This week, BITS Participants are walking the Benjamin Franklin Parkway with digital cameras and clipboards in hand. They are examining three aspects of this iconic Philadelphia landscape. First, they are searching for unexpected features, unique historical and cultural juxtapositions, signs of competing uses, and the use of symbols to represent Philadelphia's urban identity and history. Second, the BITS team is examining the design and environmental characteristics of the Parkway. Finally, they are assessing the relationship between the pedestrian and transportation modalities of the space.

Here are links to institutions and organizations we encountered along the way.

Schulkill Banks
Center City and Fairmount are connected via a new, paved path for pedestrians, cyclist, wheelchair, stroller, and roller use.

The Water Works
The Delaware River Basin includes the watersheds of the Wissahickon Creek, the Schulkill River and the Delaware River. This educational center is a resource for learning about the historical development and contemporary challenges of those waterways.

Logan Square Neighborhood Association
"The square is a circle." This comment has been echoed at the foot of the Swann Fountain. Check out the LSNA's history page here.

Sadie's First Walk
Here is a map of the walk route, updated regularly to add new photos and links of interested based on our visits.

Click Here to read our prior post on the Parkway walk and associated Resource Links.

Michele Masucci, Director
ITSRG - Temple University

www.philadelphiabuildings.org

Tomorrow, BITS Interns and Service Learners will walk the Ben Franklin Parkway as part of their respective examinations of historic landscapes and green spaces in Philadelphia. Interns are creating a virtual reality that includes various digital media to depict the iconic planned city park system from a contemporary perspective. Service Learners are examining green spaces throughout the Fairmount Park system and in the city. They will analyze the different uses and users of the park spaces and document the different types of green spaces incorporated in the park system. Their observations will be drawn upon to create designs for new trails, marking existing trails, and mapping routes that the general public can use within the park system, including both Fairmount Park and Wissahickon Park venues.

Here are some links that may be of interest for students and readers alike:

Ben Franklin Parkway Rehabilitation Project - The Parkway is one of Philadelphia' planned park settings. Explore this site to review old photos and maps and learn about plans to maintain the spaces and improve user experiences throughout the area. Click here to view the map.

Sadie's First Walk - Here is the route we will take and points of interest. This map will updated throughout the next few days, so check here often to see what is new.

Gmaps Pedometer - Use this tool to analyze the distance between points of interest and the route we take. See how the differences change depending on the settings chosen for mapping the path. See if you can recreate the path from Sadie's First Walk.

Love Park - Known internationally to Philadelphia's millions of annual visitors, extreme athletes, community organizers, and residents alike for it's quirky LOVE statue and ever changing users.

Julian Abele - The Art Museum of Philadelphia was designed by African American architect Julian Abele. Read more about his role in the design and his professional accomplishments here. Investigate a database about architects and their designs across Philadelphia here.

Michele Masucci, Director
ITSRG - Temple University

Hardly a day goes by without the announcement of a new dire circumstance for local economies. The stories include layoffs, hidden effects of the economic downturn, growing pockets where local effects are visible, and fewer opportunities and services for citizens to maintain their quality of life.

Online cartographers using web 2.0 map tools have chronicled the downturn by mapping images of localities, visualizing data sets that show the trends and eliciting citizen volunteered information to catch the impacts.

Here is a collection of a few online maps that illustrate the economic transition in the U.S.

1. Map of Newspaper Layoffs - While the relative number of layoffs in the news field is low, the impact is large and growing. A number if cities will lose their daily papers, and many others will see that local news is no longer prioritized.

2. Where is the Milk Cheapest? - This map sponsored by WHYC in NYC asks volunteers to a non-organic quart of milk, head of iceberg lettuce and six-pack of 12 oz beer in New York City.  Price differences are pretty dramatic; for example Han's deli charges nearly 2.5 times the price as does Fairway for the same quart of milk. Such variation underscores the challenges the many people have in balancing time-distance-cost economies.

