Mapping Hacks

I picked up a copy of Map­ping Hacks with some vague notion of adding geo­graph­i­cal coor­di­nates to pho­tos that, after all, hap­pened some­where. But I quickly got swept up in grander schemes, such as the pos­si­bil­ity of anno­tat­ing the entire phys­i­cal world with geo­graph­i­cal mean­ing and embrac­ing a geo-ecology:

Imag­ine a world in which we can move about phys­i­cal places, access­ing not only what is stored in our brains but also mul­ti­ple lay­ers of infor­ma­tion that have pre­vi­ously been inac­ces­si­ble: expe­ri­ences of friends, col­leagues, and com­plete strangers in the same space; infor­ma­tion about who lives and works in the place, their demo­graphic char­ac­ter­is­tics, and per­haps their polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions; crime sta­tis­tics for the area; the his­tory of com­mu­nity events, from cel­e­bra­tions to calami­ties; infor­ma­tion about busi­nesses in the area and their prod­ucts; changes that have reshaped the nat­ural envi­ron­ment over time; and much more.

Map hack­ing is the prac­tice of using open-source map­ping appli­ca­tions or com­bin­ing one site’s func­tion­al­ity with another’s to cre­ate some­thing that is often quite sur­pris­ing and non­tra­di­tional (some­times also known as “mashups”). The con­trib­u­tors to the book have man­aged to col­late some 100 loca­tive hacks, despite the con­sid­er­able obsta­cle of non­stan­dard geo­data for­mats hosted in pro­pri­etary geo­data­bases, and intro­duce map­ping enthu­si­asts to a vari­ety of open-source geospa­tial tools, from GRASS to GPS­Ba­bel and from GeoServer to Red­Spi­der. Given that the pub­li­ca­tion date (2005) would not have allowed them to take full advan­tage of deci­sions from com­pa­nies like Google and Yahoo! to allow pro­gram­mers to use their APIs, surely some of these hacks could use updat­ing (for exam­ple, I use a Word­Press plu­gin that gives me much of the func­tion­al­ity of hack #91 to build an inter­ac­tive web-based map.) But that’s not the point.

The point is that geo­t­ag­ging is a dis­trib­uted, bottom-up process, with all the emer­gent char­ac­ter­is­tics of the World Wide web that this implies. Maps are no longer cre­ated by a trained asso­ci­a­tion of car­tog­ra­phers, but by legions of non­ex­perts who cre­ate them as needed. In their intro­duc­tion to crit­i­cal car­tog­ra­phy, Cramp­ton and Kry­gier (2006) cite Harley and Woodward’s 1987 def­i­n­i­tion of the map, one that empha­sizes the role of human expe­ri­ence over tech­ni­cal accu­racy: “maps are graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tions that facil­i­tate a spa­tial under­stand­ing of things, con­cepts, con­di­tions, processes, or events in the human world.” For exam­ple, con­sider Google Earth. Released to the pub­lic last year, it quickly gained promi­nence dur­ing Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina when many of us, with­out the ben­e­fit of a car­tog­ra­pher, made use of aer­ial pho­tographs of the dis­as­ter in our weblogs and photostreams.

Map­ping Hacks is a won­der­ful intro­duc­tion to the wealth of mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion map­ping offers. The sec­tion on map­ping with other peo­ple that includes mod­el­ling inter­ac­tive spaces, map­ping your friend-of-a-friend net­work, and geo-warchalking with two-dimensional bar­codes are among the most intrigu­ing hacks. More of us are liv­ing in fun­da­men­tally mobile worlds; adding a geo­graph­i­cally mean­ing­ful com­po­nent to nav­i­gate this world is rel­e­vant to a broader audi­ence than hackers.