#digital map

DISTRICT FOUR ⸝⸝.ᐟ⋆

I am a 25 year old student nurse and nature devotee who has an interest in memory benches.

With no valuable IT skills, a limited budget and no overall knowledge of creating and maintaining an active online map, I am seeking advice, tips and potentially assistance from those of you who have insight on how to achieve my goal.

In the UK, memory benches are everywhere - wooden or steel seats of engraved love given by those who were privileged enough to have shared life with those who have passed.

I made this tumblr so that I can start keeping a record of the memory benches I come across in my city, Sheffield, tagged here on this account by location, postcode and the dedicatee’s given name. I will record benches I find outside of Sheffield also, just far less frequently or sporadically.

My goal is to eventually pool the knowledge and resources together to, first, create an online directory of recorded memory benches and then hopefully develop into a map once I gain experienced of how to do so.

A like or reblog would be appreciated if you see this, and any and all insight into the matter would be appreciated.

Dungeon Battle Map - Cave. Explore the rooms through the narrow passages and cross the perilous bridge to discover what lies further in..

In my patreon page you can find more maps and support my work.https://www.patreon.com/XploringMap

Hey ya’ll!

I’ve been doing a lot of world-building lately for a comic idea I’ve been working on, and it’s been a lot of fun!

In 1904, Daisy Bates printed out 500 copies of a survey and sent them to public servants and pastoralists in the western states of Australia. The survey listed around 1800 words, and Bates asked people to fill them in with the vocabulary of the local Indigenous population. Bates was something of an eccentric. She spent most of her adult life among Indigenous Australians, mostly in South Australia. Always dressing in Edwardian style until her death in the 1950s, in photographs she looks like a misplaced governess.

Eventually around 120 surveys were returned. For many years after Bates’ death they sat in boxes in an archive. Over the last few years, there’s been a project to turn these old surveys into an interactive digital corpus.

From an article by Nick Thieberger about the project:

There are 4,500 pages of typescript representing languages from the Southern South Australia/Western Australia border all the way up to the Kimberley. At least 123 speakers are named in the vocabularies and, even now, it’s not clear how many languages they represent.

The vocabularies preserved in the Daisy Bates questionnaires are extraordinarily precious as little else was recorded in the same time period, and nothing of the same scale has been attempted before or since.

The questionnaires she sent out contained some 2,000 prompt words and sentences in English, and asked each respondent to fill in as much as possible in the local Aboriginal language. It means that in addition to the lists of words totalling over 90,000 individual items, the collection includes grammatical information in the form of example sentences.

For every word there’s a map, showing all the tokens that were collected. They gently jostle each other on the page. You can see how broadly some words were in use, and local areas of variation. Clicking on a particular word takes you to a page where you can see the original handwritten survey answers, and an old typewritten transcript.

Wattle Tree:

http://bates.org.au/word-maps/#wattle-tree

Red Kangaroo:

http://bates.org.au/word-maps/#kangaroo-red

Gum Tree:

http://bates.org.au/word-maps/#gum

I helped out briefly on an earlier stage of the project, where the digital sans all had to be renamed to sequence correctly. It’s exiting to see the final version online!

See also:

My piece about Daisy Bates for Dangerous Women

An earlier post about the Daisy Bates project

Digital maps have evolved far beyond simple navigation tools. Today, they form the foundation of a location-intelligent world where businesses, governments, and consumers rely on real-time geospatial data to make faster and smarter decisions. The digital map market sits at the intersection of satellite technology, cloud computing, and data analytics, enabling everything from ride-hailing and food delivery to urban planning and disaster management. As smartphones, connected vehicles, and IoT devices multiply, the demand for accurate, dynamic, and high-resolution maps continues to accelerate.

At its core, the digital map market includes mapping software, platforms, and services that collect, process, and visualize geographic data. Providers integrate satellite imagery, GPS data, street-level photography, and sensor inputs to create detailed and constantly updated maps. For users, this translates into seamless navigation, optimized routes, and location-based insights. For enterprises, digital maps support site selection, supply chain visibility, asset tracking, and customer targeting. The growing recognition that “location is data” has positioned digital maps as a strategic asset rather than a background utility.

Several growth factors are propelling this market forward. One major driver is the rapid adoption of location-based services across industries such as retail, transportation, logistics, and tourism. Businesses increasingly use geospatial insights to understand customer behavior and improve operational efficiency. Another driver is the rise of connected and autonomous vehicles, which require highly precise, real-time maps for safe and reliable operation. Smart city initiatives are also boosting demand, as municipalities deploy digital mapping for traffic management, infrastructure planning, and public safety. In addition, the expansion of e-commerce and last-mile delivery has made route optimization and geocoding essential tools for competitiveness.

Current trends and news in the space highlight how dynamic the market has become. Artificial intelligence is being used to automate map creation and updates by analyzing satellite and street imagery at scale. Crowdsourced data from millions of devices helps keep maps current, reflecting road changes, closures, and new points of interest. Augmented reality navigation is gaining traction, overlaying directions onto the real world through smartphone cameras and vehicle displays. There is also rising interest in indoor mapping for airports, malls, and large venues, where traditional GPS signals are weak. Meanwhile, partnerships between mapping companies, automotive manufacturers, and tech giants continue to reshape the competitive landscape, as players race to provide the most accurate and data-rich platforms.

Despite strong momentum, the market faces challenges. Data privacy and security concerns are growing as more location data is collected and analyzed. Maintaining accuracy at global scale is complex and costly, especially in rapidly developing regions. Regulatory differences between countries can also complicate data collection and distribution. However, these challenges are driving innovation in anonymization techniques, privacy-by-design systems, and collaborative mapping models.