3. Foreclosure Maps - A proliferation of maps depicting foreclosures and other real estate value changes are show homeowners, customers, and real estate professionals the trends by location. The one we highlighted from USA today illustrates the uneven nature of the localized impacts, with just 35 counties representing the vast majority of numbers of foreclosures. Trulia.com's heat map shows home pricing on a local basis, also revealing uneven nature of housing, both on a national and local scale.

Michele Masucci
ITSRG - Temple University

On behalf of the Information Technology and Society Research Group of Temple University, we wish to express sincere thanks to the geo-blogging community for following ITSpace during the past six weeks as we have called attention to growing trend for citizens to share spatial information using web 2.0 applications. In particular, we wish to give a special thanks to the folks at Very Spatial for calling our series to the attention of their readers and pod cast audience. We are grateful for the insightful comments shared by the professional geographers across the country and members of online map user communities. Thank you also for the contributions of guest authors David Organ and Paul Schroeder. We will continue to welcome guest authors to post new discussions, so please do not hesitate to contact us about new post ideas related to the theme of Citizen Cartographers in the future.

Citizen Cartographers theme posts have highlighted examples of citizen involvement in creating and sharing maps online, the use of online map tools by citizens and advocacy groups, and the concerns citizens may have in how online spatial information may affect them on the ground. We have suggested that the magnitude of this trend warrants the attention of geographers, cartographers, community advocates and others to enter into a public conversation about the impact of the Internet on sharing spatial information, collaborating to create spatial data sets, geo-visualization and map making, and using maps. One of the challenges that we face in doing so is how to foster and engage a conversation that is relevant with respect to the rise of citizen cartographers and their concerns.

Now that citizen involvement in cartography is web-enabled, the participatory impact and geographic dissemination of projects engaged by citizens and in the public domain is greatly expanded. Maps as literal and metaphoric tools for illustrating community concerns, depicting contested spaces, visualizing analyzed geographic problems, and showing where the thing occurs are one of the oldest artifacts of geographic inquiry and representation. We have suggested that what makes the emergence of web 2.0 tools for creating maps intriguing is the ways in which collaboration, distance, and dissemination are mitigated for content creators. 

Our examination has also led us to theorize about how collaborative cartographic practices are redefining the focus of geographic inquiry and cartographic representation. The professional practice of cartography involves using skillful design techniques to locate and visualizing geographic information, define and classify geographic data sets, align those datasets with graphical representation traditions and formats, and critically examine what is communicated on maps. Many scholars have pointed out that embedded within the practice of cartography are political and ethical concerns. Maps can be artifacts of power relations (such as political redistricting maps) as well as tools for mitigating power among groups (such as zoning maps). Maps can be representations of places and they can be manifestations of how people identify themselves.

The traditional study of maps is quickly being supplanted by the rapid creation of maps (or maps-of-a-sort). Many web applications that permit collaborative mapping are quite simplistic in terms of how spatial data are represented. Most mash ups approaches supported by online map applications use simple x-marks-the-spot tools for geo-tagging features. Attributes can be attached to the point (line or area) markers with most of these applications. Most online map applications also support collaborative approaches that enable more than one contributor to create the spatial data set. This aggregation of spatial data through the inclusion of collaborators is one of the unique features of the process of online mapping, and represents one of the most important divergences from prior cartographic practices. Users can e-collaborate to generate data in virtually real time, so that the spatial data set itself is unbounded at the onset of creating the map. Most professional cartographers are accustomed to mapping a temporally static spatial data set.

More sophisticated forms of geovisualization, such as representing classes of spatial information, showing proportional representations over space, or creating isometric lines of equal value to model distributions of spatial information are not yet the domain of online cartography collaborations. Instead, the underlying objective of web-enabled citizen cartographic activities lies in two main areas: (a) participating to create and share new content that cannot be shared or accessed otherwise and (b) tailoring existing (online) content for new audiences and new purposes through adding new media components.

