Maps |

Maps, world-views and neutrality: squaring the circle?

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Map-making is a serious business. There’s a science devoted to that, and only highly specialised companies and organisations can endeavour to translate every feature on Earth into a feature on a map with the right size and location. But that’s what make maps reliable, too. So much so that, besides being part of our everyday lives, scientists use them to assess the effects of drought and deforestation, identify migration patterns or making predictions, amongst others. And yet, all maps are wrong. All of them make assumptions on how the world is or should be, and in so doing, maps have particular built-in world views and become political. They define what is included and what is not, what can and can’t be done with them, and the stories that they convey. In other words: maps shape the world as much as they are shaped by them. In this talk, we will explain how maps are made to understand how they have been used to exert power and how they are still doing so. We will then focus on OpenStreetMap, a collective effort to “map the world as it is”, and how are they succeeding or failing in doing so in an equitable way.

A brief note on maps and feminism

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As those who know me well know, : I like to see them, I like to make them and I like to use them to give answers to complex questions. I like the fact that you can create maps about almost anything. But surely, what I like most about them is that they are unique tools to show unnoticed realities that help to understand all types of phenomena. Some common (and, to some extent, hackneyed) examples of such maps are those used to explain the spread of diseases¹, the , social inequality, or . However, we can map any topic we can think of, and there are examples no less well known but important (on the contrary!), such as gender inequality.

That is why today, , I wanted to highlight the excellent work they have done at ², with the project .

Women’s streets is paradigmatic because it makes a novel and necessary reading of an everyday reality for most of us who live in urban environments: the street nomenclator. By identifying the streets of some cities in Spain and Latin America whose names refer to women, and comparing it with the streets whose name refers to a men, they show that there is a great biass in the representation of women in public space. This is by no means trivial: since street names are often a way of celebrating (and recounting) the culture of a place by assigning names to influential and notable people or landmarks that have marked history, such unequal gender representation evidences that the importance of women is systematically silenced, which contributes to building a story in which women have barely had an important role (or worthy of public recognition) in the historical and cultural development of our society, which is clearly incorrect.

Another aspect of the project is to show how many of the women after whom a street is named have an article in the wikipedia (without evaluating its content). This also evidences that there is yet another gender gap which is not just a local matter of a few cities.

On the other hand, I cannot help but pointing out another issue that I love about the project (and for which I congratulate , who has led its development), and it is its open development: since , it is relatively easy to expand the information to other cities in the world, making the project even more useful, if possible.

Other examples of maps that have dealt (although from other approaches) with the gender perspective are the (also made by geochicas), or the maps of feminist entities that exist in some cities or those that are collected in books such as by Joni Seager.

Unequal opportunities. From Myriad Edificions and Seager, J (2003. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World)

Another similar, yet different, project linked to maps and gender perspective is the initiative promoted by Esther Mingot (a well-known mapper within the community of OSM Spain under the pseudonym of [Lanxana] ( )) to , out of several open datasources from Barcelona City Council and Generalitat de Catalunya. As a result, OSM map will become more inclusive and useful for those collectives.

All those examples outline another important feature about maps: maps can also be social transformation tools! (and I love it!)

It is famous the example of the map that Dr. John Snow made in 1854 to understand the spread of cholera in London. That map allowed to deduce that cholera was infected by polluted water rather than by air, as was thought at that time (For more information on the map, please read [this text by John Mackenzie] ( ) in which he explains how the map works and how to reproduce it with current GIS tools). ↩︎
Geochicas is a group of OpenStreetMap women mappers aimed at closing the gender gap in that community. ↩︎

'Accessible Zaragoza' is now on TV

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

During the last few years, I have hardly shown any activity on this website. This is because they have coincided with periods of considerable intensity, especially in terms of work. I already wrote about , and today I would like to write about another other one: , the collaborative mapping project of aspects related to urban mobility and disability that I devised in the academic year 2015-16 within a chair at the Universidad San Jorge and in which I have been working as a principal investigator since then.

