Placeless and barrier-free? Connecting place memories online within an unequal society

Digital media have a significant impact on how individuals and groups relate to their own as well as shared memories. Digital and online memorialisation has the potential to connect a greater number of disparate agents across physical place boundaries. Using the case study of an online mapping project recording women’s migration experiences, this article finds that digital media are indeed used to challenge established place narratives and contest an exclusionary sense of place. This online memory mapping is intended to connect personal memories of local areas across group and place boundaries. Thematic tagging serves as a tool to connect local memories globally. However, these attempts are situated within an unequal society, where resources, time and digital skills are not equally available to all. Offline power relations and social location are thus found to be constitutive of the making of online memory maps and to hinder democratised memory-making of place.

Volunteered Geographic Information Users Contributions Pattern and its Impact on Information Quality

Recent advancements in web-based geospatial software and smartphone technology have popularized the process of voluntary production and sharing of geospatial data by individual citizens. Through such Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) activities, people across the world participate in online mapping projects (such as OpenStreetMap) to insert their spatial information. The quality of data generated by such VGI activities has profound impacts on online mapping projects and their spatial database. In this study, we examine the VGI contribution pattern in OpenStreetMap through three case study neighborhoods located in three major cities: Tehran, London, and Los Angeles, and investigate how it might affect the process of quality assessment of VGI.

Mapping Historical Texts in the Classroom: The Anatolian Travelers Project

The process of mapping provides an active approach for students to engage with landscapes of the past. As part of a graduate-level class called Spatial Analysis of the Past, students were given an assignment to create online maps of nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts about western Anatolia (Turkey). Travelers often record their experiences of journeying through foreign landscapes. Although usually written from the perspective of an outsider, these first-hand accounts can serve as valuable primary source documents for geographical information about these regions. The participation of students in mapping these accounts can prompt deep reflection in the classroom regarding the subjectivity of spatial representations and understandings. This class assignment served as the initial step in a larger research undertaking called the Anatolian Travelers Project, an ongoing, open access initiative. This project attempts to collect, organize, and visualize regional travelers’ accounts through online mapping, to improve our understanding of how people interacted with this landscape and its inhabitants. The project records and compares, among other things, the travelers’ modes of transportation, the routes they chose, their observations about the land and people, and what they felt was worth recording and publishing. Here, we reflect on the use of web mapping as a pedagogical method in teaching the past by reporting on the results of our classroom experimentations. Specifically, we focus on four learning goals: the integration of historical and archaeological methods, an increase in digital literacy among humanities students, experimentation with visualization decisions, and an investigation of landscape and spatial perspectives. Our experiences in the classroom will help inform our future implementations of online mapping as a teaching tool. In terms of technology, we utilized the Neatline plugin to Omeka for mapping, though we consider infrastructure ultimately interchangeable.