ITSRG

Gas Maps Part 2 examines a map published by The New York Times on June 9th, 2008 called "The Varying Impact of Gas Prices" that has been in heavy Internet circulation during the past week. It shows the locations where consumers spend the highest percentage of their income on gasoline. In general, poor rural counties in the Southeast and Appalachia; along the Mississippi River; in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico and in the Northern Rocky Mountains states are fairing the worst despite the fact that urban centers on both coasts have higher per gallon costs. The place that earned the dubious distinction of the highest gasoline costs as a percent of income is Wilcox County, Alabama. There, residents pay on average 16% of their income on gas at current prices. The rest of the counties in the Black Belt along the Alabama River share a similar impact.

Patrik Jonsson's related story published in the Christian Science Monitor on June 11, called Sticker Shock at the Supermarket,  features comments of residents of Camden and Gee's Bend, two communities in Wilcox County. They were featured to illustrate the difficult trade offs that many families are making as both gasoline and food prices climb while income remains static.

Reddit.com's comment scroll related to the New York Times map illustrates the degree to which geographic inequalities related to the local impacts of prices are not well explained by a cursory examination of the New York Times map. "Hellsbelles" and "Digitallysick" give testimony to the intense and persistent poverty in the county among the 300 plus responses to the map. "Starkwhite" raises the issue of racism as a contributing factor to local poverty in Wilcox County. But most of the comments seem to avoid the uncomfortable finding that economic circumstances in Wilcox County really are that bad as compared with so many other places that are also struggling.

This is not the first time that Wilcox County or its most well known community - Gee's Bend - has come under the mainstream media spotlight. Most recently, Gee's Bend was featured by J.R. Moehringer's moving, Pulitzer Prize winning feature called Crossing Over in 2000. He presented a cultural and historical portrait of the community of Gee's Bend through the eyes and experiences of Mary Lee, one of its elders descended from generations of local African American residents. Readers learn about the extreme geographic isolation of the setting and how this contributes to its economic difficulties. They learn of the community's complex social, racial, and political history and of its centrality to civil rights activism in the 1960s. They learn that the events of the 1960s unfolded in the context of decades of institutionalized racism that resulted in unequal state investments in education, economic infrastructure, and transportation, symbolized by the the state's elimination of ferry service to cross the Alabama River in 1962. Crossing Over was published at a time when discussions about reopening the ferry were underway. That eventually occurred in 2006, punctuated by  a new round of mainstream media attention.

Now that ferry service has resumed, there is a website that provides the Internet public with information about its hours of operation, directions on how to find it, and information about local cultural attractions in Gee's Bend. Prominently featured on the main page of the website are images of quilts created by the Gee's Bend quilters, famous in their own right as community artists and regents of local cultural heritage. Gee's Bend quilters are known nationally and internationally through coffee table books available at chic art shops and museums around the country. Their work is featured in exhibitions around the country. In 2004, the quilt designs were marketed.

The Gee's Bend settlement and the Snow Hill Institute artists colony are among the top educational tourism destinations featured in the widely acclaimed Black Belt Heritage Trail sponsored by the State of Alabama. The Alabama Cooperative Extension System has also recently partnered with other state agencies to implement an innovative Agricultural Tourism Program designed to connect rural communities along an AgriTourism Trail with special interest travelers. 

Despite these efforts to improve the economic base and connectivity of Gee's Bend, Wilcox County and the larger region of Alabama's Black Belt with mainstream societal and economic institutions, last week's headlines underscore the harsh irony that the commodification of local culture in Gee's Bend has failed to fully benefit its residents. Moehringer's reflection of Mary Lee's reality in Crossing Over was indeed prophetic. He wrote: "Mary Lee knows better. A ferry would also bring tourists and hunters and developers and criminals and snoops. In other words, the end of Gee's Bend, the last place on Earth still safe enough for children and dead folks to go walking after dark. 'When you can sit in a place,' she says, 'and everybody be lovely--no fussing, no killing--to me, this don't even seem like the USA.'"

Gee's Bend once served as a safe haven in the racially tumultuous environs of west Alabama for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other local and regional civil rights activists to reside and organize prior to the historic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.  Their struggles and efforts are embedded in the memories of the people and local institutions of Wilcox County and Gee's Bend. Forty three years later, we are reminded that regional and economic disparities and institutionalized forms of racial inequality persist in the social landscape of American society.

