Grassroots Mapping is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras.

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Raising the Dead: Grassroots Mappers Help Look For America’s First Veterans Cemetery.

November 8th, 2012 by eymund-diegel

An ordinary looking concrete slab in Brooklyn - what story does it really tell ?

"To balloon or to kite, that is the question.."

Just after Independence Day 2012, the “Over My Dead Body” balloon mapping expedition set out to capture high resolution aerials of a very special grave site: America’s first ever military cemetery.

Their site of interest was none other than the fabled Marylander Burial Ground, rumored location of the first soldiers ever to die as Americans in the 1776 War of Independence.

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