Grassroots Mapping

Over the last four months, the Gulf Coast contingency of Grassroots Mapping has been working with the University of South Alabama (USA) School of Computer and Information Sciences. Dauphin Island community member, Leo Denton, introduced us to USA Instructor, Dawn McKinney in September and she requested that we set up a project that would help her freshmen students learn about the process of aerial mapping, project management and using open source software to stitch maps.

During the first session, Jeff Warren and I gave an overview of the Grassroots Mapping project and Jeff taught the basics of map stitching via Skype from Boston. After this first session, with two volunteers, I accompanied a group of approximately fifteen students and three faculty members to Dauphin Island for a day of service learning where students were to map different portions of the island. Dauphin Island is a particularly difficult location to map as we had experienced over the course of the summer. On the ground there can be hardly a breeze, but upon letting a balloon up only a hundred feet, the wind currents change and you can end up with a balloon floating low to the ground, but half a mile from your standing point. Using the kite was equally difficult, two or three students would act as shadows, making sure that upon catching a rogue air current the kite and camera didn’t dive into the water. Despite the initial difficulties that students experienced, they mapped the island a total of three times, producing enough images to experiment with the stitching process.

From participating in the mapping and learning about Grassroots Mapping techniques, students commented that, “… it gives our communities a chance to fight back,” and, “We were basically able to make our own Google Earth. It made us realize that we don’t always have to rely on companies or what they say. This process gave us the confidence to do things that we might have thought were too complicated or troublesome- you can really do so much with relatively little.”

In the classroom, the students used the mapping process as a way to experiment with project management. In each team, students were required to break into the roles of IS, IT and CS, each with different responsibilities. You’ll be hearing from a student in the class on his experience with this project in the next week, but overwhelmingly when students were asked to reflect on what the most powerful take away from this project was, the response was that they not only learned mapping and computing techniques, but skills for working and communicating with a team.

Student teams tackled difficulties that they encountered along the way and even developed suggestions for the Grassroots Mapping team going forward. An initial difficulty that students learned to work around was that the shoreline of Dauphin Island had been completely altered after Katrina, the beach of Dauphin having expanded close to 200 feet. Although Google imagery documented a central pier as being underwater, students quickly identified from memory their local shoreline, noting that it was the same pier that today stands completely inland, out of the water and offers shade on the hot summer days to beach goers.

When the Cartagen site was down for a few weeks, students experimented with different programs that could help them stitch maps including Gimp, Photoshop and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Students favored alternative methods such as the automatic merge function in Photoshop, but were quick to point out the flaws with the different systems that they tried. Some suggested that ease of stitching did not equate to accurate maps, others cautioned their classmates that working in Photoshop was difficult because of the amount of memory that was used in the process. Others even made suggestions about the mapping process including:

– tie two (or even better, three) strings to the balloon to control the movement rather than letting the wind dictate balloon direction,

– When in auto shoot function, count how long it takes for the camera to snap 100 pictures and take GPS coordinates at each subsequent time interval so that there is a more accurate GPS reading (when logging and tracking devices are unavailable),

– Because it is difficult to geographically pinpoint photos where only beach shows, have someone shadow the balloon to take GPS coordinates while walking underneath.

After a positive experience with this project, which was interpreted into computing management practices, USA is interested in continuing this program next semester. From the teaching perspective, Dawn commented that, “…it was wonderful to get out of the classroom and have an experience with my students, it not only gave them a hands on opportunity away from their computers, but also allowed me, as an instructor, to get to know each of them better.” As this was a “pilot” program for teaching Gulf Coast students about the Grassroots Mapping process- from mapping their local areas, to completing final mapped images- over the next few months, we’ll be working on further developing the teaching process for computing students.

Thanks to everyone who helped with this project- all the students, Leo Denton, Dawn McKinney, Cesar Harada, Hunter Daniels and Mariko Toyoji

On October 20th, architecture students from Hong Kong university gathered at Studio X Beijing to assemble their own grassroots mapping kits and take them out in the city. The students were in Beijing on their site visit, studying the city’s 2nd ring road and envisioning it as a new urban public space in 2049.

We spent the morning in Studio X, constructing camera rigs, taping mylar emergency blankets into 4 pillow-shaped balloons and filling them with helium, and imagining other forms of active mapping. After a spicy lunch at the restaurant next door, we headed out and started marching from the little historic hutong where the studio is located, into Beijing’s infamous traffic.

We first gave our kites a try, but although they city has a great kite tradition, there was not enough wind and our kites refused to get off the ground – even with the help of some experienced kiters we met in the park. Turning back to our balloons we ran some test flights, and ended up connecting them into pairs (tying top and bottom and wrapping with tape in the center), and when that wasn’t enough we tied the whole thing together at the bottom.

