Critical GIS .com

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 re...

#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...

It's very interesting to see a faculty position announced so clearly in "critical GIS"! Definitely feels like a first... Lecturer in Human or Environmental Geography (Critical GIS Specialism) Fixed-term for 2 years The Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London invites applications for a fixed-term lectureship in Human or Environmental Geography with a specialism in Critical GIS. A research focus on the interface between geo-technologies and environmental and/or development themes is particularly desirable. Indicative areas of interest and research include Participatory GIS, location-based digital technologies and their relationships with communications technologies, and the politics and governance of spatial data and geo-technologies. The successful applicant would join the Politics, Development and Sustainability (PDS) Research Group. This group of about 20 research-active staff and 35 PhD students works in locations across the globe w...

This semester I've helped to facilitate nine university-community partnerships in my upper-division GIS classroom (GEO509), drawing on previous instantiations of this program in 2011 and in 2010 .  The students will be presenting their work on these projects on May 2nd, and have composed abstracts and provided snapshots of work-in-progress to help describe their projects. Lawrence County, Kentucky Vaccination Campaign Pilar Desha, UK Geography Alli Sehon, UK Anthropology Ron Enders, Lawrence County Health Department With a grant from CancerFreeKY, the Lawrence County Health Department launched a vaccine campaign in 2011 to combat the growing HPV infection rate in Eastern Kentucky.  The HPV vaccine is administered in three separate doses spread over a period of several months and can be extremely costly to patients even with insurance coverage.  The Lawrence County HPV Vaccine Campaign is offering the full shot series for free to all county residents betwe...

Students in my Digital Mapping course (UKC101, soon to be GEO109), with TAs Ryan Cooper and Sonya Prasertong , worked on a 'generative constraint' project -- a module that Jentery Sayers and I developed as part of our Huckabay Teaching Fellowship while at the University of Washington. The constraint was to take photos of a celebrity cutout around Lexington, developing a creative story that links together the photos and places.  The students then tagged these photos to a collaborative Google Map. Celebrity Mapping Project with Matt Wilson from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo .

This video highlights/promotes a specific community-based GIS project in partnership with OpenLexington and Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government .  Students in this year's GIS workshop will work with OpenLexington to collect data to demonstrate the utility of open data within municipal government. Matt Wilson on GIS Workshop from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo . UPDATE (2/3):  See an article written by UK PR about this effort: Lexington, Ky. (Feb. 3, 2012) -- The University of Kentucky  College of Arts and Sciences  is partnering with the  Lexington Fayette Urban County Government  in an effort to open the municipal government's data practices. The call for open data, or publicly available data, has been widespread throughout Lexington government. Mayor Jim Gray included the initiative in his election platform, and the Urban County Council agreed that open data is important for Lexington Fayette Urban County development. ...

The Arts & Science PR team created this podcast describing the GIS Workshop course I'm offering this semester.  More details about the partnerships/projects will be posted, soon.

In fulfillment of the University of Kentucky   Arts & Creativity Core Curricula , I'll be offering Digital Mapping next semester (UKC101, eventually GEO109).  I'm excited about this course, as it will be an opportunity to experiment with web-based mapping tools to provide the foundation for more advanced curricula in critical cartography and GIS.  Excerpts from the syllabus follow: 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 a creative and artistic 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...

In TSP's Sunday paper, Seth Slabaugh gives a good overview of our interactions with community partners this semester, with quotes from two students: Ryan Cooper and Bryan Preston.  Read the story, here . MUNCIE -- Ball State University is making maps to help the community identify its neediest areas, including severely eroded river banks, neighborhoods heavy with low-income residents who are without health care and historic homes lacking attention. Then it's up to the agencies to use those maps to visually see solutions. Two of Ball State's geographic information system (GIS) workshops are helping the United Way and Open Door Health Services locate low-income residents who need public assistance. Another one is showing the city of Muncie which of the century-old homes in the Emily Kimbrough Historic District need to be repaired. A fourth shows where soil is eroding into the White River, turning the water the color of coffee with cream. "We know the data, we know the po...

Erin Moore and Ben Reckelhoff at the Center for Media Design are promoting this year's GIS Workshop with a nice article (below) and short video as part of their February Emerging Media Initiative Update . Geography students provide GIS services to local non-profits by Erin Moore, Emerging Media Initiative; video by Ben Reckelhoff, Center for Media Design  In spring 2010, Matt Wilson, Emerging Media New Faculty Fellow in Geography, launched a unique GIS course that partnered geography students with local organizations in need of digital mapping services and analysis. Last year, student teams provided mapping solutions for four community organizations, including Delaware County United Way and Open Door Health Services, a community health center for the uninsured and under-insured. United Way and Open Door have continued their partnerships with Ball State into 2011, offering opportunities for a new class of geography students to apply their skills to important social issues. For t...

I've been wanting to create a subgrouping of my bibliographic database on the topic of 'critical GIS' for some time.  I've finally completed a draft  (no doubt, a work in progress)!  I hope others will find it useful, as I've enjoyed revisiting some of these key interventions.  To see the bibliography that I use for my introductory GIS course, click  here .

Last week, at the Imagining America conference in Seattle, WA, Sarah Elwood and I co-organized a workshop titled, "Participatory Mapping: Engaging Sites, Mobilizing Knowledges".  With the help of Jin-Kyu Jung , Ryan Burns , and Josef Eckert (and greatly informed by the work of Jentery Sayers ), 22 workshop attendees collaborated in six small groups to map the university, using documenting practices like sketching, filming, and photographing.  The workshop packet is below. Each group was given a theme which was to be expressed through their mapping process.  Themes included: collaboration, movement, culture, politics, and the social.  After a brief, 30-minute field mapping session, each group was able to upload a few items to the collaborative map (see below).  The map is by no means complete (are they ever?), but it gives you a sense of the kinds of practices afforded by visual, mobile technologies. Session description: Building on the organizers’ experi...

The folks over at the Center for Media Design (thanks, Ben, Tommy, and Erin!) have pieced together this snazzy YouTube video documenting the 2010 GIS Workshop .  It contains brief interviews with community partners and my own summary comments on the conclusion of the workshop.

Several maps were produced by students of the 2010 GIS Workshop at Ball State University.  I've compiled a selection of these maps into a lower resolution PDF, see below. City of Muncie Strays in 2009: City of Muncie Strays in 2009 by Census Tract: Muncie and Age Over 65 Mobility: Muncie Predatory Lending and Poverty: Muncie Childcare Services and Poverty: GIS Workshop Selected Final Maps View more documents from Matthew Wilson .

At the conclusion of GIS Workshop (GEOG448/548), each student team presented their findings to community partners.  While all the student teams created products that will greatly assist their community partners, the animal shelter project, in particular, captured the attention of the community partners.  The Star Press , drawing on recent concerns about the operation of the animal shelter, ran a story about the mapping project. An excerpt: It's raining stray cats and dogs in Muncie, and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it. That's what mapping by Ball State University shows. It also shows the problem is worse in south Muncie, including the Industry Neighborhood. "There's certainly a south-of-the river phenomenon," said Matt Wilson, an assistant professor of geography and emerging media expert. But he advises against finger-pointing. "This is a social justice issue," said Wilson, who predicts the spread of stray animals wil...