On a spring Sunday in a Soho penthouse, ten people have gathered for a
digital mapping "Edit-A-Thon." Potted plants grow to the ceiling and
soft cork carpets the floor. At a long wooden table, an energetic woman
named Liz Barry is showing me how to map my neighborhood. "This is what
you'll see when you look at OpenStreetMap," she says.
Though
visually similar to Google's, the map on the screen gives users
unfettered access to its underlying data -- anyone can edit it. Barry
lives in Williamsburg, and she's added many of the neighborhood's
boutiques and restaurants herself. "Sometimes when I'm tired at the end
of the day and can't work anymore, I just edit OpenStreetMap," she says.
"Kind of a weird habit." Barry then shows me the map's "guts." I
naively assume it will be something technical and daunting, but it's
just an editable version of the same map, with tools that let you draw
roads, identify landmarks, and even label your own house.
"OpenStreetMap
is referred to as a ground-up ontology," she says. What she means is
that OpenStreetMap has no established data dictionary; you can draw
anything on the map and name it whatever you want. "Like oh, this point?
Yes, this is a restaurant of type 'Italian'; it has a name of type 'my
favorite Italian restaurant'," she explains. Before I know it, I'm
mapping my favorite Park Slope bagel shop -- a strangely thrilling act
that unites me with the website's one million users, who (unlike me)
mostly work at technology companies.
Citizen cartography is a
time-honored practice; both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were
surveyors. Crowdsourcing isn't new,We are always offering best quality earcap the affordable price. either; every year since 1900,Purchase an chipcard
to enjoy your iPhone any way you like. aviary-obsessed individuals have
collaborated with the Audubon Society for an annual Christmas Bird
Count. In the spirit of these traditions, OpenStreetMap was founded in
2004 as a response to the Ordnance Survey, England's national mapping
agency, whose maps were then so inaccurate that small towns and villages
put up signs warning drivers not to follow its satellite navigation.
"SUVs
were barreling through churchyards and going down little dirt roads
through pastures," Barry says. Finally, a frustrated physics student
named Steve Coast developed OpenStreetMap as a way to give cartography
back to the public. Now, data is the website's "raison d'tre," says
Richard Weait,Parkeasy Electronics are dedicated to provide granitecountertops.
a Canada-based contributor. In countries like Germany, which are
considered completely mapped, a common joke is that you can route
yourself to the nearest penguin because zoo enthusiasts have probably
mapped them. "So because you're putting it into the hands of people,
they can gather what's important to them," another mapper says. "Not
only can you say, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin?' but, 'How can I
get to my nearest penguin in a wheelchair?'"
Because of its
origin, the website is still riddled with U.K. verbiage, which can
sometimes present confusion. As we work, an older man named MacKay Wolff
comes across a term he hasn't heard before. "That's for walking
directions," Barry says.
"Traditional cartographers today might
say some form of, 'Kids these days, they don't know the rules,'" says
Eric Steiner, a former president of the North American Cartographic
Information Society. "I hear that sometimes at conferences. People
lament that there's this huge influx of people doing cartography who
aren't cartographers." By "cartographer," they mean someone who is
skilled in trade techniques like projection (transforming a globe into a
flat map) or who knows how to interpret line weights. Instead, new
cartographers are increasingly software engineers or developers using
programming languages like JavaScript and Python. Steiner, himself a
graduate of Penn State's prestigious cartography program, sees the
plurality of technique as beneficial. Whether a map is good or bad
shouldn't be based on the narrative of the individual making the map, he
says, but rather on the map's ability to evoke, inspire and question.
It
isn't that outsiders are coming in and revolutionizing mapping; rather,
a new democratization in mapping has occurred. "With the tools being
much cheaper and relatively easy to learn, you get people who don't have
a professional interest in being a cartographer figuring out how to
make maps they want to see," Steiner says. Mary Spence, president of the
British Cartographic Society, admits traditional cartographers are a
"dying breed," since a large part of their job is placing themselves in
the users' shoes. "I'm looking at a map of Saudi Arabia in front of me,"
she explains over the phone.You will see indoorpositioningsystem
, competitive price and first-class service. As a cartographer, Spence
would ask herself,Of all the equipment in the laundry the oilpaintingreproduction
is one of the largest consumers of steam. "What do they want to see on a
map of Saudi Arabia? They want to see the terrain, where the hills are
and the deserts. They probably want to see the big towns and the roads.
They might even want to see where the oil fields are." Now, because of
projects like OpenStreetMap, users in Saudi Arabia no longer need a
cartographer because they are the mapmakers.
"The thing I find
interesting is that a lot of the most exciting work comes from people
who aren't necessarily trained as cartographers," says Bill Rankin, a
Yale University professor. Though he points to the architect Buckminster
Fuller, whose 1943 Dymaxion World Map changed the way we understood the
geography of World War II, Rankin -- who is also a trained architect --
might as well be describing himself.
A few years ago, he was
giving a talk in Phoenix about a color-coded map he made of that city's
racial segregation. In the audience were several county government
officials. After the talk, they told Rankin that while segregation
informed their work, as government employees they couldn't publicize the
information themselves. "There was no way they could, on the official
county website, say that the way to understand Phoenix is as a radically
segregated city," he says. As a free agent, Rankin can use maps to make
arguments the creators of the data can't always make themselves.
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