Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about why I love geowanking, which is a highly technical term for digital map geekery. I went to the first Bay Area meeting for members of the geowanking e-mail list, a group I’ve always adored. I had a blast meeting (in person) a bunch of philosophers, computer geeks, and geo-data experts who are about to change the world by giving everybody the ability to access and reshape maps in real time. What makes the geowankers especially appealing to me are their populist values:

Geowanking is all about making maps democratic and creating representations of space that reflect ordinary people’s lived experiences. The idea of letting a real estate agency call the shots on where your neighborhood’s boundaries are is absurd to a geowanker. Why not just build a digital map in layers so that you can see the real-estate-defined neighborhoods, then click into another layer that shows what ordinary people on the street think are the boundaries, then move to another layer to see where all the rivers run underneath the city?

Read more about the geowankers saving the universe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 4:55 pm.
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