Transcriber: Arthur Manookian Reviewer: Helena Bedalli
I've always thought of maps as a way to get from point A to point B.
And maybe not much more than that.
Maybe a snapshot of a bird's eye view of a place.
And Community Cartography is a different sort of thing.
It's a way to look at place in a different way
and build it from the bottom up.
I'm going to talk to you about that today.
But first what I want to do
is to give you some ways to think about maps
and your relationship with maps.
Maps have been around for a long time.
And these ancient maps were usually delimiting the space that people lived in,
and anywhere outside was probably danger lurking,
and that's where you get 'There be dragons!' Right?
But also maps give us some insight into the social norms.
And when I look at this body of water
I'm not sure, should I call this
the Persian Gulf or is this the Arabian Gulf?
And I think it depends on which shore you're looking at the water from.
Maps have been used for a long time
for people to try to figure out what's going on with data,
learning from the data.
This is a map from the 1800's.
John Snow's Map of the Cholera epidemic
in London back in 1854.
And in here these black boxes you see in the map,
these indicate cases of cholera that were documented there,
and he mapped them
and then he compared that map to the map of the drinking wells
and he found that:
Surprise!
These cholera cases were around this one drinking well.
Mystery solved using maps.
On the other side of this spectrum,
and thinking about the other side from data analysis,
maps can be a fiction too, maps can be fictional items.
This map was drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson
long before he wrote his famous novel "Treasure Island"
So, map first then the story.
[Who is making the maps?]
Current map makers are thinking in a different way.
They are thinking a little more about who are the map makers
and what is their agenda, what motivates them.
And they're trying to encourage us to think in the same way,
and that leaves us to the Community Cartography.
Now, I've been thinking about maps as a way to do a portrait of a community.
And I've been exploring this with a collaborator John Gunderlock,
he's a historic preservationist in Uptown,
and we came up with the technique that we use
where we can work from the bottom up to build maps about communities.
What I'd like to do now
is to walk you through one of the early projects
that I did and I worked with John on this.
This is called "Uptown walks".
Uptown walks is an implementation of this Community Cartography,
and what it is is a way that we can go out
and look at the community and start to document it in some way.
So what John and I decided to do was,
we went out, we got on our bikes we walked around uptown,
and we started looking at the sights that really interested us.
What was it that we found good about uptown
and we wanted to share with people.
Then we contacted a local blog and blog clubs
and got input from them to see what's interesting
in the neighbourhood.
Once we compiled all of this data,
so we had these sights that we wanted to put on,
and then we compiled these sights and put them into categories
that we decided what those categories were.
So I put a key up here and you can see any icon
that contains a dot in the middle.
That means that it has
a sound recording associated that you can click on.
A yellow cow is for art work in the community.
The green tree means some kind of nature item
and this museum looking thing is for urban fossils.
All the sight that we put on the map
are clickable and most of them have a photograph associated with them.
So you can put photographs, links, sounds, videos, anything you want,
anything that can be uploaded to the map.
As we're making this map
I started to get a little more in tune
with what I was experiencing in my neighborhood
and one of the things was the sounds of the neighborhood.
So, I take the train everyday
and I started thinking "Oh, I love that,
the clicking of the turn styles
and I love the roar of the rail cars."
And I thought, "I'm going to include that"
(Sounds from a railway station) Voice: "Doors closing"
We have several of these sound clips associated with the map.
We have the skateboard park, that sound of skateboards,
we have the ice-cream vendor bells on the lake front,
but lest you think that,
just because it's the quintessential urban community
that we don't have any nature;
well, there's actually a bird sanctuary on the lake there
and we went on an excursion there at 5 am
to record this.
(Sounds of birds)
Now, I mentioned these categories and some of them are pretty obvious
and I think for uptown
especially as we went through uptown and started looking at the artwork there,
it was obvious that artwork was going to be a category.
There's sculpture, there are mosaics there are murals,
there's all kind of artwork there.
Less predictable I think was this category, urban fossils.
And if any of you have walked down the streets of Chicago
you'd probably run into something like this,
animal tracks or seeds or leaves that you saw
that left their impression in the concrete,
even human tracks, right?
And it used to be
before community cartography
I would look at these and smile and forget about it.
