I caught up with BC recently in a follow up to his presentation as part of the affective atlas project here at RMIT. He introduced me to open street map

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.

Along with some other resources including the Pan America Institute of Geography and History based in Mexico, all part of a discussion on the community providing their own information towards the mapping process. Domesday project is an example of both community and specialist documentation. From wikipedia:

It included a new ‘survey’ of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and ‘virtual walks’. Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally-prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.

Another reference Association of American Geographers and Chris Perkin‘s research and Subversive Cartographies. The essay ‘Radical Cartography: Artists making activist maps‘ is a useful reference towards my current interest in this field. From the abstract:

Radical cartography is a practice that uses maps and mapping to promote social change, and is part of a cultural movement that cuts across boundaries of art, geography, and activism. This paper will present examples of cartographic work by artists, architects, and collectives who create maps to raise awareness of social justice issues. These maps are both artworks and part of a larger activist research and practice.

The other person who reappeared from the videoblog scene was Daniel Liss (pouring down) and his project Seven Maps

Other links:
Book Review – An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Making maps DIY cartography – subversive cartographies post
International Cartography Conference Chile – themes/submission

emotional cartographies – five examples
map my london

ArcInfo GIS software
jet studio GIS software

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, Verso: London, 2007

My one-minute rant for the Open Spectrum Quality/Control symposium held at the Melbourne State Library today. I lined up with 10 others and raced the clock to open the event. Documentation was done using a live blogging tool Cover it Live.

There is no content on the web!
on the web, content is a king (stripped naked)
content is everybody, content is communities…
content is creating accounts
sign in, sign out, log in, log out
passwords, more passwords…
content is social, content is friends, fans
content is connecting, networking, linking, traffic…
sharing, embedding, uploading, downloading…
content is comments…
searching, searching, searching
content is naming, tagging, categorising
favourites…love this track!
content is channels, playlists, slideshows, sets
organising…content is management…
content is piracy, bootlegging, plagiarism
copy, copy, copy
all rights reserved, attribution, non-commercial, no derivative works, share-alike, public domain…open…copyright…
content is dirty, noisy, messy
cheap, amateur, trash
content is remixing, cut n’ paste
content is user-generated
on the web, content is no king, it is a pawn (in virtual drag)

The Video Vortex video documentation is now online. Ogg Theora files are also available for download.

Envisioning the Future of DIY – part 1, Ulrike Reinhard, who is blog (video records of the panel)

DIY 24/7 video summit plenary panel titled ‘Envisioning the Future of DIY Video’. From the lrike Reinhard’s blog:

Then they started out by giving their best visions of what Rheingold called the activist question: what to do to influence the way the institutions of democratic governance, of cultural production, of knowledge gathering will shape the outcome of DIY media!

Dialogue from a online video recoding by the first speaker Henry Jenkins:

My vision of the future would be one where everyone had the power to participate, and where diversity was valued as central to the enterprise so it is not that we build and they will come, it is not that we construct YouTube and we are automatically at democracy, there is still a struggle to be fought around democracy, it is a struggle in terms of education in terms of teaching media literacies skills to kids, struggle in terms of law, in terms of changing the notion of fair use so we have strong protection on our ability to respond to the stories that are absolutely central to our culture, it involves changing politics, how we mobilise people who are feeling empowered by making videos and turn them loose in the streets to transform society…

From YouTube to WeTube… , Henry Jenkins blog post, February 14, 2008

One of the things that has excited me about YouTube is the ways that it represents a shared portal where all of these different groups circulate their videos, thus opening up possibilities for cross-polination. Yet, as many at the conference suggests, the mechanisms of YouTube as a platform work to discourage the real exchange of work. YouTube is a participatory channel but it lacks mechanisms which might encourage real diversity or the exchange of ideas. The Forums on YouTube are superficial at best and filled with hate speech at worst, meaning that anyone who tries to do work beyond the mainstream (however narrowly this is defined) is apt to face ridicule and harrasment. The user-moderation system on YouTube, designed to insure the best content rises to the top, follow majoritarian assumptions which can often hide minority works from view. Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the way YouTube strips individual works from their larger contexts…

Also on the videoblogging mail list an some links to websites that archive earlier movements independent video production right back to the first portapaks. The Radical Software movement:

“Our purpose is to make all the historic issues of Radical Software freely available to everyone. This site is designed for easy browsing and downloading, and hosts a sophisticated search engine to help you find the information you require on all aspects of independent video and video art back in the “Portapak Era.”

A curated group of artists on the California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute website.

And an archive of individeo iniaitives the Media Burn website:

“Welcome to Media Burn Independent Video Archive, the first website of its kind, created entirely from progressive nonfiction videos and television programs.”