Trevor, an Irish polymath residing in Barcelona (and fellow traveler, blogwise) unEarths, so to speak, a little campaign to switch Google Earth’s toponymy in Catalonia from Castillian to Catalan. He engages the main conspirator in this thread on Google Earth Community’s bulletin board, and it makes for an esoteric but fascinating little debate about the aspirations of the world’s smaller languages.
Getting into Google Earth, it would appear, is as desirable and difficult as getting into one of Barcelona’s better nightclubs. And I can definitely vouch for Barcelona’s nightclubs.
GIS and Politics
“My mama always told me, GIS is like a box of politics”
Well, not quite. But there are a bunch of things going on right now that affect GIS and mapping. Let’s take a look-see:
1. Next Monday, Congress will hold hearings on “Wartime Executive Power a
It may be esoteric for someone speaking a national language… But I am Basque. My first web project, something typical of the past century, was a truly esoteric and personal website in Geocities: http://geocities.com/geonative/
This is what I wrote for that website several years ago: We live in a beautiful city, Donostia (pop. 200,000). Don’t try to find Donostia in the map: Surely it’s not there…
That sentence holds now for Google Earth, of course.
I don’t believe that tagging is a solution to that, although in Tagzania http://www.tagzania.com/tag/donostia happens to be clearly defined. However, I do believe that some kind of Tagzania-Geonative mixture could be developed… Features will come, also for minority languages.