We suggest that a new research direction related to citizen cartographers and the cartographic products they create would focus on issues related to their participatory processes, the transparency and fairness of information practices, the privacy implications of citizen cartographic practice, the use of data sets and maps created through e-collaborative processes, and the implications of a proliferation of user defined content.

We will begin to explore these issues through the startup of an informal science education demonstration project that involves citizens in Philadelphia and other cities to map and share their walking and rolling routes using online social media applications. The project will be implemented in the Fall of 2008, with more details to come soon about how to participate.

Michele Masucci
Caroline Guigar
Temple University

BITS Summer Program 2008 is underway throughout the month of July. This year we are providing students with research and field experiences and information technology skills in mapping historic markers related to the African American experience in Philadelphia.

Charles L. Blockson, founder of the Blockson Afro-American Collection housed at Temple University's Paley Library has met with BITS students every summer for the past four years to instill in them an understanding of the importance of learning about the relationship between primary sources of information and analyzing the racial, cultural, and geographic histories of Philadelphia and beyond. Over 200 BITS Students have had the opportunity to examine first edition volumes of major works by African American authors, documents related to the historical underpinnings of the institution of slavery that are hundreds of years old, photos taken by John Mosely depicting nationally prominent African Americans, archives from the nation's largest collection of Underground Railroad documents, and the focus of our theme this year - one of Blockson's books depicting the locations and descriptions of historical markers related to African Americans throughout Philadelphia. It is called: Philadelphia's Guide: African-American State Historical Markers (1992). He has been gracious to donate this and other volumes of his work to ITSRG and the BITS Program.

Students are shown visiting the collection and interacting with Mr. Blockson on Thursday, July 11, 2008 here:

This summer, our students are focused on creating web-interactive maps of the entire marker collection documented by Dr. Blockson. Dr. Blockson has spent a great deal of time helping our students to understand the politics of marking by sharing some of the stories related to how and why specific settings are ultimately chosen to receive an official state historical marker. They have found that there is no single consolidated listing of markers, since more than one institution has programs to place markers at historical sites. And, since the various marker programs do not create meta-tags denoting categories for inclusion, it is difficult to search for maps of markers online. Here is the map one of our students, Hazreena Ali, has created drawing from Mr. Blockson's book detailing sites related to African American history designated by the State of Pennsylvania to be of interest within Philadelphia.

One interesting example of a setting that has been given a state historic marker is the Legendary Blue Horizon, located on North Broad Street, just a few blocks from Temple University's Main Campus. Many of the greatest boxers of the last century have fought and trained at the Blue Horizon. Surprisingly little information about it is found online, and even less is noted on the marker outside. Our approach for providing students with an understanding of its historical and cultural significance within the African American community of Philadelphia and beyond has been to visit, photo-document, and map the location during the past four years. Through this process, our students have come to understand that it is a living legacy that continues to host world-renowned boxing events, and that its owners are striving to compile archives of its historical significance and share them with the public. Newspaper clippings are framed behind the venue manager's desk, shown here in a photo taken by students in the BITS Program during the summer of 2006.

One block away is Progress Plaza, another site with important significance in the African American experience in Philadelphia and the nation. It is the oldest black-owned and developed shopping center in the country. It is currently in the process of being renovated. The renovation will feature the return of a neighborhood grocery store after a decade without one. The issues of local food security and economic development have been themes for the BITS Program during the past four years. Students have learned that these two issues are closely intertwined. They have visited and photo-documented this site, tracking the progression of change related to the renovation. No historical marker notes the significance of Progress Plaza for the local community or larger national audience. Students have discussed this issue with Mr. Blockson and BITS mentors as they learn about the process by which some sites gain distinction while other important sites are less noticed.

