Mapping Hacks

Last Wednesday, Shekhar Krishnan and I presented a talk entitled Open Historical Maps: Crowdsourcing, Open Source GIS, and the Research Web to the ABCD GIS working group at Harvard University. Here’s the abstract from Shekhar’s announcement:

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[We] show how open source GIS and curated “crowdsourcing” can create an infinite archive of places for digital historians and ethnographers. While the importance of space and place to their research has long been acknowledged by social scientists, there remains a wide gap between their theoretical concerns and the data-driven empiricism of GIS. For those without technical or database skills, maps and geodata are mostly commonly to illustrate rather than advance an argument. However, the web can render the tacit knowledge of geography implicit in most historical and ethographic narratives available to the scholars in entirely new forms.

We will showcase our ongoing work with the Maps Division of the New York Public Library on a web-based Map Rectifier and Digitizer, a platform for scholars and entusiasts to georeference scanned historical maps and digitize historical features of cities and the environment.

On Saturday, I gave a 20 minute presentation entitled txts 4 africa, or, How I Learned to Three-Point Turn an Eighteen-Wheeler in a Two Car Garage, for Open Everything NYC 2009, at UNICEF House in New York. Basically, this talk is an overview of why the lowly 160-character SMS is a logical and even necessary platform for building ICT applications for NGO-based international development projects in Africa. The talk describes in brief the experience of UNICEF in developing ICT apps that employ SMS to support projects in Africa for, inter alia, community health care management, famine relief, and distribution of bed nets for malaria prevention. Finally, in the talk, I introduce RapidSMS, an Open Source, Python-based application development framework, designed to facilitate the construction of these projects and others. I also gave shout-outs to Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS.

I’ve posted the slides for both talks on SlideShare:

• Open Historical Maps
• txts 4 africa

A note on the Harvard talk: The source of the “8 Reasons Why Some Wikis Work” slide is Aaron Swartz’s weblog post of the same title from 2006, which for some reason didn’t make it into the talk slides themselves. I have found his insight into the sine qua non of successful crowdsourcing very influential in my advocacy of the practice.

And one on the RapidSMS talk: The presentation was designed somewhat in the Takahashi method, so the slides themselves are rather telegraphic. I hope you find them entertaining anyway. I am trying to get audio for this talk to make the slides more comprehensible.

Anyway, please enjoy! If you have any questions or comments, or if you’re interested in further developments on either of these projects, please don’t hesitate to post here, or otherwise to get in touch!

Posted in collaborative mapping, events, talks, historic, sms |

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