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:
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.
Towards a Geo-Ecology
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.