The weather was almost perfect – chilly and calm with very little wind. We ended up not going very high, faced with an interesting dilemma – a narrow angle with sharper, more saturated images, vs. a wider angle with a foggier, smoggier image? (yes, there is always photoshop).
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Update: I started to stitch the flight imagery together using the Cartagen Knitter — anyone who likes can help out by adjusting and uploading new images: cartagen.org/maps/gigapixel-cmu

We had a great time flying at the workshop I gave on Saturday (above photo courtesy of Andrew A. Wagner); Nathan Craig was there with some kites and I got to check out his very nice kite aerial photography kit. He uses the same electric cable winder I do!

The conference was centered around the GigaPan tool, and so I learned a lot about 3D reconstruction of a scene from image collections… I hope to duplicate some of their techniques to derive 3D terrain maps from our balloon photos!

Here is a link to the entire set of aerial images we shot: gigapixel-workshop.zip (1 Gb)

And here’s one of the aerial photos we shot:

The flights were typical of DIY Cessna imagery collection. The Camera is held in approximate “geodata position” by a rubberized cabinet clamp. The camera operator stays quite busy though by holding the rig to dampen vibrations, shooting images, and communicating with the pilot. All this is happening with the window wide open and the plane travelling around 130 MPH, making it quite noisy in the cabin.

Google Earth and imagery within the historical time slider was used concurrently with other existing imagery sources from the region to process the new data from the flight. The map contains oil pollution/dispersants.

-video of mapmaking

-imagery on Flickr -original TIFF file

* UMO = “unidentified mapping object”

On the morning of Friday October 8th, the Grassroots Mapping public workshop kicked off in the corner gallery on 5th avenue and W 13th Street. We began experimenting with a few types of mylar ranging from 55″ 1 mil rolls to 0.5 mil emergency survival sleep sacks, in shapes ranging from a tetrahedron to what some referred to as the “burrito.”  Seams were folded and taped, then pressed with a pen or ID card. We worked all day to assemble four rigs between the two dedicated Parsons/Eugene Lang classes and bring together materials for the exhibit and for Saturday’s workshop. Fun fact: New York taxis will not pick up a 5 foot tall tank of helium.

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This weekend in New York City, public workshops will be held at 2 West 13^th Street, in the corner gallery on 5^th Avenue. Come out and join us! The exhibit and events are sponsored by Urban Inclusions, a  collaboration between Urban Design at Parsons the New School for Design and Urban Studies at Eugene Lang College. Additional thanks to the students of Mapping the City and Street Life.

Friday October 8, 9am-12pm, or 2pm-5pm:

Hack a camera and assemble a rig (2 West 13th Street)
Saturday October 9, 1pm-5pm:
Collect imagery with balloons and kites (2 West 13^th Street, Union Square)

Email ebarry at gmail for further information.

(Image above is from a Spring 2010 balloon mapping workshop at RISD)

I’ll be presenting our work mapping oil in the Gulf of Mexico with LABB as well as mapping with OpenMapsCaucasus at the 2nd International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010) this Friday the 1st of October. This year’s conference is in Boston at Tufts University, and the topic is ‘Haiti and Beyond’

ICCM Agenda

These saddening photos — taken in 2010 — show oil contamination in beach sediments around Prince William Sound, left over from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, over 20 years ago.

Read more at Prince William Soundkeeper.

Hi, Cesar Harada here, first post and first map using the techniques of Grassrootsmapping.org for LA Bucket Brigade – thanks guys for putting this wonderful DIY technology together. So! In the late morning 22nd of July 2010, Hunter Daniel and myself went to map out of Port Sulphur, on these funky boats :

With 2 boats we took this route (see google map) :

I traced this route with my mobile phone Google Nexus One and the fantabulous Open GPS tracker for Android – 4 stars rating!
This is what we could see from the boat, kinda boring :

Soon after I launched a balloon and Hunter a kite out there, kinda exciting :

we captured nice pictures, here 6 details :

These 6 pictures were made using 270 stills… that was a 12 hours work on photoshop since hugin (an open-source photo mosaic software) didnt do the trick – yet :/ Still working on it to automate the process and spend more time sipping mango juice 🙂
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A group of tech enthusiasts and bloggers in Tbilisi Georgia joined me and Sopho from OpenMapsCaucasus to prototype some solar hot air balloons for use in balloon mapping. Helium in Georgia is exorbitantly expensive – $700 for a 250-cubic foot tank, which would cost $125 in the US or $250 in the West Bank (and would last for up to 8 flights). To try to get around the helium cost issue, we’re trying a variety of other means to get cameras up in the air.

This flight wasn’t successful – we reached only about 10 meters – but perhaps with darker plastic, or in lower winds, this could be a viable replacement for helium.