ITSRG

On behalf of the Information Technology and Society Research Group of Temple University, we wish to express sincere thanks to the geo-blogging community for following ITSpace during the past six weeks as we have called attention to growing trend for citizens to share spatial information using web 2.0 applications. In particular, we wish to give a special thanks to the folks at Very Spatial for calling our series to the attention of their readers and pod cast audience. We are grateful for the insightful comments shared by the professional geographers across the country and members of online map user communities. Thank you also for the contributions of guest authors David Organ and Paul Schroeder. We will continue to welcome guest authors to post new discussions, so please do not hesitate to contact us about new post ideas related to the theme of Citizen Cartographers in the future.

Citizen Cartographers theme posts have highlighted examples of citizen involvement in creating and sharing maps online, the use of online map tools by citizens and advocacy groups, and the concerns citizens may have in how online spatial information may affect them on the ground. We have suggested that the magnitude of this trend warrants the attention of geographers, cartographers, community advocates and others to enter into a public conversation about the impact of the Internet on sharing spatial information, collaborating to create spatial data sets, geo-visualization and map making, and using maps. One of the challenges that we face in doing so is how to foster and engage a conversation that is relevant with respect to the rise of citizen cartographers and their concerns.

Now that citizen involvement in cartography is web-enabled, the participatory impact and geographic dissemination of projects engaged by citizens and in the public domain is greatly expanded. Maps as literal and metaphoric tools for illustrating community concerns, depicting contested spaces, visualizing analyzed geographic problems, and showing where the thing occurs are one of the oldest artifacts of geographic inquiry and representation. We have suggested that what makes the emergence of web 2.0 tools for creating maps intriguing is the ways in which collaboration, distance, and dissemination are mitigated for content creators. 

Our examination has also led us to theorize about how collaborative cartographic practices are redefining the focus of geographic inquiry and cartographic representation. The professional practice of cartography involves using skillful design techniques to locate and visualizing geographic information, define and classify geographic data sets, align those datasets with graphical representation traditions and formats, and critically examine what is communicated on maps. Many scholars have pointed out that embedded within the practice of cartography are political and ethical concerns. Maps can be artifacts of power relations (such as political redistricting maps) as well as tools for mitigating power among groups (such as zoning maps). Maps can be representations of places and they can be manifestations of how people identify themselves.

The traditional study of maps is quickly being supplanted by the rapid creation of maps (or maps-of-a-sort). Many web applications that permit collaborative mapping are quite simplistic in terms of how spatial data are represented. Most mash ups approaches supported by online map applications use simple x-marks-the-spot tools for geo-tagging features. Attributes can be attached to the point (line or area) markers with most of these applications. Most online map applications also support collaborative approaches that enable more than one contributor to create the spatial data set. This aggregation of spatial data through the inclusion of collaborators is one of the unique features of the process of online mapping, and represents one of the most important divergences from prior cartographic practices. Users can e-collaborate to generate data in virtually real time, so that the spatial data set itself is unbounded at the onset of creating the map. Most professional cartographers are accustomed to mapping a temporally static spatial data set.

More sophisticated forms of geovisualization, such as representing classes of spatial information, showing proportional representations over space, or creating isometric lines of equal value to model distributions of spatial information are not yet the domain of online cartography collaborations. Instead, the underlying objective of web-enabled citizen cartographic activities lies in two main areas: (a) participating to create and share new content that cannot be shared or accessed otherwise and (b) tailoring existing (online) content for new audiences and new purposes through adding new media components.

We suggest that a new research direction related to citizen cartographers and the cartographic products they create would focus on issues related to their participatory processes, the transparency and fairness of information practices, the privacy implications of citizen cartographic practice, the use of data sets and maps created through e-collaborative processes, and the implications of a proliferation of user defined content.

We will begin to explore these issues through the startup of an informal science education demonstration project that involves citizens in Philadelphia and other cities to map and share their walking and rolling routes using online social media applications. The project will be implemented in the Fall of 2008, with more details to come soon about how to participate.

Michele Masucci
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