Let’s talk about maps
by Cassim Shepard March 5th, 2009 |
The map provides one of the principal governing metaphors for how we organize and navigate information. According to New York Times technology reporter John Markoff,
With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map… As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods.
Understanding where we are in the world usually involves a singular conception of location. Phrases like “from point A to point B” reflect the common view: you are either here or there. And if you are in between, you are at a single point in between. Mapping fields of action is far more complex – activity is zonal, concentrations are unequal – and the two together often lead to muddy and busy if not downright confusing results.
The vast range of environmental stewards discussed in this week’s feature, Who Takes Care of New York?, speaks to a complicated set of spatial relationships. One of the many gaps in the existing literature that STEW-MAP seeks to redress is that notion that no two bodies occupy the same space. Common sense tells us otherwise, yet the most popular and accessible forms of geographic information (note the google map on your right) still make it easier to drop a pin than to draw a polygon. Or, leaving digital technology aside for a moment, just think of the last time you hand-drew a napkin-map with directions through an unmarked traffic bypass or to a secret bar.
At Urban Omnibus, we always aim to make the back-stories and forward-looking provocations that we feature as useful as possible to the project at hand. This week, we want to start a virtual community roundtable on mapping to support the STEW-MAP project team’s brainstorming on useful platforms and visualization strategies. We’d be into hearing rules of thumb from graphic designers, new directions in geographic information systems from GIS experts, war-stories from citizens who have used – or wanted to use – spatial information to effect change in your community. Landscape architects and urban designers: how do you use maps to buttress site analysis and support your choices for a particular design solution? Software developers and information architects: how has the rise (or resurgence) of location awareness changed the way you organize information? Students: where are we headed next?
Share thoughts in the comments below. If you have advice that you’d rather not share in this public forum, you can email Lindsay and Erika directly here (stew-map@urbanomnibus.net)
Here at Green Map System, we’ve been assessing many issues related to mapping local stewardship and sustainability for community and global well-being since 1995. We invite you to explore our social mapping platform-in-progress at http://OpenGreenMap.org. The first 40 Open Green Maps chart 2800 sites, and each has its own social networking space so everyone can participate and add their own insights, images and impacts. OGM makes it easy to share, compare, update and replicate green living sites, natural cultural and social resources, locally and globally. Many features are being built as we move toward the June 5 launch celebration. More tools will follow, hopefully including an easy way for projects like STEW-MAP to be imported as a batch so this data can be opened to public interaction, as well as readily exported for mobile usage, widgets, and other shared formats, including printed Green Maps. We welcome your thoughts and involvement! Contact us at info (at) greenmap (dot) org.
As Executive director of HabitatMap.org, an environmental health justice organization that builds web-based tools to support grassroots organizing for livable cities and healthy communities, I spend alot of time thinking about and making maps. Here are my two cents on mapping for today:
Fundamentally, maps allow us to conceptualize the relationship between our current location in space and the world around us. Maps can reveal relationships that would otherwise remain invisible to us, for instance the relationship between asthma and air pollution, and they can also establish relationships where none existed before, e.g. think of the impact the photos of earth taken from space have had on our conceptions of the environment and the interconnectedness of life on earth.
Our ability to experience the world around us is necessarily limited by the potency of our five senses and the circumscribed geographies we travel. Maps allow us to experience aspects of the real world that are normally beyond reach. That is to say, with a map I can travel half way around the world and witness phenomena that cannot be directly experienced even by the residents who currently occupy that space and I can do it all without leaving the comfort of my living room. Maps are a kind of virtual reality that at times may be more real than the “real” world.