The facade and ambiance of the Legendary Blue Horizon are distinctive in many ways. Fancy grill work, well maintained brownstones, and a famous mural on the northern exterior wall all say "historically significant" to passersby. In contrast, Progress Plaza is denoted with a well worn, wooden sign. It is famous locally for the rapid rate at which cars unauthorized to park in the lot are towed. And, the slow transformation of the site is on the minds and in the conversation of locals eager for the new grocery store set to open its doors this fall. Yet, the continued presence of Progress Plaza in the neighborhood is vital to its economic stability, anchoring it to the massive investments that are being made in public-private partnerships along what is known locally as Avenue of the Arts North.

Our students have had the opportunity to gain a front row seat to the tensions between neighborhood transformation and historical preservation at work in our community of North Philadelphia. Through the basic geographic research tasks of field observations, mapping historically significant settings, and photo-documentation they have gained an opportunity to see their local community through different lenses.

Michele Masucci
Temple University

Over the past year, various Web 2.0 technology platforms have begun to provide its users with the ability to connect content they have created with a location, thus enabling not only keyword searches but location-based searches.   This experience has been further enhanced through geoRSS feeds and geotags which integrate technologies such as Twitter and Flickr with online mapping sites such as Google and Yahoo Maps.

Never before have citizen cartographers had such easy-to-use tools at their disposal to create meaningful maps that reflect not only the way they perceive their environments. Additionally, citizen cartographers are now able to share with others both inside and outside of their communities a much more nuanced view of their world through sight and sound.  In short, the map is in the hands of the masses and the opportunities for gaining new insight into place and space have never been more exciting. Further, the ever growing Web 2.0 technologies situated around online maps have  enabled people to develop online communities based on a share interested in geography and have brought to the forefront of the importance of understanding geography.

Citizen cartographers have used these new technologies to become empowered in times of crisis,  banding together to use online mapping tools and associated Web 2.0 content as a portal to organizing vast amounts of information from otherwise isolated areas. The 2007 California wildfires saw citizen cartographers taking their on-the-ground experience with the fires and sharing it virtually through Twitter, photo-sharing, and Youtube to the outside world as well as those isolated by the fires in their own communities. The 2008 Floods in the Midwest have seen the power of the map in a time of crisis, with organizations like the Red Cross using these Web 2.0 and mapping tools to send and receive information in the flood affected areas.

This growing movement shows the power of grassroots mapping to provide both a micro and macro experience of a vast crisis that assists not only neighbors but increases the knowledge base of those responding to the natural disaster.It is this grassroots effort coupled with technologies that hold promise for developing new and meaningful ways to respond to large scale crisis. It also serves to refocus the lenses of the discipline of geography and provides a unique opportunity to learn from and critically engage this exploding technology.

Geographers have much to offer in this new space of citizen cartography. As these technologies grow and becomes more and more ubiquitous there are substantial questions we must ask.

While we have seen an explosion of citizen cartographers actively contributing to grassroots mapping there is also a different map that is emerging that we must engage and critique. As web technologies enable and encourage location-based tagging and location-based searches,  we must begin to question and understand the long-term consequences of the electronic footprint being created by and about individuals, both intentional and unintentional.

How is the online electronic footprint becoming the unintentional electronic map, especially as  the roll-out of technologies that take advantage of GPS-enabled mobile phones  make tagging location seamless and more and more invisible to the user? How will governments and industry seek to use these electronic maps in the future? What are the ultimate implications for the growing level of transparency both intentional and unintentional?

Finally, an important tenet of web 2.0 is user-generated content which requires a level of computer literacy and technology access that vast sections of the population still lack. Will the those citizen cartographers who map and describe their own communities bring attention and resources their way for simply placing it on the map? Will communities forfeit resources and lose even more visibility in an online world because they lack the resources necessary to reestablish their communities on the virtual map? These are questions are where geographers have much to offer citizen cartographers.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University
June 30, 2008

Thanks to Temple's IT and Society Research Group (ITSRG) for creating a space for "citizen cartographers" to show their work. I hope this opportunity continues beyond June into the coming months.