Michele Masucci, Temple University
David Organ, Clark Atlanta University
Caroline Guigar, Temple University

Soaring gasoline costs have prompted keen consumer interest in finding the locations of service stations that have the lowest prices per gallon. The problem is an interesting one from a geographic perspective. The key to saving money is to find the lowest cost source of gasoline that is located as close as possible to a person's normal driving rounds. This allows the consumer to maximize savings by minimizing the cost of driving extra distances to search for cheap gas.  Web maps have proliferated to fill in local knowledge of where gasoline is cheapest just-in-time for a fuel-up.

For example, "Hatetopay," a Gasbuddy.com user, reported low gas prices on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia at 5:15 pm on June 13, 200. The image to the right is a jpeg of the map showing Hatetopay's report of $3.99/gallon gas, along with prices found by other users at two other nearby locations. Gasbuddy requires individuals who report gas prices to create a users account. Reports (and searches) can be entered through text messages and browsers of cell phones or other mobile devices, as well as online with computers. The data submitted by users is available to the entire public. The vast majority of users and site visitors are located in the U.S., followed by Canada. According to the site traffic monitor application called Alexa, the site reach of Gasbuddy has increased by 266% and traffic is up by over 34,000 page views during the past three months (as of June 14, 2008).

A careful look at the whole Philadelphia region shows that very few people are posting prices for stations located in Center City (it's the area between I-76 and I-95 on the map) despite its dense residential population. Many price posts are located in main line suburban enclaves and along corridors used by commuters to enter and leave the city. There is also a large cluster of price posts in New Jersey suburbs. But, as with Center City Philadelphia, central Camden shows no posts. Gasoline prices in New Jersey are a little lower than those in Philadelphia because of different taxation policies by the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The price differences leads many Philadelphia residents to cross the Ben Franklin Bridge to fill their tanks with less expensive gas and perhaps shop in nearby malls and supermarkets. The toll to cross the bridge may be increased from $3.00 to $5.00, so the economies of scale for pursuing the cheapest gasoline in NJ could change for some consumers.  However, there may several factors interacting that contribute to the Philly-NJ gas optimization-crossing phenomenon. Cheap gas, better access to groceries, recent relocation of health services for women from Philadelphia to New Jersey suburbs, and less expensive alcoholic beverages are a few examples of border differences that drive our local consumer geographies.

It is clear that one of the impacts web 2.0 is having in the context of the current economic crisis is to connect consumers with better information - "insider" views in particular - about where best to spend money on goods and services. Lime.com and Yelp.com are two web 2.0 applications that are rising to fill the demand for user identified and rated shops. Lime's focus is on fostering what is referred to on its website as "ecoist" lifestyles. For instance, many of the establishments identified are ones sell locally produced food and goods. Yelp is focused on providing a forum for the exchange of opinions about all kinds of local services.

All three of these services operate on the same basic concept - to create communities of users who contribute and access information about what is located in a given setting. The goal of these sites is to increase value of purchases and to help users match their spending and consumption with lifestyle preferences as closely as possible.

We note that this trend is just one of the many that excludes those who do not have access to digital technologies or the skills to use them. Once an individual has mastered the interface of one of the map-user-reviewer systems we have described, the skills are applicable to other similar sites. Searching for new web 2.0 map tools is also quite easy for those who have strong search skills, since there are many portals that list and review web 2.0 applications. But a quick glance at what has been mapped on Lime's  Philadelphia section gives users the impression that only the pocket of Center City has high quality, locally grown, organic, and tasty food to offer. North Philadelphia and Camden have no posts at all.

Citizen cartographers are bringing a torrent of new information about places into cyberspace. Gasbuddy, Lime and Yelp are just a few of the examples of how digital exclusion - either through opting out or because of digital divide barriers - may foster perceptions about what is on the ground among the members of the cyber-communities they create. We cannot help but wonder what effects this will have on geographies on the ground as this trend grows. Originally posted 6/15/08.

Michele Masucci, Temple University
David Organ, Clark Atlanta University
Caroline Guigar, Temple University

Openstreetmap.org and Wikimapia.org are two wiki-enabled collaborative mapping applications that support web user defined geographic content anchored to a common global geo-coordinate system. (ITSRG is among the handful of collaborators for the Philadelphia region, shown in the map above.)

