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Briana Garcia

5/19/09

CIA 511

Reclaiming Mapping Through Social Information

Since the beginning, mapping has been a way to provide viewers distinct information on geographic locations. And it wasn't until the expansion of growing civilizations that our planet began to be socially divided. Through war, politics, and pioneers, our globe was taken over piece by piece. Now that countries have claimed stakes on continents, realistate companies on apartments, and sidewalks owned by the cities, what is left to explore and document?

By exploring locative media through this class I learned that even through we have discovered every place there is to roam on this earth, the places we inhabit are not only getting redefined, but are being socially redeveloped into multipurpose locations through new technology. This technology includes a wide range of both tools, and software such as mobile phones, gps devices, Google Earth, Open Street Mapping, and Mscape. With these tools and various software one can create either their own space, or add information onto a location.

Adding information onto a location has been a progressive transition for me from the moment I started participating in the Open Street Mapping project, where I remapped a fraction of Colfax (my home town) and the surrounding blocks of the cross streets Post & Leavenworth in San Francisco (my current residence). Since doing this activity I not only got a better feel of these locations geographically (comparing and contrasting their physical environment from each other), but I also began to develop a curiosity of social information with in the city. Social Information being any type of experience that can be tied with location such as places to eat, places not to visit (due to crime), common places to go if you're an art student, or even common places where one's experienced a lot of different social interactions.

With my project I focus on the later, where I cover my personal experiences within public transits, which was inspired by Mechella's project Train Tracks, where she interviews Bart passengers and shares their stories through recorded mp3s. Having just moved to the city, transitioning from a private car to such a public space was really uncomfortable but also highly entertaining. By using Google maps I plan on showing the class how this transition became so memorable. Google maps was a simple and obvious solution to how I wanted to display my information by geotagging the areas of where my stories take place.

“Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.”

By geotagging, I can link together my fascination of social information with locative media. Creating this link helps me to spread my new information about site specific locations to a open range of people who are just as interested as I. Although leaving this information out in the open is great for creating connections with people, I have to say that I can only hope that more will do the same until all of these stories and locations become a massive collective, organized via website. Meetup.com and Yelp are two great examples of sites that deal with site location and atmosphere however with Meetup.com there is no direct story telling involved, its just directions for activities to “happen.” With Flickr, however, one can upload geotagged photos by themselves (with out a fancy phone!) along with an added caption (which is great for festivals and parties).

There are other sites that promote geotagging in a similar manner to Flickr, one being Panedia, which is helped run by Google maps and the other being TagMaps, which is ran by Yahoo! Maps. (Tagmaps has a "night life" feature which i found interesting because i haven't seen anything like that yet.) Unfortunately both lack the input and feedback that Flickr receives. Picasa on the other hand seems like it will be an interesting development that is already tied into with Google Earth (it also organizes your photos/folders by date when you install it).

There is also Live Search Maps which is ran by Microsoft, where a list of popular business categories automatically pops up after searching, which are also organized into smaller sub categories! I was impressed to see how well organized they were as well as how easy it was click on a place and have it immediately highlighted:

All in all I can say that I look forward to these technologies developing more advanced social features, enough that search engines are so cluttered with them that they have to develop categories/ sub categories to filter them all. Also, after doing research I've discovered that not all sites can be as highly organized as Yelp or Meetup, but I would like to see a combination of two together that can be easily accessible through phone or wireless devices. After exploring so many possibilities, one can only assume that this affect will take place with such growth in developing technologies.