Welcome to ImageCities - Circus

This studio will be conducting research in South Africa and as such we will be utilizing parametric tools at our disposal in order to map, model and ultimately spatialize our findings. Below you will find some of the primary data sources for South Africa that will be useful when exploring the information related to South Africa and its mother city , Cape Town.

You will also find tutorials below. Tutorials 1 and 2 go over some very important basics regarding parametric modeling and data.Tutorial 3 builds upon these basics and delves into extracting live data through the use of the Mosquito plugin.

GEO Locations in South Africa:

Cape Town:        Lat: -33.918861   Lon: 18.423300
Bellville Station:   Location Pin
Cape Town Station:   Location Pin

SOUTH AFRICA DATA RESOURCES:

StatsSA - South African Census data (provincial scale data)
Create and download Tables of South African Census data:
http://interactive.statssa.gov.za/superweb/login.do

Timelines from StatsSA:
http://www.statssa.gov.za/timeseriesdata/timeseriesdata.asp
http://eservices.joburg.org.za

Example CSV data file downloaded from StatsSA:
http://www.studionu.net/ceed3/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/06/StatSSA-Gov-File.zip

Data First UCT - South African Census data (Micro scale data, down to a neighborhood/suburb)

https://www.datafirst.uct.ac.za/dataportal/index.php/catalog/486

Grasshopper and Rhino Parametric Basics
This is a generic tutorial regarding parametric modeling and data extraction. If you are not comfortable with parametric modeling then you should start with these two tutorials. These tutorials make use of New York city as a case study.

Tutorial 1: Core Data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBjIp6gD-RI

• This tutorial deals with basic decomposition of geometry in Rhino and Grasshopper.
• We look at creating geometry from point data in custom text files.
• Manipulation and cleaning of data sets within Grasshopper so that we can extract the useful portions of data and use that to create spatial maps.
• The tutorial also touches on the hierarchical system with Grasshoppers lists (flat and branched lists).
• Towards the end of the tutorial we will look at how to download KML data from New York’s OpenData site and use that as an external data source and create a geographic mapping of this data using longitude and latitude points.

Latitude, Longitude AND Live Data tutorial:

Tutorial 3: Extracting info from Google and accessing Twitter data

Click Here to Watch the Tutorial

The tutorial is set in Johannesburg and uses train stations and stops within the CBD area as an example of geo point data from Google Earth. The Social media section looks for people that might be talking about issues or current movements regarding Taxi’s within a 5km radius of those stations and Bree St.

The tutorial runs through the process of locating geo co-ordinates in Google Earth, exporting all those points and then converting the resulting KML file into a CSV format.  The tutorial then runs through a set of Social media plugins for Grasshopper that allow us to locate and track users in realtime in relation to the points we extracted from Google Earth.

The tutorial is about 30min long, but it moves fairly quickly, it should take around 2 hours with some pausing, rewinding etc… All the workshops are merely introductions into the different components and commands.  You are encouraged to discover the rest of software as you progress.

Download these before starting the tutorial:

Tutorial Example Files:LatLonLive-Video_Tutorial_Files.zip

Google Earth: http://www.google.com/earth/index.html

KML2CSV: http://choonchernlim.com/kmlcsv/

Mosquito: http://www.studionu.net/ceed3/?p=2443

Mosquito for Grasshopper:

Mosquito is a set of tools developed by us that allows you to extract static and live data from the net. For example, you can download maps of roads, buildings and amenities straight into grasshopper. You can also extract data from social media platforms such as Flickr and Twitter. To use these tools you will need the following:

• Rhino v5
• Grasshopper for windows
• Mosquito plugin - http://www.studiosmuts.com/ceed3/mosquito/

Once you have these tools, install everything and then please make use of the Mosquitos included PDF documentation as well as the examples found with the download.

Mosquito extracts data such as Twitter, Flickr, Maps, Geo Location, Transportation Routing, Finance etc:
http://www.studionu.net/ceed3/?p=2443

https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced
http://twdocs.com/