Open Street Map's coordinate system is constructed from data in the public domain such as TIGER Files from the U.S. Census. E-collaborators add content to a global integrated geo-coordinate system base map. The data is "owned" by the community of developers who share in the creation of the wiki.

Open Street Map uses its social wiki to exchange information about technical issues, local users meetings and events, local map projects embedded within the global street map, and resources for broadening participation in the map project. The interface for contributing to the street map wiki is a simple CAD style drawing interface. Data can also be integrated from GPS devices.

Wikimapia differs from Open Street Map in two fundamental ways. First, the application uses Google Maps as the base to which wiki tags are added. Second, e-collaborators are comprised of the entire universe of individuals who have created a wiki tag on the map. In contrast, Google Maps and Earth collaborators access group map content from their individual Google Accounts. Maps projects can be shared among collaborators and they can be made public or kept private among the account-driven collaboration team.

Web 2.0 applications such as Open Street Map, Wikimapia, and Google Maps have the potential to support citizen and community collaborative cartography projects. One of the most important aspects that should be assessed in the determination of which platform is best for a given project is the e-collaborative approach supported by each. Another important factor to consider is the degree to which it matters whether or not the content shared on the maps remains in the public domain. Among the three applications referred to in this discussion, only Open Street Map meets that criteria. Finally, ease of use and ability to support collaboration is also an important factor in fostering participation on mapping projects.

Wikimapia is by far the easiest application to use; although any additions made to the map are susceptible to being altered or removed by others. Google Maps is the most proprietary of the three systems. However, Google's cross platform integration provides a robust solution to the prickly problem of spatial data interoperability across formats and applications. Because of this, many may overlook the concerns about Google's policies on data ownership and use. Open Street Maps is specifically designed as a free and open source of spatial data to both fill in basic information about streets in previously unmapped locales and to connect that information within a unified coordinate system. This is a particularly appealing aspect of the application from the standpoint of community empowerment in that data are in the public domain.

ITSRG has approached the use of Web 2.0 map applications by matching our choices with project contexts and skill levels of those involved in mapping activities.  One of ITSRG's primary constituencies has been high school students involved in the BITS Program.  Two of the maps projects developed by the BITS students are shared below. The first is our tagging project related to "TempleTown," the North Philadelphia locus of many field activities sponsored by the program. The second is a mash-up that was created using Google Maps depicting the locations of participants in an on-line pumpkin carving competition sponsored by ITSRG and the BITS Program last October. 

The aim of the Wikimapia Temple Town tagging project was to introduce students to the core concept of ground truth. They interpreted images online, visited the associated locations, and returned to the computes to add descriptive tags to Wikimapia based on what they observed on the ground. The aim of the exercise was to provide hands on, inquiry led experiences in understanding the limits of satellite and map presentations of spatial information to depict real world geographic information.

The second map is a mash-up created in Google Maps to show locations of pumpkins carved online and entered into a competition last fall. The map is an electronic footprint of the geographic extent of the viral participation in the competition. The objective was to create a demonstration project that illustrates the impact of using social media applications on the web to disseminate information. We also examined the effects of the project on fostering participation in our community of educational and research praxis related to the societal dimensions of information and communications technologies.

The points on the map below  illustrate the geographic extent of the viral marketing campaign the students implemented. The points are tagged with jpeg formatted images of the pumpkins that were carved online and e-mailed to the participant team. We held an event on Temple University's virtual and actual pumpkin submissions, featuring live voting on submitted pumpkins. Winners received online notifications and prizes. BITS program participants concluded the event with a fun workshop for young patients at St. Christopher's Childrens' Hospital in North Philadelphia. The workshop involved training the children how to create and submit an e-pumpkin into the competition. The entire event, including BITS participatns, pumpkin carvers, voters, patients, and staff involved over 300 participants during a three week period of time. Originally posted 6/12/08.

Michele Masucci
Temple University

The Huffington Post is currently ranked as Technorati's number one authority blog. This means that it has more blogs that link to it than any others according to Technorati's links count. This distinction makes the recent addition of a separate page on Green News and Opinions within The Huffington Post particularly noteworthy to the environmental research community.

