Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 1.3
Recording the places
All information about places, concise enough to be edited manually,
was stored in 'Comma Separated Value' (CSV) files. These files can be
read by many applications on different computer systems, in particular by
spreadsheets - allowing complex manipulation to be easily accomplished.
An example of the beginning of a CSV file containing information used to
create a drawfile of counties is:
"$.GIS.Area.Ward.County.Sheet", 1,64,4
"County Topology and Statistics"
"Number", "Name", "Residents", "Neighbours", "Neighbour"
"1981"
1, "Greater London", 6713130,6,0,29,22,43,26,11
29, "Kent", 1467079,5,0,1,21,43,22
22, "Essex", 1474126,6,0,12,42,1,26,29
43, "Surrey", 1004332,8,21,45,1,29,0,24,10,11
26, "Essex", 1474126,6,0,12,42,1,26,29
11, "Buckinghamshire", 567979,7,43,26,34,9,38,1,10 ...
The first line gives the filename, number of tables, number of areal units
and fixed variables. The second line describes the file, the third has variable
names and the fourth holds temporal information. This header is followed
by the relevant numbers and text for each place. Notice that the records can
be in any order and of variable length. They are easily edited individually
as this is a text file.
A library of procedures was written to manipulate these files, in particular
to allow any other application to read and write to them, taking advantage of
an interpreted language, which allowed the procedures themselves to invoke
routines from the applications that had called them.
what sounds should we make? In the past we made sounds by knocking sticks
together, so we get the machines to imitate those noises (drum machines). But
surely, we think, is there more? According to Aristotle, 'thought is impossible
without an image'.
18
Our vision has a much higher bandwidth than our hearing. We can see thou-
sands of stars, watch sunsets, view landscapes and survey half a million people
in a crowd. Naturally we begin to paint things by getting them to look like
recognisable objects, chaotic functions to look like mountain ranges or an island
archipelago, flowing energy to appear as running water. In this work pictures
are often based on natural things that have two-dimensional structures, ranging
18
'Memory, even the memory of concepts, does not take place without an image' (Kosslyn,
1983, p. 5).
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