Thanks to Temple's IT and Society Research Group (ITSRG) for creating a space for "citizen cartographers" to show their work. I hope this opportunity continues beyond June into the coming months.

How are citizen cartographers making a difference when engaged with particularly intractable global issues such as environmental collapse and international conflict? The evidence is slim, but now that ITSRG has tuned us in to the concept of "citizen cartography" we'll probably begin noticing many examples where individuals and small groups are making a difference by re-drawing the maps we've inherited and by creating entirely new maps that help us to visualize global transformation.

The problems between the US and Iran are again demanding our attention. The chronic antagonism that has infected relations between these nation-states certainly prompts citizen innovation, especially since these governments seem to have no incentive to give peace a chance. I'm reminded of the early '90s when I was involved in promoting network connectivity for Maine's libraries and schools. A librarian from a rural Maine school testified at a utilities commission hearing that the "Internet will bring world peace." Of course I was skeptical, but as long as we got our online connections, why should I argue? The promise that the emerging "information superhighway" would do away with the "constraints of distance and time" also seemed like over-the-top hype to me.

While we usually think that cartography represents places and spaces, we can also think of cartography as a way to create spaces that don't exist yet, or as a way to re-create spaces that have been lost socially and geographically. About a year ago I began to inhabit a place cartographically that I last visited physically nearly 50 years ago, the small city of Abadan, Iran where I lived from 1958 to 1960 as a teenaged American boy (see photo essays here). The responses have been overwhelming, showing that there is a huge unmet need for people to connect personally across gaps of culture, time, politics and geography.

Public mapping technologies such as Wikimapia point the way toward reclaiming and even re-inhabiting territories that have been completely occupied by contending state interests. The City of Abadan is situated on a major river (variously named, depending on what national claims are held) that for many years (decades? centuries? millennia?) has served as a major conflict zone. The city, formerly Iran's largest refinery and oil port, suffered widespread destruction from bombing and siege during the Iran-Iraq war (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Abadan for more information). The house my family lived in was destroyed, but its footprint is still visible on the Wikimap. By annotating this plot, I could reclaim a part of my personal history by use of a public map technology.

Sites like Wikimapia open the door to reclaiming a collective history based on shared connections to a beloved place. Annotations to the Abadan Wikimap are now mainly in three languages: English, Persian / Farsi, and Arabic. The stories told from these three lingustic perspectives are very different, but there is a chance for dialogue within this shared mapped space. I'm encouraging people who have contacted me to collaborate in bridging these perspectives through translating existing annotations into all three languages. I visualize this as a project for Iranian teachers (some of whom have been in touch with me) who want to broaden both the language skills and the intercultural awareness of their students.

Meanwhile, the deeply felt need to establish direct person-to-person contacts across this critical international divide has been taken up by other projects such as EnoughFear.org. As a project of The Action Mill. EnoughFear has posted hundreds of photos of individual Americans, Iranians and others whose hands reach out with a shared message, No to War between the US and Iran. This project also sponsors direct public person-to-person telephone conversations between the US and Iran.

So far there's not a mapping component to EnoughFear. Both this and the Wikimapia reclamation effort seem to share in trying to create new spaces for international direct citizen dialogue. My personal belief is that regions such as Abadan, whose geopolitical situation has bred ceaseless conflict, are candidates for reclamation as international peace zones. (See Zones of Peace and Zones of Peace, a History. Learning to recognize the stake that each of us has as "global citizens" might help us to re-define our tasks as "citizen cartographers."

Thanks again to ITSRG for creating this space.

Paul Schroeder
June 30, 2008

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