Huffpo readers are familiar with the format of the blog. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds are collected under theme pages related to Breaking News (Home), Politics, Media, Business, Entertainment, Living and now Green. Each page also lists news sources and featured commentators and their blogs in a thematically organized Links box at the bottom of each page. The blog permits searches by topic/keyword and contributor. Also, there is a pull down menu that permits category searches.

The Green page is new and obviously will undergo enhancement and development over time. Our current observation is that the a Green lifestyles focus dominates the page, implying that  improving environmental quality should be centered on the task of educating consumers about their ecological footprints and  fostering their eco-friendly consumption. The inclusion of Ecofabulous as a news source and No Impact Man on the blogroll of the Green page reflects this approach.

Several highly visible nongovernmental organizations focused on wildlife, environmental, and ecological conservation are also featured as news sources. Among these are Conservation International, Greenpeace, The National Geographic, World Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Defense Fund. It appears that among those missing from the news sources and blogrolls are environmental scientists, scientific organizations, experts on environmental problems and environmental advocates. We anticipate that this will change as the Green page evolves due to the large digital footprint of the environmental research community on the Internet.

No Impact Man lists Best Green Blogs on its blogroll. In keeping with our month-long focus on citizen cartography and GIS, we call attention to the Green Blog Map and what it represents to us as academics focused on how information technology shapes community empowerment with respect to environmental quality. The map shows the locations of green bloggers around the world. Bloggers request to have their blog locations entered on the map. (Our own request to be added to the map is pending!). The criteria for inclusion are that blogs: (a) post regularly on topics of interest to the environmental community, (b) have an RSS feed url, and (c) have content that is substantive in terms of the environmental issues and topics. Many of the bloggers focus on local environments. The project to map green bloggers does not have a direct connection with mapping environmental problems or with citizen environmental monitoring and mapping activities.  Moreover, not many of the mapped bloggers represent the environmental research community.

Few researchers would dispute that grass roots activism and environmental reporting are important backbones of contemporary environmentalism. However, given the viral pathways that are emerging in a user defined content driven web 2.0 world, perhaps more researchers should consider such approaches for disseminating their work and perspectives about environmental problems and issues. Originally posted 6/11/08.

Michele Masucci and Caroline Guigar
Temple University

While The City of Brotherly Love observes a near meltdown of its nationally touted city Wi-Fi initiative called Wireless Philadelphia, the Los Angeles Fire Department  marks over 1,500,000 visitors to its blog. The LAFD Blog is not just any online information resource. It is a fully interactive communication and response system built on a series of free web, cross connecting 2.0 applications that supports real-time information flows through the network nodes. Integrated features include live Twitter Tweets, Youtube videos, Blogtalk Radio broadcasts, and live news feeds related to fire safety and prevention, fire events and statuses, and other emergency management news from around the region and country. The current post provides basic information about Twitter, a popular mini-blog and message system application.

Posts also feature embedded interactive fire maps developed in Google.  An example of one of the LAFD maps related to wildfires in Los Angeles last October is embedded below. The map includes citizen reports and photos of fires. It also depicts the status of road openings and closings and updates on reported fires. Citizens can report fires via Twitter, phone or email or through creating their own Google Map that can be linked with the one managed by the Fire Department. The map can be viewed in Google Earth as well as in Google Maps. The map has been viewed over 880,000 times.

The LAFD approach for connecting web 2.0 and geographic information system and internet mapping tools has been recognized in the field of emergency management as the state of the art for reciprocal communication among responders and citizens. Such applications are no-doubt among the many that the city of Philadelphia had in mind when its wireless initiative was implemented.

Philadelphia's experiment in digital inclusion via the Wireless Initiative adds dimension to the LAFD participatory model. The Wireless Initiative's aim to broaden the citizen participatory umbrella through improving information technology access and skills among the least connected groups could have improved access to information and quality of services on the ground in some of the cities poorest neighborhoods.

ITSRG's focus on citizen mapping throughout June aims to continue the discussion about how to move the theme of digital inclusion forward by highlighting examples of citizen involvement in mapping.  Originally posted 6/11/08.

Michele Masucci and Caroline Guigar
Temple University

ITSRG announces the start of its Citizen Cartographers 2.0 Program. One of the most exciting developments in the web 2.0 community is the rise of user created map resources that can be shared, commented on, and integrated in websites, blogs, and e-newsletters. ITSRG will showcase examples of maps created that pertain to community interests and information needs. If you would like to submit a map, please email us at: itsrg2007@gmail.com or send a link to your map using the comments function of this post. We will feature your posts throughout the month of June.