How are citizen cartographers making a difference when engaged with particularly intractable global issues such as environmental collapse and international conflict? The evidence is slim, but now that ITSRG has tuned us in to the concept of "citizen cartography" we'll probably begin noticing many examples where individuals and small groups are making a difference by re-drawing the maps we've inherited and by creating entirely new maps that help us to visualize global transformation.

The problems between the US and Iran are again demanding our attention. The chronic antagonism that has infected relations between these nation-states certainly prompts citizen innovation, especially since these governments seem to have no incentive to give peace a chance. I'm reminded of the early '90s when I was involved in promoting network connectivity for Maine's libraries and schools. A librarian from a rural Maine school testified at a utilities commission hearing that the "Internet will bring world peace." Of course I was skeptical, but as long as we got our online connections, why should I argue? The promise that the emerging "information superhighway" would do away with the "constraints of distance and time" also seemed like over-the-top hype to me.

While we usually think that cartography represents places and spaces, we can also think of cartography as a way to create spaces that don't exist yet, or as a way to re-create spaces that have been lost socially and geographically. About a year ago I began to inhabit a place cartographically that I last visited physically nearly 50 years ago, the small city of Abadan, Iran where I lived from 1958 to 1960 as a teenaged American boy (see photo essays here). The responses have been overwhelming, showing that there is a huge unmet need for people to connect personally across gaps of culture, time, politics and geography.

Public mapping technologies such as Wikimapia point the way toward reclaiming and even re-inhabiting territories that have been completely occupied by contending state interests. The City of Abadan is situated on a major river (variously named, depending on what national claims are held) that for many years (decades? centuries? millennia?) has served as a major conflict zone. The city, formerly Iran's largest refinery and oil port, suffered widespread destruction from bombing and siege during the Iran-Iraq war (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Abadan for more information). The house my family lived in was destroyed, but its footprint is still visible on the Wikimap. By annotating this plot, I could reclaim a part of my personal history by use of a public map technology.

Sites like Wikimapia open the door to reclaiming a collective history based on shared connections to a beloved place. Annotations to the Abadan Wikimap are now mainly in three languages: English, Persian / Farsi, and Arabic. The stories told from these three lingustic perspectives are very different, but there is a chance for dialogue within this shared mapped space. I'm encouraging people who have contacted me to collaborate in bridging these perspectives through translating existing annotations into all three languages. I visualize this as a project for Iranian teachers (some of whom have been in touch with me) who want to broaden both the language skills and the intercultural awareness of their students.

Meanwhile, the deeply felt need to establish direct person-to-person contacts across this critical international divide has been taken up by other projects such as EnoughFear.org. As a project of The Action Mill. EnoughFear has posted hundreds of photos of individual Americans, Iranians and others whose hands reach out with a shared message, No to War between the US and Iran. This project also sponsors direct public person-to-person telephone conversations between the US and Iran.

So far there's not a mapping component to EnoughFear. Both this and the Wikimapia reclamation effort seem to share in trying to create new spaces for international direct citizen dialogue. My personal belief is that regions such as Abadan, whose geopolitical situation has bred ceaseless conflict, are candidates for reclamation as international peace zones. (See Zones of Peace and Zones of Peace, a History. Learning to recognize the stake that each of us has as "global citizens" might help us to re-define our tasks as "citizen cartographers."

Thanks again to ITSRG for creating this space.

Paul Schroeder
June 30, 2008

Gas Maps Part 2 examines a map published by The New York Times on June 9th, 2008 called "The Varying Impact of Gas Prices" that has been in heavy Internet circulation during the past week. It shows the locations where consumers spend the highest percentage of their income on gasoline. In general, poor rural counties in the Southeast and Appalachia; along the Mississippi River; in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico and in the Northern Rocky Mountains states are fairing the worst despite the fact that urban centers on both coasts have higher per gallon costs. The place that earned the dubious distinction of the highest gasoline costs as a percent of income is Wilcox County, Alabama. There, residents pay on average 16% of their income on gas at current prices. The rest of the counties in the Black Belt along the Alabama River share a similar impact.

