Notions of Accuracy

-About the confusion matrix, a great starting point for anyone who is trying to organize things, but is ultimately doomed to failure.

Network Address, 2013