“We love maps,” says Jon Howell – and it shows.
It shows in the office of Microsoft Research’s Jeremy Elson, where Howell is visiting one recent afternoon. As they chat, they are enveloped in maps. Every wall in Elson’s workspace is festooned with a variety of mapping imagery: here, a schematic representation of the Los Angeles metropolitan area; there, a King County (Wash.) bicycling map; on another wall, aeronautical charts of the U.S. West coast; pinned to a corkboard, maps of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. There’s even a “found” map of the United States on which the previous owner had painstakingly delineated a lifetime of travels.
It shows in the excited energy Elson and Howell display in discussing their cartographical devotion and the various ways in which a good map can rouse the imagination.
And it shows in MapCruncher, prototype technology they’ve developed that promises to revolutionize the way people use online maps.
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