But now I have a place to catalog it
And, the funny thing is,
I know it sounds weird, but once you start doing it, you can't stop.
It gives you this place to put these little treasures.
Another category probably not what you would expect
is ghost signs.
Ghost signs, if you ask anyone in the neighbourhood about a ghost sign,
"Where's the nearest ghost sign?"
Everyone knows one, everyone has a favorite.
And there're a lot in uptown as there're all over Chicago.
This is one of my favourites.
This Coca-Cola sign was revealed when they demolished the building
next to this building with the sign on it.
And this sign is perfectly preserved because of that.
Now what I really like about this in terms of community cartography
is that we've documented several things here,
we've documented this past, this sign from the past
50 - 60 year old sign,
but we've also documented this moment in time,
because I guarantee you
there's another building that's going to go up next to this sign,
and it's going to go back into storage.
But now we've documented it we have it on the map, this ghost sign.
And we are not fussy about ghost signs we accept paper signs too, that's ok.
(Laughter)
As an educator
I was interested in trying to make some kind of educational tool here.
And what we came up with was what we call the Buena Avenue walk,
the Buena Avenue tree walk.
It starts at this little park next to the El
and you walk straight down Buena Avenue.
There's this beautiful tree line street.
And it ends up at this really cool sculpture garden on the lake.
So it's a perfect walk, you should do it.
These clickable icons are for particular trees.
So that you can get a picture of a tree
hopefully some kind of identifying information,
maybe it's a leaf, maybe it's a seed or fruit from the tree, depending.
And also, remember, we can put links in there too.
So we could put the links in there to more technical information
the kind of stuff I couldn't really tell a person about.
This is the kind o thing as an educational tool,
this is great for teachers, students,
but also just for people in the neighborhood, right?
You want to know: "What are those trees on my street?"
One thing that fell out of this uptown walks project was,
and this was an unexpected result.
We realized that we could actually engage the community from using the map.
So what we decided to do was sponsor a mural walk.
What we did was, we recruited a muralist in uptown
and she was great, she lead the mural tour.
And you can see,
we looked at a bunch of these on the way,
and the interesting thing was
this is early morning on a cold Saturday October morning
and we got a great turn out.
It really showed us
how people are interested in their community,
they're interested in knowing more.
And I want to mention
that you can see here that we didn't cover all the sights on the walk
so we're hoping for a sequel, we're going to have the mural walk 2
and you're all invited.
Now, you can see that community cartography
worked out pretty well in this project I think
And I wanted to make sure that people understand
that it's not so much about the technology,
it looks like it is,
but the technology is easy to learn, people can do it really quickly,
and the key is participation,
it's the enthusiasm of the neighborhood
that brings about these kind of maps.
We decided that it's not the technology,
we can do it without ones and zeros.
So John and I created cardboard walks.
And what we did,
this is an art installation at Preston Bradley Center in uptown.
And we built this map out of cardboard,
it's a map of our electronic map
and the community was there for the opening,
it was part of the Chicago artist month.
What we did was
on the map instead of clickable links they had little cardboard windows
that you could open up and little pictures in there,
we had QR codes,
where people with their mobile devices were able to listen to some of the sounds.
I know that's cheating in a way, but that's ok.
But that's how we translated it.
And beyond that
we wanted this to also contribute to our electronic map.
So we made available little slips of paper for people to tell their stories
and attach those to the map,
and then we could take those and put them on our electronic map.
We're so glad that we did this,
because we got some excellent contributions
and everything from,
- so we now have map that ally where this guy saw a peregrine falcon
swoop down and take a pigeon.
Also now on the map we have the cafe where a woman was broken up with twice
by the same person. (Laughter)
The point is that this kind of contribution in both ways
is what the community cartography is about and how we can make it work for us.
So the thing to remember,
I want you to take away from this,
it's not the technology, right?
It's the spirit of the community.
It's a thousand eyes making what no 2 eyes could make alone.
I love this quote from Pierre Lévy,
"No one knows everything, but everyone knows something..."
And I think this really captures the spirit of community cartography.
And I know now
that having been involved with this project,
that I really look at my community differently.
And I think that all the oddities
and all the little details of the community that I see now,
I feel like now they have a home.
And this home I can share.
Thank you. (Applause)