Publications
Newsletter
Subscribe to our free mailing list for event announcements, CSM news and our latest reports.
Feeds
Subscribe to News RSS feed
Subscribe to iCalendar
News from the Future of Public Media
Beyond Broadcast: Maps as Public Media
email discuss Posted by Kate Schuler on Jun 17, 2008 at 8:11 AM
While traditional maps have often been a tool of colonialism and top-town government, maps are becoming a form of public media and a democratic tool, noted Future of Public Media Project Director Jessica Clark.
With the emergence of free and open source tools that make mapping and visualization much easier, maps are a “rising and vibrant form of participatory media,” she said.
The panel’s moderator, Jacquie Jones, President and CEO of the National Black Programming Consortium pointed out that maps are being used far beyond their traditional geographic purpose and that map interfaces now encompass social networks, media maps, and that election maps have almost become their own genre.
Lee Banville, Editor-in-Chief of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, presented a central 2008 election map that acts as a portal for information and background for local and national races. The goal for the election map, Banville said, was to create a single public broadcasting map for the elections, instead of having separate entities such as PBS and NPR or local broadcasters creating their own.
By creating a single-entry point Banville said the project allowed them to harness the geographic power of public broadcasting – funneling all the content from around the country into one place, allowing the detail of local programming to be aggregated into one central starting point. Such attention to local information is particularly important as small locales may suddenly become a focus of attention in close national elections.
With over 2400 stories linked from the map, “It is highly iterative and we’re starting to inject just a bit of fun,” he noted. An area in the corner of the site allows users to predict how different states can affect the outcome, but it has evolved from similar participatory efforts in 2004 in that this area now acts as a portal for content as well, he noted.
Paula Le Dieu, Director of Open Media at Magic Lantern Productions, noted that as a storytelling media, she notes that maps are powerful visual tools. She presented a map of the world in which flashing points marked births and deaths around the world. “We all know that more people are being born in India and China, but when you see it like this, it becomes that much more powerful and obvious.”
While such maps have power, the medium faces some obstacles outside of the United States, Le Dieu noted. In the UK, “the crown owns our maps, and charge money for us to use them. As a result, we haven’t seen anything like the same flourishing of maps as in North America,” she said. However, a project called “Open Maps” has sent people with GPS units around the country to re-point the data set – going so far as to attach GPS units to bicycles and taxicabs to create the maps.
Chaacha Mwita, Training Director at Media Focus on Africa Foundation based in Nairobi, said that his organization’s map evolved organically over time rather than a deliberate result of decision on how to present data.
“At the center of Media Focus, is giving marginalized people a voice. We gave community information volunteers mobile phones with video capabilities. They then sent them through community information centers for uploading,” Mwita explained. “For us, the map was just a way of presenting that information.”
The content on Media Focus’s map is hyper-local, driven by the immediate circumstances of the people in communities. But the audience, Mwita said, is largely made up of Kenyan’s living outside of their home towns who want to keep abreast of local events.
The impact of mobile phones on small communities in Africa has been profound. “Mobile phones did a lot of good for these people that television and radio never could,” Mwita said. He added that SMS messaging allowed for a real exchange of information during the crisis that followed Kenya’s elections, while traditional media outlets were unable to provide accurate and current reports.
While maps as a means for participatory media is driving forward at a quick pace, panelists did sound a note of caution.
Jones agreed with an audience member’s observation that maps are still a contested medium. Crime maps, for example, “can serve to reinforce what we think we know about crime,” and who commits it, she said.
Banville said that while mapping is a powerful tool, if used incorrectly, can misrepresent a story. The map “doesn’t necessarily tell a story, it introduces a story.” Otherwise, he said, there is a danger of a map simply being a data dump.
Discussion
There are no comments on this blog entry yet. Start the discussion below.