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.
At Public Lab, we've grown the Grassroots Mapping community into a broader effort to enable communities to understand and respond to environmental threats with DIY techniques.
Jean-Babtiste Labrune and Oliver Yeh joined us for the final day of the NuVu Studio workshop on grassroots mapping, where all the students presented their work and we had some good discussion – both about mapping techniques and on a conceptual level. JB spoke a bit about DIY culture and Oliver showed some of his high-altitude ballooning work.
This was a great chance for students to push some of our Advanced Projects forward, and has built on previous work such as the Kite Balloon prototype we built during WhereCamp 2010.
Last Thursday in the NuVu Studio workshop, we flew an experimental aerodynamic balloon modeled after a shark’s body at Skyline Park, a former landfill which has been converted to playing fields. A Brookline TAB photographer caught us launching (see above photo) and we made it into their blog:
I mentioned this on the mailing list, but we subsequently lost the balloon due to a bad knot (my fault!). This is our first balloon lost! We’ll be more careful with knots from here on out — apologies to Vanessa and Julian, who built the balloon!
We’ve been doing some great building and flying at the NuVu workshop this week and last; I wrote a blog post about it for the PBS IdeaLab blog. Also check out the photos on Flickr
This isn’t exactly your typical high school activity. My workshop at Beaver Country Day School is part of a series of studio design-style courses that make up the NuVu Studio — an experimental education project where the students get hands-on exposure to topics like alternative energy and “the future of labor.”
It differs quite a bit from other workshops I’ve taught in places like Amman, Jordan and Lima, Peru, in that the idea of “subjective geography” seems somewhat less immediate. I didn’t have to explain to anyone in the West Bank, for example, that mapping is not a neutral act, or that it’s a social construction with a profound political meaning and agenda. But here in Walnut Hill that seems a bit distant…
These are from Beaver Country Day School’s NuVu Studio workshops, which I’m teaching this week and next. We flew today and got some great imagery of the Boston waterfront. I’ll post pictures soon.
The NuVu workshop at Beaver Country Day School near Boston started today, and participants Mariah, Danielle, Hayley, and Nicky flew 3 different ‘DIY satellites’ over the school’s campus, capturing some great imagery, and assembling the map below.
WhereCamp was a blast – lots of people brought kites and such, and we managed to get a pretty good set of photos of the area of the Google campus we were ‘camped’ at (almost entirely due to the expertise and kite-flying of Eric Wolf). I demoed the new Cartagen Knitter and on Saturday night a bunch of us started to knit a map together, called “Deathstar Plans“. Check it out!
Actually it was mostly them (see picture below) trying to knit, and me fielding bugs, new feature requests, and so forth… it was the first time a bunch of people had gotten together to stitch a map at the same time, each on their own laptop. The feedback was great, and I was writing code and publishing it until 3am.
You can now ‘lock’ images you’re done knitting, and the tool is quite a bit more useable. Thanks again to everyone!
We’ve had a lot of trouble with winds between 5-10 mph, where it’s not enough for a kite, but too much for a balloon… so this weekend at WhereCamp a few of us designed and built a hybrid kite-balloon, which we named Black Knight 1, made from a 99-gallon trash bag.
Sadly, after a lot of careful work, it immediately exploded! But in fact it made a pretty passable large sled kite, even after falling apart. So we learned a lot, and are moving forward on the Black Knight 1.1. I encourage anyone interested to tackle this problem, since it just takes a lot of plastic and packing tape! Basically it’s a balloon which acts as an airfoil, so that instead of a light wind pushing the balloon down onto the ground again, it provides lift and flies more vertically.
We really need an ‘open source’, easy-to-build design for a kite-balloon! Read more about the concept and upload pictures and notes from your own experiments at Helium Kite page on the Grassroots Mapping wiki.
As promised in an earlier post, the hand-warping tool is online, although ‘beta’ may be a generous descriptor… lots of features are still coming, please be patient! Watch the above video for an introduction.
This is basically a tool for people to upload and easily stitch together their balloon- and kite-photos. I wanted to add that it’s optimized for ease-of-use, and even for folks with limited tech literacy — we’re working on other techniques for mass warping and stitching.
Suggestions or what-have-you can be posted to the Cartagen Knitter page (yes, that’s what I’m calling it) or posted here in comments.
Coming soon: a pen tool to trace out buildings from the images you upload.
Are you embroiled in an cartographic dispute? Do you disagree with the official version of your geography? Contact us through the public mailing list.
Grassroots Mapping is part of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, founded by a group of activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers interested in new ways to promote action, intervention, and awareness through a participatory research model.
Purchase the Grassroots Mapping Forum, our new community research journal/archive/zine/map, where we hope to share ideas, techniques, and stories from the Grassroots Mapping community. It is printed on a single 22.75x35" newsprint sheet, folded down to just over letter size, and includes a full color reproduction of a grassroots map along with essays, illustrated guides, and interviews on the reverse.
We're helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming yeas.We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery into the public domain.
Techniques and tools for people who want to make maps, on the Public Laboratory wiki. Includes readings and case studies on grassroots mapping projects.
