Well, I assume Google has a big staff of skilled people working on GIS, but I'm curious to know what kind of input they get from people trained in the art of cartographical mapmaking...
My hunch is that the tech industry is bad at taking advantage of this kind of traditional trade knowledge, and the essay in question here is an indicator.
As for Amazon, the Kindle e-books very often have horrific typesetting that would be laughed out of any traditional book printing shop.
And as for Spotify, their catalogue mechanisms and information design are clearly awful from a musicology standpoint.
Something that has become interesting to me recently is the amount of knowledge about maratime weather and sailing that isn't readily accessible in a some kind of neat database, app or website. You actually have to talk to people and wander through museums to find out some of it.
It's an example of an industry and body of knowledge that still grows and is passed around outside of the internet.
Weather patterns for a particular area, places to anchor and dock, safe passages through reefs. You can't always google the answer and much of it is gleaned from other sailors who used experience and their tools to figure it out.
Having grown up pretty much constantly online, with the answer to any question I have being reasonably available with a quick search; that some common information about the world can still be discovered and shared is is really fascinating.
It sometimes feels like there isn't much outside of STEM fields left to explore.
> Something that has become interesting to me recently is the amount of knowledge about maratime weather and sailing that isn't readily accessible in a some kind of neat database, app or website. You actually have to talk to people and wander through museums to find out some of it.
I've been online and windsurfing for decades and I've watched online info about weather/wave conditions at various locations grow then peak, and now it's been declining and drying up in recent years.
It used to be curated and published on websites and talked about in public discussion forums. Even usenet and mailing list archives dating back to the early 90s would appear in searches. In the last 5 yrs or so it's all been slowly evaporating into ephemeral Facebook group posts hidden behind a login form.
I suspect this is happening to all sorts of other communities too as they drop below critical mass. I'm not thrilled about it.
Weather patterns for a particular area, places to anchor and dock, safe passages through reefs. You can't always google the answer and much of it is gleaned from other sailors who used experience and their tools to figure it out.
Lots of this information is collated in Almanacks and pilot guides (eg. Reeds Natuical Almanac and the Shell Channel Pilot for UK sailors, plus the books from the Cruising Association and Royal Cruising Club). There's not a lot of incentive for an online version, as the information needs to be accesible offline for reference and in case plans change. However, there is a lot of information in apps: there's an iPad version of Reeds Natuical Almanac [1], Imray has a worldwide Tides planner app [2], and there are apps with charts from both the UKHO and Imray [3].
The best application I've found that can be used offline is ActiveCaptain. The database is free and actively updated. The mobile app is garbage. An old Adobe AIR concoction that sometimes crashes or freezes arbitrarily.
Other apps I've used that have a slick interface are unfortunately online only. Which is useless to me. When I'm coming into a new, unknown, anchorage I need the information now, not after I've already tied up.
> My hunch is that the tech industry is bad at taking advantage of this kind of traditional trade knowledge, and the essay in question here is an indicator.
As is the fact that other than Knuth, no-one seems to have learnt the first thing about how to lay out a page of text in an attractive fashion. And then even given Knuth, essentially no-one bothers to use his magnum opus (I honestly think that TeX is even more important the The Art of Computer Programming, and is what Knuth will be known for in two centuries).
