The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Erie Coke Corporation Quilt
|| 3/20/2009 || 1:08 pm || Comments Off on Erie Coke Corporation Quilt || ||

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Erie Coke Corporation Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

Coke is used as a fuel and as a reducing agent in smelting iron ore in a blast furnace. Cokes are the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal. Cokes from coal are grey, hard, and porous and the process of their creation gives off a lot smoke. It was also this smoke that brought me to this imagery.

The other night I was looking for new cities to map and came across the imagery of Erie, Pennsylvania. As I was looking around I found this blemish of industry near the center of the town. Like the maps Baton Rouge Quilt – An Oil Refinery Reflection and Enrico Fermi Nuclear Reactor Quilt, this map focuses on the smoke being generated by the geographic subject. I chose the Octagon Quilt Projection because I was able to create a smoke reflection that points to the eight general directions: North, South, East, West, North West, South West, North East, and South East (see image below).

What I find most interesting about the land on which the Erie Coke Corporation is situated is how dark the ground is. Surrounded by the blue hues of Lake Erie, the ground that factory sits on is completely black from all the coal that has been processed throughout the years. It makes me wonder how much pollution generated from this plant goes into the Lake and in the air around the town.

View the Google Map of the Erie Coke Corporation outside of Erie, Pennsylvania

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A location somewhere within the map

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West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt
|| 3/4/2009 || 1:05 pm || Comments Off on West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt || ||

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West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

Last night, after watching the video in my previous posting, I decided to look around the satellite/aerial imagery of Las Vegas to gauge the level of sprawl. Upon further inspection I discovered how much of Las Vegas is composed of large tracts of suburban, low-density housing. I knew there was a lot of this type of development, but it wasn’t until I started looking closely did I see the pattern of the development.

The neighborhood of Las Vegas that I chose to use for today’s map is called West Sahara. It’s a large retirement community that allows only people aged 55 or older to be residents. I guess you could say that I’m happy that I’m not even allowed to live there for at least 27 years. But as I mused before, will there be any water left in 2036 when I qualify to live in neighborhood? I jest, I would never live there– put me in the mountains or a city, but not in a cookie cutter house surrounded by only people my age.

Anyways, I chose the location because it features one of my favorite transportation designs, the traffic circle. I might make a derivative map of this location later today…

View the Google Map of the West Sahara Lake neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada

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A location somewhere within the map

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Kansas City Quilt
|| 12/8/2008 || 2:19 pm || Comments Off on Kansas City Quilt || ||

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Kansas City Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

It’s been over a month since I’ve made a map and to knock the dust off of this website I’ve decided to make a map of city that I’ve never sampled before. For over two years there was a licensing issue that prevented the imagery used in this map from being placed into the public domain. I don’t know when it was finally released, but I’m happy they did. This map features the downtown area of the Missouri side of Kansas City and when I was tessellating the source aerial photography I made sure to include something I remembered from when I was a kid. When we’d drive to Colorado from Missouri, we’d drive through downtown Kansas City and I always thought it was cool that there was a portion that created a tunnel that cars drove under. While I didn’t know it at the time, this building is the Bartle Hall Convention Center and I placed it at the exact center of this Octagon Quilt Projection map.

View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri

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A location somewhere within the map

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New York Public Library Quilt
|| 6/25/2008 || 7:50 pm || Comments Off on New York Public Library Quilt || ||

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New York Public Library Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

This fractal octagon quilt projection map was recursively rendered four times before the final result above. It took approximately two hours for each rendering to complete and then each tessellation was sampled while maintaining the source spatial integrity. Altogether this map took about 12 hours of rendering time and post-processing time to complete. I intend on printing this out for the upcoming lecture.

View the Google Map of the area around the New York Public Library in New York City.