Patrik Jonsson's related story published in the Christian Science Monitor on June 11, called Sticker Shock at the Supermarket,  features comments of residents of Camden and Gee's Bend, two communities in Wilcox County. They were featured to illustrate the difficult trade offs that many families are making as both gasoline and food prices climb while income remains static.

Reddit.com's comment scroll related to the New York Times map illustrates the degree to which geographic inequalities related to the local impacts of prices are not well explained by a cursory examination of the New York Times map. "Hellsbelles" and "Digitallysick" give testimony to the intense and persistent poverty in the county among the 300 plus responses to the map. "Starkwhite" raises the issue of racism as a contributing factor to local poverty in Wilcox County. But most of the comments seem to avoid the uncomfortable finding that economic circumstances in Wilcox County really are that bad as compared with so many other places that are also struggling.

This is not the first time that Wilcox County or its most well known community - Gee's Bend - has come under the mainstream media spotlight. Most recently, Gee's Bend was featured by J.R. Moehringer's moving, Pulitzer Prize winning feature called Crossing Over in 2000. He presented a cultural and historical portrait of the community of Gee's Bend through the eyes and experiences of Mary Lee, one of its elders descended from generations of local African American residents. Readers learn about the extreme geographic isolation of the setting and how this contributes to its economic difficulties. They learn of the community's complex social, racial, and political history and of its centrality to civil rights activism in the 1960s. They learn that the events of the 1960s unfolded in the context of decades of institutionalized racism that resulted in unequal state investments in education, economic infrastructure, and transportation, symbolized by the the state's elimination of ferry service to cross the Alabama River in 1962. Crossing Over was published at a time when discussions about reopening the ferry were underway. That eventually occurred in 2006, punctuated by  a new round of mainstream media attention.

Now that ferry service has resumed, there is a website that provides the Internet public with information about its hours of operation, directions on how to find it, and information about local cultural attractions in Gee's Bend. Prominently featured on the main page of the website are images of quilts created by the Gee's Bend quilters, famous in their own right as community artists and regents of local cultural heritage. Gee's Bend quilters are known nationally and internationally through coffee table books available at chic art shops and museums around the country. Their work is featured in exhibitions around the country. In 2004, the quilt designs were marketed.

The Gee's Bend settlement and the Snow Hill Institute artists colony are among the top educational tourism destinations featured in the widely acclaimed Black Belt Heritage Trail sponsored by the State of Alabama. The Alabama Cooperative Extension System has also recently partnered with other state agencies to implement an innovative Agricultural Tourism Program designed to connect rural communities along an AgriTourism Trail with special interest travelers. 

Despite these efforts to improve the economic base and connectivity of Gee's Bend, Wilcox County and the larger region of Alabama's Black Belt with mainstream societal and economic institutions, last week's headlines underscore the harsh irony that the commodification of local culture in Gee's Bend has failed to fully benefit its residents. Moehringer's reflection of Mary Lee's reality in Crossing Over was indeed prophetic. He wrote: "Mary Lee knows better. A ferry would also bring tourists and hunters and developers and criminals and snoops. In other words, the end of Gee's Bend, the last place on Earth still safe enough for children and dead folks to go walking after dark. 'When you can sit in a place,' she says, 'and everybody be lovely--no fussing, no killing--to me, this don't even seem like the USA.'"

Gee's Bend once served as a safe haven in the racially tumultuous environs of west Alabama for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other local and regional civil rights activists to reside and organize prior to the historic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.  Their struggles and efforts are embedded in the memories of the people and local institutions of Wilcox County and Gee's Bend. Forty three years later, we are reminded that regional and economic disparities and institutionalized forms of racial inequality persist in the social landscape of American society.

