Critical GIS .com

#Mapshop 2015 will focus on the NE quadrant of Lexington. GIS Workshop at the University of Kentucky is becoming Community Mapshop this Spring semester. I've retooled the course and the partnerships, hoping to inspire a different kind of community-based classroom project from those in 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , and 2010 . Think Bunge and Wood . More studio; less laboratory. This course will become part of a broader initiative within the College of Arts & Sciences at UK, beginning in Fall 2015, simply called Mapshop: http://mapshop.as.uky.edu . (Our website currently points to the old GIS Workshop page under the New Mappings Collaboratory, but the new site will be functioning by December 2015.) The course description for this Spring follows: Drawing on the last twenty-five years of scholarship in critical cartography and critical GIS, this workshop begins from the premise that maps are more than windows on the world. Maps do not only provide a record of geographic phenomena b...

[ Chris Alton, Zulaikha Ayub, Alex Chen, Leif Estrada, Justin Kollar, Patrick Leonard, Martin Pavlinic, Andreas Viglakis, Matthew Wilson ] Following a seminar in critical and social cartography at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, course participants set about writing a manifesto of sorts, a provocation in the thinking and practice of geographic representation. Make art, not maps. Talk is cheap. So are pixels and kilobytes. To build is more labored than to destroy, and maintaining the tenere of an attentional wave is the work of humanist scholars, artists, writers, poets, playwrights, and architects—and not for gaggles of open-source spectators. Masterpieces are immutable. Let's build masterpieces or #dietrying. We would rather enter the ground in pursuit of ineffability than constantly losing face in the mangle in which we are all subsumed. Harness confusion. How maps and mapping need to be rethought starts with a rejection of both the possibility and desirability...

Ptolemy Windheads, ca.1490, Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library This spring I'm excited to be offering Critical & Social Cartography, a seminar in the Graduate School of Design (SES-5345). I've copied the course problematic and the weekly discussion topics below. Critical & Social Cartography Wednesdays, 10am-1pm Gund Hall: Gropius Room http://tinyurl.com/HarvardCart How might we identify the practices of responsive/responsible social and critical cartography, amid the proliferation of digital spatial media? To address this question, this seminar begins with the premise that cartography is not ‘dead’, although certainly challenged by the advancement of GIScience. Rather, the renewal of geographic representation can be charted as paralleling the advancement of neogeography, the saturation of location-based services, the marketization of geodesign, the reconfiguration of the humanities toward the spatial and the digital, and the drumbeats of ‘big data’...

This fall at Harvard, I'll be co-teaching Maps and Mapping with Charles Waldheim (chair of Landscape Architecture at the GSD). A course video has just been produced to promote the course on campus. Geography at Harvard! Course description: Mapping has been considered both an art and a science, as part of artistic, communicative, and analytical processes in the geographical tradition.  This course will serve as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and histories that enable mapping as an empirical and analytical practice, with particular attention to the digital.  It covers the centrality of the map in everyday life and considers the changing role of the map-maker as society becomes increasingly saturated by digital information technologies.  Of particular interest will be the use of Internet-based mapping tools and location-based services and the relationship of these tools with more traditional digital mapping techniques, such as geographic information systems...

The following video wraps up the Spring 2013 GIS Workshop at the University of Kentucky. Read more about these partnerships here .

The design and marketing team in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky has finished producing a great video showcasing a couple university-community partnerships from my GIS Workshop course.  Also see an article written by the UK PR team, copied below. [ See a previous iteration of this kind of video about GIS Workshop, here . ] GIS Workshop: Community Partners from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo . GIS Workshop Strengthens Community Ties LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 27, 2012) — For the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice, it was an opportunity to reorganize youth programs; for the nonprofit Seedleaf, it was a way to better connect with volunteers; and for students in geography Professor Matt Wilson's class, it was the chance to apply their skills to engage with the Lexington community. Students in Wilson's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Workshop course spent the past semester applying their knowledge of geographi...