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Madison Square Garden Quilt
|| 6/10/2008 || 6:17 pm || Comments Off on Madison Square Garden Quilt || ||

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Madison Square Garden Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

Using my new procedure, I pre-rendered 2 tiles to create this third derivative map of Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. It looks very similar to Hirshhorn Quilt (they are both circular buildings) but they are composed of aerial photographs taken at different spatial scales. The NYC imagery has been downsampled to 2ft per pixel compared to DC’s imagery which is at 6 inches per pixel or a difference of about 16 times less detail (I think). Up next will probably be the New York Public Library, which was actually in the first tessellation, but dropped from the second.

View the Google Map of Madison Square Garden in New York City.

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Boston Common Quilt
|| 4/17/2008 || 6:59 pm || Comments Off on Boston Common Quilt || ||

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Boston Commons Quilt

I’ve had a couple geographers contact me asking if I was attending the AAG’s annual meeting in Boston. My answer has been that I’m too busy on various projects to attend. As a former employee and someone who helped facilitate two annual meetings (Denver & Chicago), I realized that the next meeting I plan on attending will be as either an exhibitor or if the trip is paid for by an employer. I would like to give another presentation again or organize a panel discussion, but, as with most things in life, I’m in no hurry.

Since I have not made any maps of downtown Boston since August of 2005, I decided to download the city, in lieu of going to the city. Pleasantly, I was able to download the city at two different spatial scales and from two different years: 2004 & 2005. So far the imagery looks a lot better than the patchwork design that was previously placed into the public domain. Eight different tessellations later, the entire downtown area will be remapped in the next week. Today’s map features the area around Boston Common, which is the oldest public park in America (created in 1634), and the Massachusetts State House. I chose an Octagon Quilt Projection because I liked the way the center creates a compass rose. Up next will be a derivative of today’s map.

View the Google Map of Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Albany Droste Quilt
|| 3/31/2008 || 3:49 pm || Comments Off on Albany Droste Quilt || ||

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Vassar Quilt #2

I’ve made similar Droste-like maps before that are multi-scalar, but this is the first to follow “rules” involved in creating the Droste Effect. To achieve this effect I cut out an octagon out of the center of the map and pasted a 34% reduced duplicate of the map within the octagon. This recursive process allows for multiple internal repetitions because the source map is very large in size (216 megapixels).

View the Google Map of downtown Albany, New York.

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Vassar Quilt
|| 3/26/2008 || 5:18 pm || Comments Off on Vassar Quilt || ||

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Vassar Quilt

Continuing my ongoing project of mapping various colleges, schools, and universities around the United States, I decided to follow-up Mount Holyoke College with Vassar College. According to the metadata, the aerial photography was taken in 2004, scanned at 1 foot per pixel in early 2006, and released to the public in December, 2006. I have prepared another tessellation for Vassar and will make a derivative follow-up map.

View the Google Map of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

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Scott + Dupont Circle Quilt
|| 3/18/2008 || 1:07 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

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Scott + Dupont Circle Quilt

Continuing my current project of mapping the portions of Washington, DC that Google is censoring, I decided use the same process that was used to create Washington + Dupont Circle Quilt. This type of digitally derived double exposure aerial photography creates some of my favorite maps as of late. While I am only touching on the germane juxtaposition of traffic circles in Washington, DC, I’ve been thinking about how I take two completely disparate geographies and create similar styled maps. One idea is to take two of the tessellations I created for the Los Angeles Interchanges Series and create a double exposure highway interchange. Another possibility is to make a Supreme Illusion Supreme by overlaying the Pentagon on to the site of the World Trade Center. I’m not sure how it would look, but I think I’ll try making one of these maps in the near future.

View the Google Map of Scott Circle in Washington, DC.
View the Google Map of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.

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87 & 280 Quilt #4
|| 2/24/2008 || 3:32 pm || Comments Off on 87 & 280 Quilt #4 || ||

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The 87 & 280 Interchange in San Jose, California

Using this portion of 87 & 280 Quilt #3, I constructed this derivative map of the California State Route 87 & interstate 280 interchange. This is the final map of the series. It reminds me of a braided highway!

View the Google Map of the interchange.

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: