Vernacular Mapping, and the Ethics of What Comes Next

Gerlach, Joe

doi:10.3138/carto.45.3.165

Cited by 26 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…In the latter arena -the social and political implications of neogeography -we see divergent concerns and predictions. Some scholars trace trends of increasing surveillance and state/ private-sector control over the production and circulation of geospatial imagery, maps, and the resources needed to produce and share them Gerlach 2010;Leszczynski 2012). Others suggest that neogeography constitutes new spaces of civic engagement or resistance and begins to level access to cartography, geovisual imagery, and deliberative or decision-making forums in which they are used (Madden and Ross 2009;Okolloh 2009;Meier 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Another Politics Is Possible: Neogeographies, Visual Spatial Tactics, and Political Formation

Elwood

Mitchell

2013

Cartographica

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Neogeography -the use of interactive online mapping technologies, often by laypersons or grassroots groups -continues its rapid growth, as do debates about its implications for spatial data and map quality, public spatial literacy, and the digital divide. Ongoing efforts to understand whether and how neogeography might enable the participation, influence, and agency of less powerful social actors require greater attention to theorizing neogeography politics. Existing work, tacitly or explicitly, tends to theorize these politics in ways that align with Michel de Certeau's notion of ''strategy'' or its conceptual partner, ''tactics. '' We argue that a neogeography politics conceived as ''strategy'' has inherent limits and that the political significance of neogeography ''tactics'' is even more foundational than has been understood thus far. Recent work has shown neogeography to be a powerful site of political action or engagement, but our evidence suggests further that visual spatial tactics in neogeography are also key sites of political formation. Neogeography tactics are significant not just as a site of resistance or political action by less powerful actors but also as practices that contribute to the formation of political subjects, mobilized social groups, and shared knowledge. Recognizing neogeography as a site of political formation paves the way toward realizing its broader potential in the development and practice of a critical spatial citizenship. We develop these arguments from a three-year neogeography project conducted with young teens. RÉSUMÉSi la néogéographie -l'utilisation de technologies pour la cartographie interactive en ligne, souvent par des amateurs ou des groupes communautaires -poursuit sa croissance rapide, il en est de même des débats concernant ses répercussions sur les données spatiales et la qualité des cartes, la littératie spatiale publique et le fossé numérique. Il faudrait consacrer plus d'efforts et d'attention afin de mieux comprendre comment la néogéographie pourrait favoriser la participation, ainsi que l'effet et le rôle d'agents sociaux moins puissants, afin d'établir une théorie concernant les politiques de la néogéographie. Les travaux existants ont tendance, implicitement ou explicitement, à élaborer des théories sur ces politiques d'une manière qui s'harmonise avec la notion de « stratégie » de Michel de Certeau ou celle de son partenaire conceptuel, « tactique ». L'argument énoncé dans l'article est qu'une politique de la néogéographie conçue comme « stratégie » possède des limites inhérentes et que l'importance politique des « tactiques » néogéographiques serait encore plus essentielle que ce qu'on a cru jusqu'à présent. De récents travaux ont montré que la néogéographie peut devenir un moyen puissant d'action politique ou d'engagement, mais nos résultats suggèrent que les tactiques spatiales visuelles en néogéographie sont aussi des sites clés de formation politique. Les tactiques néogéographiques sont importantes non seulement comme site de résistance ou d'action pol...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Another Politics Is Possible: Neogeographies, Visual Spatial Tactics, and Political Formation

Elwood

Mitchell

2013

Cartographica

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“…User diaries allow individuals to share views with the rest of the crowd, and the wiki brings together postings into a single feed. In addition I draw on the growing number of critical interventions interrogating OSM practice, notably Dodge and Kitchin (), Eckert (), Gerlach (), Haklay (), Lin (), Mooney and Corcoran () and Perkins and Dodge ().…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plotting practices and politics: (im)mutable narratives in OpenStreetMap

Perkins

2013

Trans Inst British Geog

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It has been argued that crowd‐sourcing offers a radical alternative to conventional ways of mapping, challenging the hegemony of official and commercial cartographies. In this view mapping might begin to offer a forum for different voices, mapping different things, enabling new ways of living. Instead of the Latourian notion of the map as immutable mobile, fixing knowledge and bodies and facilitating governance, the wikification of mapping might facilitate a more mutable politics. This paper focuses on these possibilities by examining OpenStreetMap (OSM), arguably the most significant and emancipatory of neo‐geographic assemblages. While not underplaying the importance of a political economic understanding of the Geoweb, it suggests we need to attend more to the contexts through which emergent knowledge communities enact alternatives, and that notions of practice are central in any evaluation of changing politics of representation. Communities involved in OSM contest the geographies that they call into being, and this process can be narrated through a consideration of local action, in different map spaces and places. A processual view of mapping reveals the extent of mutability of OSM, and highlights many of the tensions evident in collaborative remapping. New ways of mapping reciprocally create and reinforce newly expert knowledge communities that may be emancipatory, but that may also reify power relations. Crowd‐sourced mapping is likely to comprise a hybrid of mutable and immutable elements.

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“…The fact that geographical data do not have to be produced, validated and published by an official organisation such as the UK's Ordnance Survey 3 has attracted geographers to investigate this ''open source mapping'' movement and its impacts on cartography (Tulloch 2007, Perkins and Dodge 2008, Dodge et al 2009, Gerlach 2010. It is generally agreed that such ''citizen cartography'' or ''amateur cartography'' (or as Gerlach (2010) terms ''vernacular mapping'') subverts the existing norms in cartography by re-distributing the power of map-making from the experts to the lay. Like many other digital cartography projects, OpenStreetMap has brought interactivity and mash-up into play.…”

Section: Openstreetmapmentioning

confidence: 99%

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Lin

2011

New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

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This peer-reviewed journal article considers open data and participatory media by investigating the socio-technical practices and dynamics within a Voluntary Geographical Information (VGI) innovation system. Based on a case study on OpenStreetMap, an open source project that crowd-sources geographical data and geographical information, the paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explore the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and to investigate how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. \ud \ud The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps, which black-box cartographic knowledge to produce a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as OpenStreetMappers alongside some of the other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires. \ud \ud This research has led to a collaborative project with the Institute of Geoinformation and Cartography at Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien), and Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft in Austria: the Fostering the participation of women in Voluntary Geographical Information – encouraging FEMales to MAP (Fem2Map) project, funded by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) under the structural research programme FEMtech-fFORTE. http://cartography.tuwien.ac.at/fem2map

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Vernacular Mapping, and the Ethics of What Comes Next

Cited by 26 publications

References 1 publication

Another Politics Is Possible: Neogeographies, Visual Spatial Tactics, and Political Formation

Another Politics Is Possible: Neogeographies, Visual Spatial Tactics, and Political Formation

Plotting practices and politics: (im)mutable narratives in OpenStreetMap

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

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