Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics

Abstract

Cartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, mapping and cartography are creative, aesthetic performances and sometimes outwardly experimental and artistic. To what extent then, might contemporary forms of cartographic practice be producing spaces that are simultaneously creative and geopolitical? This article employs the wiki-based OpenStreetMap as a fieldwork intervention in exploring how online, virtual, crowd-sourced cartographies can be conjured as 'ethico-aesthetic projects' (Guattari 1995) that valorise creative processes in negotiating emergent problems, politics, events and spaces. It shows how OpenStreetMap is at once a technology, a set of performances and a series of communities that allows users to create and alter maps, thereby generating capacities to edit worlds. The article explores how these capacities inflect geographical imaginations while being generative of a minor geopolitics. 'Minor' in this context alludes not to scale or tenor, but instead refers to the non-representational registers of cartography so as to spotlight the unspoken, anticipatory geopolitics of mapping.

Thinking laughter beyond humour: Atmospheric refrains and ethical indeterminacies in spaces of care

“…The movement of thought away from humour, for example, shifts the ways in which we can describe, discuss, and understand laughter. The ''meaning of laughter'' is rendered meaningless because, as we have seen, laughter is always in excess of itself (Anderson, 2014;Bataille and Michelson, 1986), always expressing morethan its representations, always indeterminate and unfinished (Gerlach, 2015). Events of laughter themselves also emerge from simple movements, which implicate the geographies of the body: the locations of ''its'' subjectivities, ''its'' consciousness, and ''its'' emotions; but also, the ways in which it becomes orientated in relation to spaces, places, and other bodies.…”

“…Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 120) for instance describe refrains of colour, posture, and architecture. Slogans (Anderson, 2014;Closs Stephens, 2016); maps (Gerlach, 2015); sports commentary, dance and other rhythmic movements (McCormack, 2002(McCormack, , 2003(McCormack, , 2005(McCormack, , 2013; and even the arguments of human geography as a discipline (Gerlach and Jellis, 2015;McCormack, 2010McCormack, , 2012; have all been positioned by geographers as refrains capable of drawing together blocks of space time, and marking out some consistency within an otherwise differentiating world (McCormack, 2013).…”

“…As such, the refrain offers a means through which we can grasp the multiplicity and the indeterminacy of laughter, as well as its capacity to do things of its own accord. The leverage of thinking in terms of laughter-refrains therefore, are in conceptualising moments of laughter as (repeated) reference points around which bodies, experiences and space times can acquire resonance (Gerlach, 2015). In other words, refrains capture laughter's capacity to do something, without necessarily determining what that something might be.…”

Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository

“…Up-to-date maps of informal settlements in Lima were produced using balloon and kite imagery, and it was proposed that these maps be used for research and planning, decision making, public works projects, and land-use discussions [49]. The mapped imagery had a significantly higher resolution and was more current than existing satellite/aerial imagery [68], [70]. The quality of the resulting aerial imagery was so high that Google integrated it into their own products (the imagery was published in the public domain, requiring no permissions for downloading and republishing) [49], [51], [52].…”

“…OSM relies on a global community of contributors to create and edit geospatial content depicting largely built characteristics of the earth's surface (roads, buildings, and infrastructure). Since the founding of OSM in 2004, a significant amount of research on both the community of users [14], [64], data available via OSM [65]- [67], and the process and politics of its use [68] has been produced. This literature provides context for the development of a user-contributed imagery repository, outlining key concerns such as data quality [34], [56], [69], [70], licensing and reuse [62], [27].…”