Mapping

Earlier this week, Nancy M. pointed me to a new Google mashup called The Right Ride, designed to allow users to document dangers spots for bikers by adding annotations to a map. Chris Briaotta created the site in response to the recent death of two Boston cyclists, and it gives fellow bikers a way to share important information gleaned from their everyday experience of navigating through Boston's often mean streets.

Two articles describe the site:

• Cyclist deaths cause concern: Hub cyclists promoting safety with bike route Wiki
  
• For safe city biking, a wiki this way comes

I find it interesting that both articles refer to the site as a "wiki" though it seems clear that the site is more accurately described as a map-based mashup, since information is not editable by everyone and revision are not tracked, etc. This fudging of terms may not matter to the averager reader, but I find it curious that the term "wiki" is used here to denote any effort at collaborative knowledge-making online,when in fact there are many web-based tools that allow for this without them being wikis.

The comments on the Boston NOW article led me to Governor Deval Patrick's website where citizens are able to post issues and invite others show their support by "voting," in this case on the issues of bike lanes: http://devalpatrick.com/issue/bikes. In good social media fashion, the site enabled me, to create my account and post my vote: "I'm a daily bike commuter with a fairly safe route, but I ofter bike to other parts of the city that are much less safe. Until space for biking is built into the fabric of the city, motorists will continue to treat us like second-class citizens who don't belong on the road. Bike lanes are simply the civilized thing to do. It's time for Boston to begin making changes."

While it's often difficult to sort through the overblown "Web 2.0" hype, these sites make it easier to excited about the democratic potential of participatory media to help strengthen local communities. As long as I don't allow my "vote" on the bike lane issue to substitute for other, more more substantive forms of political action, I can see how this and the Right Ride site play their part in helping us work toward change in the places that matter to us.

This morning I read in the Boston Globe about Google's decision to allow developers to plug customized data into Google maps, basically legitizing what hackers were already doing ("Google points way to Maps' code"). They've made their API info available at http://www.google.com/apis/

When I ran across the GeoProject USA, I noticed they had already put together their own Google map to present geocoded information. The project is an another interesting heuristic for exploring place:

The objective of Geo Project USA is to visit and photograph every spot in the U.S. where a whole-numbered minute of latitude intersects with a whole-numbered minute of longitude (e.g., 38°14'00"N, 109°55'00"W), in what is better known as a confluence point. 

This past week I finished developing a site called Past Shapes, Present Stories: A Critical Guide to Boston-Area Memorials for a friend and colleague of mine at BC who has been teaching the American Literary History III survey this semester. As a final project assignment, Trevor had his students research local memorials and produce critical readings of them, which has resulted in this online collection of downloadable guides.

To design the site, I integrated a Flash mapping application called Map Bureau (www.mapbureau.com) with a a simple PHP/MySQL interface so that Trevor could help enter his students project descriptions. This marks my first real foray into online mapping, and now I'm anxious to begin exploring ways to geocode blog entries using some of the location-based Drupal modules currently under development.