Farmers Markets in Philadelphia

The City of Philadelphia recently opened a new Farmer's Market in the center of City Hall (see photo).  This new attention on the importance of providing high quality foods for local communities in Philadelphia inspired us to work with Harrison Campus Compact staff members and local community organizations to create a Google Maps mash-up of local farmers markets throughout the city of Philadelphia. Our map features smart markers that show information about seasonal days and hours of operation of local markets, the street address, contact information for the market management, and whether or not food stamps and WIC are accepted forms of payment. Just click the marker to find out more information about the market in your neighborhood. If there is no market nearby, contact Farm to City to learn about hosting a local market.

Originally posted 6/4/08.

Michele Masucci and Caroline Guigar
Temple University

The ITSRG Summer Intensive program is open to students entering 8th, 9th and 10th grades in the fall who will be enrolled in the School District of Philadelphia.

Students participating in the 2008 BITS Summer Intensive Program will focus their summer efforts on developing an online web portal based on the African American Historical Markers in Philadelphia.

Students will spend their days exploring the significance of several historical markers that focus on the African American experience in Philadelphia. Students will engage in fieldwork, explore various African-American archival collections, and interview experts about the markers. Summer participants will develop a series of maps, online reports, photos, pod casts and movie short about the markers and showcased in a student created web portal.

Students will also use this media to begin to develop a virtual exhibit of the historical markers using Google Sketch-up and Teen Second Life.

Students will work in small teams staffed by Temple University graduate and undergraduate mentors and faculty four hours a day from July 1 to August 3, 2008.

Temple's Main Campus. By the end of the summer intensive, students will gain knowledge in fieldwork, cartography and various IT applications including: Google Sketch Up, Garage Band, I-Movie and basic html.

This summer offers a unique opportunity for area students to spend some time on Temple's campus, gain a variety of valuable technology skills, explore future technology-related career options.

For more information contact Langston Clement, BITS Summer Program Coordinator at: 215-204-3596 or email ITSRG at itsrg2007@gmail.com.

Originally posted 6/11/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University

ITSRG sponsored a month-long writing workshop involving faculty, graduate student and community fellows aimed at sharing outcomes of our programs, projects and research activites. Fellows have been writing about issues such as digital inclusion, literacy and place, cyber safety for kids, web 2.0 and communities, fair information practices, BITS Program Lessons Learned and e-health.

Write Now in May involved a series of weekly meetings among the writers, developing shared tools for collaborating around specific journal article manuscripts, blog posts, presentations, and responses to abstracts and calls for papers.

We were able to draft 10 manuscripts, create tools for sharing literature reviews and searches, and increase the numbers of fellows with writing projects underway. We are especially pleased that three graduate fellows participated in the event.

We want to extend a special thank you to all of the fellows who participated in the event. One outcome from Write Now in May is that we have created a new ITSRG Working Papers series. You can preview ITSRG Working Papers here. Originally posted 6/4/08.

Michele Masucci and Caroline Guigar
Temple University

ITSRG Student Fellow and Geography and Urban Studies Graduate Fatima Abbas was recently featured in Temple University's Meet the 2008 Graduates article. 

Her summer research for ITSRG was with the BITS program through the Graduate School's Summer Research  Opportunities program.

Her summer research focused on promoting technological and community empowerment for underrepresented minorities in the context of geography education, blogs, and the creation of a community GIS. Her analysis was presented as "The Blog: A Tool in Youth Technology Instruction and GIS Development" on November 1, 2006, at the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference of the Association of American Geographers held at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.

You can read more about Abbas HERE.
Originally posted 5/23/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University

Congratulations to Harrison Campus Compact staff member Erin Cusack who has won a Fulbright Scholarship. She plans to study in Madrid, Spain, where she will teach bilingual classes to schoolchildren and continue her thesis project comparing immigration policies in Spain and France.

Cusack is also one of two students giving the student address at the College of Liberal Arts commencement ceremony today.

Erin  worked for ITSRG on the Sheppard School Project as a Spanish Translator. She has assisted with computer trainings, website translation , phone calls to families and home visits.

You can read more about Cusack accomplishments HERE.

Cusack has a B.A. in political science and Spanish. Originally posted 5/22/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University