Skip to main content

Atlas for a Community Mapshop

Community Mapshop 2015 has culminated in a series of outputs and engagements, but most recent among these, is our Atlas for a Community Mapshop. This is a compilation designed by a student in the course, Renae Mantooth, containing a number of the graphics and maps produced at the mid and final reviews for the studio. Using Denis Wood's Everything Sings as our inspiration, the class was asked to prepare graphics in grayscale, allowing for their easy reproduction and circulation. You can read the digital text, here (or below, or download). We explored the following themes:

  • Food Network
  • Education Opportunities
  • Modes of Travel
  • Bus Shelter Inequity
  • Uneven Housing Landscape
  • Wifi Inequity
  • Blue Grass Trust Plaque Program
  • Facade Dichotomy

From the text:
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 but also actually impact the conditions of knowing itself. This ‘more-than-representational’ viewpoint enables a productive urgency at the heart of a collaborative or participatory mapping endeavor. Therefore, the goal for this course was to prepare each student as a responsive and responsible mapmaker, at a moment in digital culture when there are many maps but few stories being told through them. To meet this goal, this course furthers the concept of the community mapshop -- an intensive studio experience in which students use mapping technologies in collaboration, when appropriate, with community partners. These partnerships have involved students in a full range of collaborative mapmaking: working with peers and community partners to invest in a study area, acquiring and preparing data for spatial analyses, communicating with those impacted by or implicated in these analyses, and producing compelling geographic representations.
Our community mapshop ends largely where it begins -- with a recognition that we, at the University of Kentucky, must do much more to educate ourselves as to the conditions of our communities. These communities are not merely containers for the University. Instead these places are the constituting materials, energies, and peoples that make our campus possible. In this course, we have sought to better understand the dynamics of what we have called the Northeast Quadrant of Lexington, Kentucky, an area composed of over a dozen neighborhoods between Newtown Pike and Winchester Road, from Main Street downtown, stretching out toward Loudon and New Circle Road. Far from homogeneous, the Northeast Quadrant is dynamic, and our attempts to represent the variegation, rhythms, and intensities are not meant to be the story of or for these neighborhoods. More modestly, we create these representations as souvenirs of our journey, which is just getting started. We hope they might provoke others to get involved. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Critical Spin on GEOG265, 'Introduction to GIS'

I'm gearing up for next semester's Introduction to GIS, a course required of all Geography (and Social Studies Education ) majors at Ball State University .  In this course, I attempt to provide learning opportunities such that students can learn the technical skills associated with geographic information technologies, while situating these technical practices, critically . Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and histories that motivate geographic information systems.  This course will simultaneously expose students to key moments in the academic literature that gave rise to GIS in the discipline of geography while providing the necessary, introductory skills to operate ArcGIS.  GIS brings together traditional cartographic principles, computer-assisted analytical cartography, relational database design, and digital image processing and analysis to enable people to develop geospatial databases, analyze those databa...

Thinking/Making Geographic Representation

[ 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...