Most people don't use a formal geographical vocabulary, however they do use a wide variety of geographical terms on a daily basis.Identifiers such as "Downtown" are components of a vernacular geography which is vastly more used than the coordinates and scientifically defined variables beloved of most professional analysts. Terms like these build into the jointly-defined world-views within which we all act. Despite its importance for policy making and quality of life, attention is rarely paid to this vernacular geography because it is hard to capture and use. This paper presents tools for capturing this geography, an example of the tools' use to define "High Crime" areas, and an initial discussion of the issues surrounding vernacular data. While the problems involved in analyzing such data are not to be underestimated, such a system aims to pull together professional and popular geographical understanding, to the advantage of both.

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This paper introduces the Kartta Labs project, an ongoing opensource and open-data project aiming at organizing the world's historical maps and making them universally accessible and useful. Kartta Labs' framework is designed as a composition of multiple modules. Each module has a crowdsourcing implementation and an artificial intelligence based implementation. The framework takes images of historical maps, registers them in space and time, generates a vector version of the map content, and allows the users to query for the vector content and recreate the historical maps in various cartographic styles. We refer to this process as unrendering. The resulting machine readable map data can support a variety of scientific studies and applications that require long-term, detailed geographic information in the past, while opening up opportunities in other areas such as entertainment. This paper also presents the preliminary results from one automated module to geolocalize a given historical map.

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