Digital Mapping

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facilitated by John Emerson from Backspace

Ten participants

Interests

What folks used maps for or are interested in:

Locations in organizing documentation – tools for mapping participation more interested.

Frustrations of mapping, strategies. Maps are cool, there are fans; civic information.

John:
- Printed handouts, nice!
- Beautiful fold out maps, brochures for us to look at.
- Graphics.
- Annual reports.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

GIS – Geospatial Information Systems, digital cartography.

Geography and map making enabled by digital cartography, better and better OS tools.
Desktop manipulation of data.

Key concepts

Longitude and latitude.
Phones with digital maps.
Sharing data attached to photos, comments, data attached to all tools.
Humanitarian disaster relief, ushahidi.org which is a way of aggregating disparate data from the web to crowdsource maps.
- Came from Kenya elections when people were monitoring violence at polls, Haiti disaster, posting and commenting can be aggregated.
Open Street Map is “kind of like wikipedia” of mapping.
USA public domain data is very good.
Points of interest, GIS data used by cities in all manner of city processes. Crimemapping, for instance.
In UK mapping data is owned by the crown, proprietary.
- Wonderful software dev happening in the US, but UK was missing out.
- Then in UK - bike mapping phenomenon started there. Data very good. Places are named, points of interest are named.
Wonderful things you can do with open data, mapped data, in typhoon in Phillipines
Important areas bubble up on a map; vulnerable areas tend to be undermapped
- Humanitarian group developed a queue of the most vulnerable places
- Very detailed map developed in short time span to assist in activist navigation.

Tools

Google Maps -
Mapbox.com – beautiful powerful alternative to Google. Pay – for. Styling.
Tilemill.com -
Cartodb – hosted platform, falls between mapbox.com and google maps.
QGIS – desktop, open source tool.
Leaflet
Open Layers
ArcMap – Esri – is the company, trial versions, student versions. Industrial strength tool
MapInfo – Windows based programs.

Mobile

Platforms for viewing the map in a mobile sense.

Recommendations?

Mobile is a challenge for spatial information.
Cartodb you can zoom in and out.

Other Specialized Functions

World maps, voting maps, d3 has a nice API for doing this.
AR capabilities?
- Mapbox ID - Open Street Map type platform in java
Art Project
Alternative Walking Tours
History from Below
City of DC has great publically accessible GIS data; borders of city of limits, stops.
John used OSM data to make his map.

Licensing Issues

Some datasets are not for commercial use, most data requires a credit.
http://www.naturalearthdata.com has border data, disputed border data.
maplibrary.org If you are working on Africa, shape files on countries
Finding the data is often a big part of the challenge – or making the data yourself.

Best Practices

Insight into clustering? - loads of ZIP codes in Houston may appear as a larger cluster in the map...
- Depends on the story you are telling...
- Location markers can show size, quantity; how to define location markers.
- Leaflet has a plug-in, Leaflet cluster – will replace marker with circle – has a number in it repping number of markers

Projects

Oakland Crimespotting - http://oakland.crimespotting.org/map/ – Stamen Design – big bubbles, categorizing crime.
Stop and Frisk maps in NYC - http://project.wnyc.org/stop-frisk-guns/ - also, what neighborhoods they were targeting.
- Drops in crime from data visualization?
- Policing smarter?
- Deploying resources in a more specific way?
Evictionmapping.org project producing evictions in SF happening – using cardodb and leaflet – also animates over time.
Stamen Design – overlaying crime with trees? Rise of prostitution based upon Uber, private car service network.
Tree census data – try to determine what factors kill trees along curbs in New York.
- Looking at traffic data, pet ownership, different factors.
- Once trees pass a certain age they are more likely to survive.
Internal planning maps used by foundations...etc.
- Basket of programs...what countries have been focused upon?
- Map gives such information trend information, awareness of larger geographic area.
- Example: storytelling about divergent kids in relation to cops; schools and stop and frisk info overlaid and evidence of increased numbers of incidents is readily apparent.
- Most organizations have limited resources.
Mapping urban poverty
- Million Dollar Blocks project came from Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia Architecture and Urban Planning.
- Rather than mapping location of maps, mapped residents of those arrested for felonies, instead.
- Cost $30,000 to keep someone in prison for a year. Million Dollar Blocks are blocks where at least 33 people lived when they were arrested, convicted and sent to prison.
- Whatever your theory of crime, more resources can be deployed in some areas than in others.
- Focusing on parole offices...how can the parole experience be redesigned to reduce recidivism and make it more humane.

Data Maps From New York, Chicago, and Beyond

New York

Poverty maps, crime maps
- Geolocated, mapped to intersections
- Used in own advocacy.
- Parents, citizens, can use this
- Journalists as research tool
- City council members can press dept of transportation about intersections
- Very easy to scroll around and see
Center for Urban Pedagogy
- Pairing artists with projects
- Where does our food come from?
- Through making this process they discovered why it is important to eat locally

Chicago

Asset Mapping: People's Atlas of Chicago – people took notes of their place
Discovering spatial justice issues in process of mapmaking

Other Examples from Around the World

Geopolitics of health in Lebanon
- Bar charts are ethnic groups
- Circles are public and private hospitals
- Decided not to publish for fear of backlash
Architecture 2030, floodplain data, city, coastal cities; where sea level rose, what land form would look like.
Hack to do this on Google Map – Sink My City
Plotting prisons in Tunisia with videostories of loved ones.
- (Done before The Arab Spring)
- Tunisian Prison Map, created by NGO
Satellite affected areas over Africa.
- All of Africa covered by satellite access.
- Government policy and state owned telecoms that are keeping people unconnected.
Cartograms, image is based on the population or the quantity of data...making small and large areas distort the map.
Project that Amnesty International did: counting houses demolished in Zimbabwe at time of election, for those supporting the opposition.
Map from Beirut
- Surveillance infrastructure
- Physical security infrastructure
- Militarization of the streets

Data

When creating a map: lat/long is generated for each point of data or gps data
- Service of converting to lat/long, change logs are available
- Good data is available
- If a more rural or less dense – you can get data from:
  - Mapquest
  - Cloudmade has an API
  - Open Street Map data, nicely sliced, too.
  - Municipal Extract, subsets of Open Street Map data: http://metro.teczno.com
  - Geocoding. Looking at particular state
  - Census has zip code shape files available to download.
Favorite places to get data?
- NYC – DoIT has more and more free data and open data.
- Ushahidi