Week 3

22 September (totally asynchronous class in Chat)

We will have a discussion of the videos/Jamboards that were prepared by the 8 groups in class and shared via links. We will use a thread called Week #3 Asynchronous Class. Our discussion will begin 22 September at 0001 and will continue for a whole day. Please make sure that you comment individually on at least 3 of the presentations. Tag the makers of the presentations in your Chat contribution.

Questions we might address in the asynchronous discussion:

• What places of the world are mapped more fully than others?

• How do maps reinforce biases of the past? How do they tell new stories about the past?

• How do mapping projects help us understand elements of our shared cultural past?

• How can maps be used for social justice? activism?

• How much labor goes into mapping projects? Can you tell?

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Homework:

Watch this webinar about Armchair Mapping using OSM (a version will be ready in Stream with captions soon).

For this exercise you will be using your OSM account that you got to work in UMap.

24 September "Armchair" Mapping (synchronous Zoom class)

Learning OSM (the "Wikipedia of mapping")
Visualizing Wikipedia edits: http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en
Maps as "live" objects: https://osmlab.github.io/show-me-the-way/
Discussing the idea: "Thou shall not be a map imperialist" (Hixson)
OSM map features

Editing OSM maps / the concept of a "data gap"

Homework:

1. Read: "Filling OpenStreetMap data gaps in rural Nepal" (sections: Introduction / Related Work) | "Combine maps, data and local knowledge to improve humanitarian response" (Devex) | "Participatory Mapping" (Mapping for Rights) | "Participatory Mapping" (Healthy Urbanism)

2. Week 3 Quick writing : Choose a place in the world that you know quite well (your hometown, a place you traveled on vacation and spent quite some time, an old neighborhood that you lived in (please do not choose NYUAD campus or Saadiyat Island around the university). Log in to OpenStreetMap in the way that is described in the webinar posted as homework for today. For your quick writing I would like you to identify information that has been connected to locations (features, naming, landmarks, streets, etc) and make an assessment of what kinds of choices the OSM community made. What kind of local information is located on the map? Be sure that you look at the different map layers (cycle, transport, OPNVKarte, Humanitarian). Do they reflect any kind of cultural, linguistic or informational bias? Do you notice "data gaps"? Look quickly at the same area in Google Maps or Apple Maps or Bing Maps and compare with OSM. Please post your short version of your remarks in Chat by 0600, 29 September.

Save your notes from this exercise, as you will be reusing this information and building upon it in the upcoming Blog 2.