Michele Masucci, Temple University
David Organ, Clark Atlanta University
Caroline Guigar, Temple University

Soaring gasoline costs have prompted keen consumer interest in finding the locations of service stations that have the lowest prices per gallon. The problem is an interesting one from a geographic perspective. The key to saving money is to find the lowest cost source of gasoline that is located as close as possible to a person's normal driving rounds. This allows the consumer to maximize savings by minimizing the cost of driving extra distances to search for cheap gas.  Web maps have proliferated to fill in local knowledge of where gasoline is cheapest just-in-time for a fuel-up.

For example, "Hatetopay," a Gasbuddy.com user, reported low gas prices on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia at 5:15 pm on June 13, 200. The image to the right is a jpeg of the map showing Hatetopay's report of $3.99/gallon gas, along with prices found by other users at two other nearby locations. Gasbuddy requires individuals who report gas prices to create a users account. Reports (and searches) can be entered through text messages and browsers of cell phones or other mobile devices, as well as online with computers. The data submitted by users is available to the entire public. The vast majority of users and site visitors are located in the U.S., followed by Canada. According to the site traffic monitor application called Alexa, the site reach of Gasbuddy has increased by 266% and traffic is up by over 34,000 page views during the past three months (as of June 14, 2008).

A careful look at the whole Philadelphia region shows that very few people are posting prices for stations located in Center City (it's the area between I-76 and I-95 on the map) despite its dense residential population. Many price posts are located in main line suburban enclaves and along corridors used by commuters to enter and leave the city. There is also a large cluster of price posts in New Jersey suburbs. But, as with Center City Philadelphia, central Camden shows no posts. Gasoline prices in New Jersey are a little lower than those in Philadelphia because of different taxation policies by the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The price differences leads many Philadelphia residents to cross the Ben Franklin Bridge to fill their tanks with less expensive gas and perhaps shop in nearby malls and supermarkets. The toll to cross the bridge may be increased from $3.00 to $5.00, so the economies of scale for pursuing the cheapest gasoline in NJ could change for some consumers.  However, there may several factors interacting that contribute to the Philly-NJ gas optimization-crossing phenomenon. Cheap gas, better access to groceries, recent relocation of health services for women from Philadelphia to New Jersey suburbs, and less expensive alcoholic beverages are a few examples of border differences that drive our local consumer geographies.

It is clear that one of the impacts web 2.0 is having in the context of the current economic crisis is to connect consumers with better information - "insider" views in particular - about where best to spend money on goods and services. Lime.com and Yelp.com are two web 2.0 applications that are rising to fill the demand for user identified and rated shops. Lime's focus is on fostering what is referred to on its website as "ecoist" lifestyles. For instance, many of the establishments identified are ones sell locally produced food and goods. Yelp is focused on providing a forum for the exchange of opinions about all kinds of local services.

All three of these services operate on the same basic concept - to create communities of users who contribute and access information about what is located in a given setting. The goal of these sites is to increase value of purchases and to help users match their spending and consumption with lifestyle preferences as closely as possible.

We note that this trend is just one of the many that excludes those who do not have access to digital technologies or the skills to use them. Once an individual has mastered the interface of one of the map-user-reviewer systems we have described, the skills are applicable to other similar sites. Searching for new web 2.0 map tools is also quite easy for those who have strong search skills, since there are many portals that list and review web 2.0 applications. But a quick glance at what has been mapped on Lime's  Philadelphia section gives users the impression that only the pocket of Center City has high quality, locally grown, organic, and tasty food to offer. North Philadelphia and Camden have no posts at all.

Citizen cartographers are bringing a torrent of new information about places into cyberspace. Gasbuddy, Lime and Yelp are just a few of the examples of how digital exclusion - either through opting out or because of digital divide barriers - may foster perceptions about what is on the ground among the members of the cyber-communities they create. We cannot help but wonder what effects this will have on geographies on the ground as this trend grows. Originally posted 6/15/08.

Michele Masucci, Temple University
David Organ, Clark Atlanta University
Caroline Guigar, Temple University

Openstreetmap.org and Wikimapia.org are two wiki-enabled collaborative mapping applications that support web user defined geographic content anchored to a common global geo-coordinate system. (ITSRG is among the handful of collaborators for the Philadelphia region, shown in the map above.)