For some time I have been looking forward to share it here because it is a project in which I am putting a lot of enthusiasm and effort and which, on the other hand, is giving me many joys. One of them was the , but the most recent has been to have participated in the program of scientific dissemination of Aragón TV “ ”, which was broadcasted last Saturday, and in which I had the opportunity to participate and explain what the project¹ consists of.

You can see the (in Spanish, though). Starting at minute 12:55, I explain to the particle physicist Carlos Pobes the particularities of Accessible Zaragoza². Additionally, the program features Javier Monclús, researcher in architecture and urbanism at the University of Zaragoza, who opens the chapter by explaining the role that our cities play in our lives (which introduces our project very well); and Antonio Tausiet, who presents the project , a repository of surprising images of the city, both current and old. The rest of the footage is dedicated in the survey section to some of the myths about menstruation and to the invention of the chair folder.

Some images of the program, whose full content can be seen in

I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve participated in a TV show like this and it was a very enriching experience to record and prepare it. I was pleasantly surprised by the meticulous and respectful work made by , producers of “En ruta con la ciencia “. After the first contact, in which their staff gave me an operational overview of their program, I had a telephone interview that lasted for more than one hour with the documentary filmmaker Isabel (I don’t remember her last name). After having read all the documentation that I had previosuly facilitated to her, she asked me very specific questions and clarified doubts, making obvious that she had already carefully reviewed my matrials). At the same time, this work served to elaborate a script that they handed me in order to guide the interview that Carlos Pobes would make me a few days later. After the interview, part of the staff joined me on my workplace at San Jorge University, where we recorded more shots.

Honestly, I have to admit that I am very happy both with the experience of recording the program as with the final result, and I can do nothing but reiterate what I did on twitter and thank the entire team of [Sintregua] ( ), first, for giving us the opportunity to publicize our project and, second, for making a program so careful and with great respect for our work.

Muchas gracias por dedicarnos unos minutos a explicar el proyecto #zaccesible (https://t.co/ocrkHpUZ81) en un programa tan interesante como cuidado, y además, por hacerlo en gran compañía. cc/ @edmldmv @ArquitecturaUSJ @MapColabora
— Carlos Cámara Menoyo - ccamara@mastodon.social (@carlescamara) February 17, 2018

I would also like to thank all the people and entities that have participated in the project and, last, but not least, I would also like to emphasize that anyone willing to help us will be more than welcome.

Aprovecho también para dar las gracias a todas aquellas personas y entidades que han contribuido y siguen contribuyendo a hacer de #zaccesible una realidad: https://t.co/o7GtR9894W cc @DiscapacitadoSF @MapColabora @Hiri_Lagunkoiak @ganchillosocial #mundocrip ...
— Carlos Cámara Menoyo - ccamara@mastodon.social (@carlescamara) February 17, 2018

Y por supuesto, para recalcar que cualquiera puede formar parte del proyecto! Si quieres saber cómo ayudar en #zaccesible aquí te lo explicamos: https://t.co/aT2ZfJBmoh
— Carlos Cámara Menoyo - ccamara@mastodon.social (@carlescamara) February 17, 2018

Other no less important joys are the that I have had the opportunity to meet and work side by side with great people, such as the members of [Collaborative Mapping] ( ), which I founded almost unintentionally thanks to the then Director of Zaragoza Activa Las Armas José Ramon Insa and Miguel Sevilla-Callejo ([here I talked about it] ( , the people of [Disabled Without Borders Aragon] ( ) and [Mundo Crip] ( ) (I have yet to meet Marta Valencia, of the , who showed his interest in the project but we haven’t been able to match yet), as well as Mikel Gómez and the rest of the ’s staff and a lot of people from [OpenStreetMap] ( ) community. ↩︎
If the explanation of the program falls short you can always see the [specific website of the project] ( ), where you can find more information. ↩︎

Accessibility and collaborative information technologies. Cartographies for an inclusive city

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 17:00:00 +0100

Mapas y drupal, o cómo no perderse en el intento

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:17:26 +0000