How many people does it take to draw a map? How many, especially, when a city is in ruins? The BBC has a slideshow of what might be called social cartography: in the hours after an earthquake hit Haiti, the map of Port au Prince at OpenStreetMap went, with a little help from more than two thousand users, from this:
To this:
A few unlabelled arteries and a lot of terra incognita became something that helped relief get to where it was needed. The most moving picture in the slide show is the one of the map downloaded to the GPS device of a Red Cross worker who is following it through the streets of Port au Prince. The World Bank’s Haiti situation room had a giant print-out of the map on its wall.
Christopher Osborne, a “neogeographer,” described the work of OpenStreetMap and CrisisMappers in a column for the Guardian’s Web site a couple of weeks ago, noting that the project was aided by the release of high-resolution satellite imagery. The map wasn’t just drawn from, say, the memories of expatriates and travellers, like something Marco Polo would have drawn, but from traces—of pictures from the sky, and from GPS tracks taken on the ground—as well as from other sorts of open-source pictures and maps. Osborne provides an animation of the cartographic process: the white flashes are new users’ edits, the spreading red and green lines are streets, and the glowing blue dots are camps of displaced people.
In a sense, collaborative mapping mirrors how an actual stone-and-glass city is built: there are rules and templates, but there are many intelligences, and its shape emerges over time. In a post last week, Close Read looked at the way whole continents were once (and still are) invisible on maps of Olympic medal winners. One wonders about the spaces that are empty on almost every map until there is a crisis. (If you suddenly learn the name of a major city you’ve never heard of, odds are you’re reading about a war, a natural disaster, or China.) According to Osborne, the OpenStreetMap is now the “most authoritative map of Haiti in existence.”
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