Users in the UK can now do all the things they could do on OSM (!) now on Google Maps with it’s ‘Map Maker’ tool. Map Maker ‘Pulse’ is a live window of these map edits. Users can add new places, roads, rivers, building outlines, natural features and boundaries as well as editing existing places, line features, road segments and directions.
Category: Space
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Walls
Jonathan Olley from Castles of Ulster. Forkhill Security force base Forkhill, South Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK. Two videos have made their way into the BBC’s most watched list today both on boundary walls. The first sees Frank Gardner head to Saudi Arabia where they’re in the process of sealing the ‘troubled’ border with Yemen across a 1,000 mile stretch. The second marks 15 years since the Good Friday Agreement with a discussion of the ‘Peace Walls’ that divide Northern Ireland along religious lines.
Each time I return to thinking about politics, territory and space I think of Jonathan Olley’s majestic Castles of Ulster photography project. The photo above is from this very series (a short review in the Guardian from 2007 is here). I saw a selection of them at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and was blown away by their composition. They really do capture everything that is haunting about military occupation, boundary-making and the sheer architectural brutality of territorial dispute.
A corrected in-press version of a Political Geography paper on ‘Interventions in the political geography of walls’ (subs. only) by Karen Till and a selection of other authors is a handy guide to reading all the above together.
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Minding the Gap in Cartography: from maps to mapping practices
Fiona Ferbrache with a short discussion of Kitchin et al.’s (2012) latest TIBG paper.
by Fiona Ferbrache
Source: Wikimedia Commons – World Map from 1664 If the biologist’s iconic tool of the trade is a microscope, then the geographer’s might well be a map. Both tools offer an alternative perspective of the world, but unlike the microscope, which enlarges for the biologist, the map serves the geographer through reduction. Maps and processes of mapping are the topics of enquiry in a TIBG paper by Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodge (2012) – one of the latest pieces of work on cartography by these authors.
For those unfamiliar with the scholarly literature, it is perhaps assumed that “a map is unquestionably a map” (Kitchin et al. 2012:2) – something that exists to measure and represent the world, even through its different forms. For example, the London Tube map, celebrated this year as part of the 150-year anniversary of London Underground, is a topographical map showing connections between…
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Digital Mapping – The Importance of Space, Place and Time
A short post by myself on the importance of space, place and time in digital mapping at NCRM’s MODE blog.
Author: Sam Hind, Phd Student, University of Warwick attached to the ERC project Charting the Digital (http://digitalcartography.eu/project.html).Digital Maps intimately connect the concepts of space, place and time. Each is a dynamic term reaching across bodies and technologies, and none can be considered a priori – as pre-existing epistemological formations. That is, each comes into its own through an iterative process between material worlds, everyday life and imaginative experiences.
Space is not simply Euclidean space – although everyday usage of digital maps is certainly predicated upon geometric calculations and built upon a Cartesian coordinate system. Each pushpin placed onto a map has a unique position. Each building, tree or road can occupy a specific set of coordinates. But this does not explain how digital maps are engaged with and wilfully underplays the performative nature of their use. Those who have conceptualized space (human geographers, urban theorists etc.) emphasize…
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Close Up At A Distance
Laura Kurgan’s new book Close Up At A Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics is reviewed by Sara Johnson in The Atlantic and by Trevor Paglen in BookForum. The video above is Kurgan discussing the ‘Million Dollar Blocks’ project which also makes its way into the book. As Paglen explains:
Million-Dollar Blocks visualizes the “microgeography” of mass imprisonment by color-coding blocks of New York City neighborhoods by their incarceration rates. The visualizations highlight remarkable facts about the criminal-justice system, including that the vast majority of imprisoned persons come from an astonishingly small number of neighborhoods, and primarily from particular blocks within these neighborhoods…The project is a powerful critique of mass incarceration, one that requires viewers to consider the specific geographies behind it.
The map in question can be seen here.
Sam Hind 