When I submitted the pdf file to the Graduate College, I received an email congratulating me for the successful completion of the doctoral program. But I did not have anything concrete to show to my friends and family as an outcome of this work. I then decided to print few copies (cover page below), which helped me realize that there are still some differences between “digital” and “physical”. It gave me a different feeling to be able to touch and see a hard copy dissertation. 

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first PhD dissertation on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). I studied OpenStreetMap to understand the mappers and their underlying motives in VGI. Click here for the title and abstract, and contact me if you are interested for more information.

The phenomenon challenges the industrial information model, which considers users as mere recipients of information. It suggests that humans are willing to engage in the collaborative creation and sharing of knowledge under certain conditions. If we can understand those conditions correctly and design systems accordingly, it might lead us into a new era of information production and use, with significant implications on the relationships among government, business, and citizens.

I am launching the survey soon. I will come with new posts with key findings soon after I analyze data. I hope that my research will help to develop a deeper understanding of user-generated content (UGC) in general and volunteered geographic information (VGI) in particular.

Session Title: Convergence in the GeoWeb: Volunteered geographic information, spatial data infrastructure, and public participation GIS

Description: The GeoWeb has enabled humans to create and share unprecedented amounts of geographic information. Cities are becoming self-describing. Multiple sources of information from field-based sensors, web services, digital photographs, videos, and user conversations are accessible through mobile devices as one moves about. A single map can have many media incarnations as it travels from a database to a web page through social networking discussions and back again. No longer the passive recipients of geographic information from national mapping agencies and the professional GIS community, ordinary citizens are busy mashing up, remixing, and spawning new geographic information. What do these developments mean? Are national mapping agencies and their initiatives on spatial data infrastructures becoming obsolete? Are they being replaced by citizen map makers, or is citizen participation in the GeoWeb just an anarchy, as some claim? We believe that it is not an EITHER-OR. The premise of the session is that there is a natural convergence between volunteered geographic information (VGI), spatial data infrastructure (SDI), and public participation GIS (PPGIS) based on the transformation of users into makers.

This session will explore the idea of users as makers of data, information and knowledge in the GeoWeb. We welcome papers on GeoWeb-enabled systems of geographic information with particular emphasis on the convergence of VGI, SDI and PPGIS, and how these different movements can supplement one another rather than stand in opposition.

 Organizers:

Yahoo! provided the grant in the form of gift; gifts are precious. But they also come with some unstated obligations to repay at some future time. Of course, Yahoo! does not expect me to repay it to them, but I feel obliged to repay by contributing to advance the science of volunteered geographic information (VGI). This has, in fact, inspired me a lot. Thanks Yahoo!

The melding of physical and digital places is what he refers to ‘digiplace’. In other words, he uses ‘digiplace’ as a heuristic that refers to the melding of data located and ranked in cyberspace, and people’s understanding and use of physical places. People’s perception, understanding, and use of place does not only depend on the physical place anymore, it is also influenced by its digital representation in cyberspace. As we increasingly rely on corporate mapping services, we also put ourselves in growing risks of corporate control. Matthew consistently used the word ‘blackbox’ to refer to the software codes Google uses to rank spatially referenced pages. More worrying is that corporate interests may lead to the change of their proprietary ranking algorithm at any time without consultation to users or the general public. Thus, if unchecked in time, there might be a unilaterally shaping of digiplace by corporations.

Matthew also introduced another concept called ‘cyberscape’. While web 2.0-based mapping is relatively easy, his firm emphasis was in the study of the processes and meaning underlying these mapping activities and their potential consequences. Using the compelling example of mapping after Hurricane Katrina, he showed a correlation between placemarks mapped on Google earth and racial composition of the mapped areas in New Orleans immediately after the Hurricane. He argued that cyberscape carry same or even amplified divides that exists in the physical landscapes. Followings are the two papers he gave me to read; I found both these papers insightful.

• Zook, M. and M. Graham. (2007). The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the Privatization of Cyberspace and DigiPlace. GeoForum.

• Crutsher M. and Matthew Zook. (In press). Placemarks and waterlines: Racialized cyberscapes in post-Katrina Google Earth. GeoForum.

Friday was packed with many interesting demonstrations and discussions. One of issues that surfaced was about the competition for resources. Because there are several organizations working for eChicago, they often compete for resources. This brings an interesting question: how can multiple organizations work together for a shared goal? Under which model? One of the panelists in the concluding session highlighted the need for research. He began his talk asking a simple yet important question: How do we know that the resources put in the past are working? He called for research that evaluates the past efforts, identifies best practices and make recommendations for the future. The need for community informatics research was further emphasized in the context of the investment the new administration is making on broadband. Community informatics research has a promising time ahead as investigations are required on different dimensions of the investment on the broadband technologies.

One of most exciting parts of the symposium was the meeting among about 20 graduate students from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and Dominican University on the sideline of the symposium. Students from Michigan and Dominican were interested to know more about community informatics and youth community informatics program in UIUC. They were curious to see similar program in their institutions. We introduced each other and exchanged ideas and experiences on range of topics related to community informatics. In sum, this was an interesting symposium and I enjoyed it.

There were hundreds of sessions in the conference. I attended almost all sessions on ‘volunteered geographic information (VGI)’ and many sessions related to community mapping. It looked to me that the mapping services from major Internet companies have sensitized the academic geospatial community. People—most of whom without any formal degree in geography or related disciplines—are using handheld devices such as GPS, cell phone, PDA to capture and share geospatial information on the web. Those who are taking part in these geospatial activities are already in the order of millions. Strikingly, many academicians and GISers have been clueless of this movement.

VGI sessions were very useful both to know non-experts’ mapping activities as well as academic preparations to respond to these activities. It was good to know that a consortium of three universities are bringing a VGI research program: University of California, Santa Barbara (content and quality), University of Washington, Seattle (social production), and University of Texas A&M (applications). Prof. Michael Goodchild’s (the man who coined the term’ VGI’) plenary lecture on VGI was an informative event. The VGI sessions remind us of time in early 90’s when GIS was entering from desktop into the Internet GIS. I see that GIS is now entering into yet another phase: from expert-driven, supply-oriented GIS to user-driven, use-oriented GIS, albeit there are several issues we need to resolve first. This transition, however, has a potential to bring deeper social implications than the previous transitions.

There were several sessions on community mapping. Many of the presentations in these sessions were focused more on mapping per se from the geospatial perspective. After listening these talks, I realized that we could have reported our activities in Youth Community Informatics (YCI) project. In YCI, we do not focus on mapping per se; rather we try to ensure that there is an explicit connection between mapping, lives of the people, and their communities. Further, we consider maps and mapping only a slice of the cube; we equally emphasize on audio, video, picture, and narrative as other slices. Most importantly, we encapsulate these within a broader learning framework of inquiry cycle as shown in the below diagram. Geometric primitives of points, lines, and polygons provide us frameworks to understand the world affairs. In YCI, we are beginning to experience that these geometric frameworks become more useful when they are filled with information about history, culture, and many other forms of human activities. Similarly, the value of audio, video, picture, narrative, and other sources of information multiplies as soon as they are referenced to location. In YCI, we have a clear emphasis on this  supplementary relationship between geospatial and non-geospatial information. We believe that integration of these diverse sources and forms of information provides us a more holistic knowledge necessary to understand and respond to geospatial situations, which are often complex in nature.