The Democratization of Mapmaking: The Result of a Potent Digital Revolution

We see them every day, popping up on our Twitter feeds, filtered through blogs, or even scattered throughout the New York Times: maps portraying not the usual locations or destinations, but data.

From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks.

“The map user has now become the map creator,” is how Fraser Taylor put it to me in an interview. The director of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, Taylor is one of the world’s leading cartographers, standing as the director of the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping and a member of the United Nations Expert Group on Global Geographic Information Management as well as a host of other major international mapping organizations.

He describes what’s going on as an enormous cultural shift from a previous era when the mapping of our cities (or countries, or world, for that matter) was placed mainly in the hands of government mapping authorities.

But even more importantly, Taylor says, we are also mapping new things—intangibles like social phenomena, feelings, impacts, and more.

“Individuals inside cities and elsewhere are creating maps for themselves and in fact giving us their own narrative of what a cityscape is about. They are telling us what is important to them, and they’re mapping the kinds of things that previously would not be mapped,” he says. “It’s becoming part of the creation of a culture of a city.”

The democratization of mapmaking is the result of a potent mixture of digital revolutions.

Combine the phenomenon of governments opening their data to the public with the new ability to crowdsource information. Then add the introduction of open-source mapping tools like OpenStreetMap, and the fact that within just around five years nearly every one of us has equipped ourselves with a mobile device with GPS technology.

Suddenly—boom—we’re seeing our cities laid out in front of us in an entirely new way. Every day.

But at some point, as with any technological revolution, it warrants taking a step back from the excitement and asking ourselves: what is it all good for?

Sure it’s fun, fascinating, and informative to see our city through these various curious lenses. We understand it in new ways, yes. But does it actually matter? Does it change our behavior, or it is just a toy?

In other words: Now what?

One glimpse of the potential this all holds can be found on Datablog, the Guardian blog dedicated entirely to data-based journalism. Datablog has mapped everything from the impact of cuts to housing benefits in the UK to government attempts to get Google to remove content or reveal data about its users, providing not only the maps and data sets but often the analysis necessary to understand the implications.

The impact of this became especially apparent during the riots that shook the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011. When UK Prime Minister David Cameron denied outright that the riots had anything to do with poverty, Datablog countered the claim with, well, data.

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