transit

New York City subway map after Sandy

New York City ghosted lines subway map

Not back to normal

For those of you living in New York, the subway map is probably familiar to you. For those who are not here, but are listening to reports, I thought I would post the maps to illustrate that the subways are not back to normal. The national broadcasts I listen to keep mentioning that the subways are coming back, which is true, but Sandy essentially knocked the center out of the network. What was once one network is now two networks with very strange structures. They connect, if at all, not through their abdomens like spiders’ legs, but at the very ends of their extremities and there is no recognizable abdomen.

The storm also knocked out some specific edges of the network, like the end of the A train that ran past JFK and into the Rockaways. Note to travelers: The New York City subway is no longer connected to JFK airport.

As of this morning, I am hearing different reports about the 7 train in Queens. It might be running to the connection with the F train according to WNYC, but the mta.info website does not yet reflect that change. I left the line partially ghosted in. There are no reports that the 7 train is running all the way into Manhattan.

Brooklyn

There is subway service between Queens and Manhattan but Brooklyn has been cut off almost completely.

Art and infographics intersect

Artist R. Justin Stewart has taken infographics into the third dimension. His work is more art than information but it’s clear that it builds on the visual tropes of information graphics.

The first image depicts the way that ex-Google workers dispersed into new jobs after their time at Google. The point is not that any of us happen to care deeply about Google workers – someone does but probably not the readers of this blog – but to see how Stewart depicts network graphs in actual space.

The second two images depict a transit system in Minneapolis over a twelve hour period on a Sunday morning. It’s elegant but far too abstract to ‘work’ as an infographic. This is not a critique – I do not think Stewart wanted to make literal art – but it does not take much creativity to see that it would be easy to layer more information onto the artistry of the presentation.

My major contribution to this discussion and the reason that I decided to post Stewart’s work is that much of the art that has been inspired by the data revolution has happened in digital space. We have seen some amazing pixel-based animations and visualizations on this very blog. But I have not come across too much work in three dimensions, real space, that shares so many conventions with information graphics or data-based ways of knowing. A million points tell a story. Usually they tell that story in the same digital realm in which they were born, but Stewart takes them offline into actual spaces. They get installed. He has to come up with the way he wants to represent intangible information with tangible physical components.