Critical GIS .com

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’...

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 .

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...