Participatory Mapping E-Book

Jean-Christophe Plantin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book is intended for applications of online digital mapping, called mashups (or composite application), and to analyze the mapping practices in online socio-technical controversies. The hypothesis put forward is that the ability to create an online map accompanies the formation of online audience and provides support for a position in a debate on the Web. The first part provides a study of the map: - a combination of map and statistical reason - crosses between map theories and CIS theories - recent developments in scanning the map, from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Web map. The second part is based on a corpus of twenty "mashup" maps, and offers a techno-semiotic analysis highlighting the "thickness of the mediation" they are in a process of communication on the Web. Map as a device to "make do" is thus replaced through these stages of creation, ranging from digital data in their viewing, before describing the construction of the map as a tool for visual evidence in public debates, and ending with an analysis of the delegation action against Internet users. The third section provides an analysis of these mapping practices in the case study of the controversy over nuclear radiation following the accident at the Fukushima plant on March 11, 2011. Techno-semiotic method applied to this corpus of radiation map is supplemented by an analysis of web graphs, derived from "digital methods" and graph theory, accompanying the analysis of the previous steps maps (creating Geiger data or retrieving files online), but also their movement, once maps are made.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: Origins and Properties of Online Maps

1 Tooling Up for Complexity

1.1. Maps as intellectual technology

1.2. A shift in the uses of maps

2 From GIS to Web Maps

2.1. The origins of a communication approach to maps

2.2. The rise of the notion of participation within maps

3 A Participant in the Web of Platform

3.1. Technical architecture of Web maps

3.2. Google Maps versus OpenStreetMap?

4 Maps and Web-based Data

4.1. Categories and data structure

4.2. Expressive, technical and scientific bricolage

PART TWO: Mapping Practices in Emergency Situations

5 The State of Information After the Fukushima Disaster

5.1. The challenges in accessing information

5.2. Flaws in the published data on radiation

6 Producing Radiation Maps

6.1. Producing radiation data

6.2. Three attitudes toward radiation data sources

7 Circulation and Use of Maps

7.1. Cartographers’ motives

7.2. Taking action on the basis of a map

8 The Shape of Public Engagement

8.1. An emerging online public

8.2. An ad hoc engagement

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

First published 2014 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUK

www.iste.co.uk

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USA

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2014The rights of Jean-Christophe Plantin to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936490

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISSN 2051-2481 (Print)ISSN 2051-249X (Online)ISBN 978-1-84821-661-7

Introduction

In the course of their long history, maps have been successively monopolized by various corporations which have developed new practices and purposes for them. For example, while the foundations of modern geography were laid by Ptolemy as early as the 2nd Century AD, T-O maps (or Orbis Terrarum) were a driving force for a religious cosmogony throughout most of the Middle Ages. In the 19th Century, topographic cartography evolved into thematic cartography as the geographers’ monopoly opened up to include engineers and doctors.

Recently, map digitization through geographic information systems (GIS) has shifted the monopoly of maps to computer scientists. While early GISs were largely viewed as overly technical, online maps indicate the advent of a change of direction in terms of monopoly. However, if we scratch the surface of the advertising narrative, which claims that the Internet is operating a “democratization” of mapping, we can enquire into which professions and audiences can now appropriate maps.

Creating online maps requires a programming interface or an application programming interface (API), which makes possible not only the display of a map on a Webpage, but also, most importantly, the visualization of personal or third-party data on a map. This operating mode is always accompanied by technical mutations and new online practices. The overlap of a base map with third-party data sources, called “mashup”, uses the same technical architecture as other applications on the contemporary Internet. Creating a map online is therefore accessible to professions other than GIS technicians or geographers. It results in new ways of creating and using maps but we also see the emergence of debates on the reliability of these mapping applications and on the validity of the data.