Open Street Map's coordinate system is constructed from data in the public domain such as TIGER Files from the U.S. Census. E-collaborators add content to a global integrated geo-coordinate system base map. The data is "owned" by the community of developers who share in the creation of the wiki.

Open Street Map uses its social wiki to exchange information about technical issues, local users meetings and events, local map projects embedded within the global street map, and resources for broadening participation in the map project. The interface for contributing to the street map wiki is a simple CAD style drawing interface. Data can also be integrated from GPS devices.

Wikimapia differs from Open Street Map in two fundamental ways. First, the application uses Google Maps as the base to which wiki tags are added. Second, e-collaborators are comprised of the entire universe of individuals who have created a wiki tag on the map. In contrast, Google Maps and Earth collaborators access group map content from their individual Google Accounts. Maps projects can be shared among collaborators and they can be made public or kept private among the account-driven collaboration team.

Web 2.0 applications such as Open Street Map, Wikimapia, and Google Maps have the potential to support citizen and community collaborative cartography projects. One of the most important aspects that should be assessed in the determination of which platform is best for a given project is the e-collaborative approach supported by each. Another important factor to consider is the degree to which it matters whether or not the content shared on the maps remains in the public domain. Among the three applications referred to in this discussion, only Open Street Map meets that criteria. Finally, ease of use and ability to support collaboration is also an important factor in fostering participation on mapping projects.

Wikimapia is by far the easiest application to use; although any additions made to the map are susceptible to being altered or removed by others. Google Maps is the most proprietary of the three systems. However, Google's cross platform integration provides a robust solution to the prickly problem of spatial data interoperability across formats and applications. Because of this, many may overlook the concerns about Google's policies on data ownership and use. Open Street Maps is specifically designed as a free and open source of spatial data to both fill in basic information about streets in previously unmapped locales and to connect that information within a unified coordinate system. This is a particularly appealing aspect of the application from the standpoint of community empowerment in that data are in the public domain.

ITSRG has approached the use of Web 2.0 map applications by matching our choices with project contexts and skill levels of those involved in mapping activities.  One of ITSRG's primary constituencies has been high school students involved in the BITS Program.  Two of the maps projects developed by the BITS students are shared below. The first is our tagging project related to "TempleTown," the North Philadelphia locus of many field activities sponsored by the program. The second is a mash-up that was created using Google Maps depicting the locations of participants in an on-line pumpkin carving competition sponsored by ITSRG and the BITS Program last October. 

The aim of the Wikimapia Temple Town tagging project was to introduce students to the core concept of ground truth. They interpreted images online, visited the associated locations, and returned to the computes to add descriptive tags to Wikimapia based on what they observed on the ground. The aim of the exercise was to provide hands on, inquiry led experiences in understanding the limits of satellite and map presentations of spatial information to depict real world geographic information.

The second map is a mash-up created in Google Maps to show locations of pumpkins carved online and entered into a competition last fall. The map is an electronic footprint of the geographic extent of the viral participation in the competition. The objective was to create a demonstration project that illustrates the impact of using social media applications on the web to disseminate information. We also examined the effects of the project on fostering participation in our community of educational and research praxis related to the societal dimensions of information and communications technologies.

The points on the map below  illustrate the geographic extent of the viral marketing campaign the students implemented. The points are tagged with jpeg formatted images of the pumpkins that were carved online and e-mailed to the participant team. We held an event on Temple University's virtual and actual pumpkin submissions, featuring live voting on submitted pumpkins. Winners received online notifications and prizes. BITS program participants concluded the event with a fun workshop for young patients at St. Christopher's Childrens' Hospital in North Philadelphia. The workshop involved training the children how to create and submit an e-pumpkin into the competition. The entire event, including BITS participatns, pumpkin carvers, voters, patients, and staff involved over 300 participants during a three week period of time. Originally posted 6/12/08.

Michele Masucci
Temple University