Mapping Cottonopolis - Terry Wyke

Maps were a defining element of the information revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. They provided contemporaries with a means of visualising and understanding the unprecedented changes in physical space, most obviously the galloping urbanization driven by the modern factory system. They also provided a means of controlling and civilizing a new and problem-ridden urban society. This talk provides an introduction to maps in Manchester during the industrial revolution, highlighting both the slow development in creating and publishing large-scale town plans alongside the development of specialist maps aimed at analysing the town’s problems.

Knowing infrastructures: mapping the hidden city - Martin Dodge

Focusing, in particular, on the c19th burst of large-scale hydraulic engineering, which supplied vastly increased amounts of clean water, controlled unruly rivers to eliminate flooding, and safely removed sewage, this paper explores the contribution of mapping to the making of a more sanitary Manchester, and towards bold civic minded urban intervention. These infrastructures from Victorian and Edwardian Manchester are now taken-for- granted but remain essential for urban life. The maps, plans and diagrams of hydraulic Manchester fixed particular forms of elite knowledge (around planning foresight, topographical precision, civil engineering and sanitary science) but also facilitated and freed flows of water around the city. This paper deploys STS, semiology, aesthetics, visualization, and critical cartography to reveal how they work as virtual witnesses to an unseen city, dramatizing engineering prowess and envisioning complex and messy materiality into a logical, holistic and fluid network underpinning the urban machine.

I must be one of Mike Parker's 'Map Addicts' because I have always been interested in maps since childhood! The school holidays were spent drawing maps and I had maps covering my bedroom walls. I moved up to Manchester from London in 1986, and was unable to find a map of the City Centre in order to explore. My talk concentrates on how I decided to draw my own map, and how it moved from a hand-drawn hand-lettered map for my own use through to a computer drawn map now in its Sixth Edition and available for sale throughout the city. The talk charts changes over the past fifteen years in the design, but also in the built fabric of the city over the period.

Maps and Geopolitics: popular geopolitical discourse in 'the press' and on the web - Peter Vujakovic

Mark Monmonier has claimed that 'the news media are society's most significant cartographic gatekeeper and its most influential geographic educator'. This was a reasonable assertion in the 1980s, however, the importance of the internet and its use by a wide range of organisations to propagate their ideological positions, through their mappings, have added another dimension to the mediascape in terms of popular geopolitics.
This paper focuses on the ways in which the new national entities are constructed and how both press and web mapping can influence our view of geopolitical issues. A series of case studies, for example, the fate of the territory of Kosovo/Kosova illustrate the importance of mapping boundaries and naming political spaces. The paper will compare the use of maps by the nationalists, the news media and other groups with a vested in interest in particular territories. 'Cartographic precedent' is widely used, especially nationalist groups; this involves the use of maps to convey a particular image of 'political reality' in advance of that reality, thereby potentially precluding or prejudicing alternative outcomes.
Peter Vujakovic is Professor of Geography and Head of the Department of Geographical and Life Sciences, Canterbury Christ Church University. Peter has been involved in map research since the 1980s; including work on the Peters Projection and world maps in development education, news media cartography (with special interest in conflict and geopolitics), and disability access mapping. Peter is a former editor if the Cartographic Journal (BCS) and former Chair of the BCS Publications Committee.

The mutability of Soviet mapping - Chris Perkins

In the Soviet era Russian military mapping agencies compiled detailed mapping of significant urban areas across the world. These standardized strategic maps became much more widely known after the break up of the Soviet Union and at the same time were enrolled in many new and diverse social contexts. This paper explores the extent to which the social life of mapping is a mutable through a case study of some of these contexts. The politics underpinning original construction in the early 1970s are explored, and the encounter between previously carefully guarded military knowledge and subsequent multinational dissemination is charted. Mapping practices are highlighted in a detailed case study of media events underpinning the display of part of the map in a map exhibition in the summer of 2009. Deploying the military map highlights the extent to which aesthetics, technologies of dissemination, individual agency and events call different politics into being and speak to a strongly cultural and situated interpretation of a newly public cartography.

Innovation and craft in transport diagrams - Andrew Smithers

The iconic status of Harry Beck?s Tube map has prevented innovation in the graphic visualization of local travel systems as they have become more complex. The map designer should endeavour to show the individuality and personality of the network being depicted, rather than force it to follow traditional abstract rules. Using new rules, a map for the railways of Great Britain gradually evolved, showing that maps at national, regional and local level can share a common theme. Online access now presents opportunities for interaction and access to detail not possible with the traditional poster map. The map is core to the identity of train operating companies and passenger transport organisations, essential to the brand, yet is invariably low profile. Schematic maps should improve interpretation and legibility, at the same time creating beautifully designed and crafted maps.

On your bike! Mapping cycle routes in Greater Manchester - Anne-Louise Fryers and Nick Gould

The Greater Manchester Authorities produce a range of free paper and on-line cycle maps to help promote and encourage cycling throughout Greater Manchester. The paper cycle maps were first published in 2006 and are now widely distributed throughout the county. The paper maps are complimented by interactive on-line cycle maps for Greater Manchester and a (national) cycle journey planner, both launched in 2008/9.We will discuss the technical and organisational issues faced in developing on-line maps, in particular the challenge of providing maps covering a large geographic area. We will also look at the opportunities offered by the latest Internet mapping technologies. This presentation also explores the challenges to local authorities in producing, maintaining and distributing these maps to the public and also the opportunity available to authorities to promote healthier lifestyles.

Everyday mapping practices and new forms of urban subjectivity: Barcelonan community mapping - Loreto Saavedra

Cities and maps have grown side by side. Starting from a critical reading and from a non-representational approach to everyday mapping, this paper explores relations between the city and the individuals who construct it through an everyday mapping. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality I review the case of Bdbarna: Barcelona`s Stories as a collaborative counter-mapping. Analysing geographic information volunteered by the members of the collective and shared through the Internet, the paper focuses on new and critical ways of understanding everyday reterritorialization, the symbolic configurations, and the social construction of local knowledge created by this group of Barcelonans in a community mapping context. The institutionalized spatial rationalities of people’s everyday lives are juxtaposed to subversive acts. Finally, the paper reviews social interactions through Anderson’s (2006) notions of affect, feelings and emotion and the idea of affective atmosphere in a web site context.

This paper takes a ‘psychogeographic’ venture into the city of Manchester to consider the question of organization as it pertains between the city and its citizens. Inspired by elements of psychogeography and the dérive (Debord, 1958; Knabb, 1995) this paper explores the city as an arena that gives occasion to a rational disordering of the senses mobilising a form of movement that provides access or transition to what Ingold (2004) has identified as the ‘world perceived through the feet’. The paper reports on the findings of a psychogeographic experiment that deployed a strict mathematical formula to generate and inscribe the letters ‘order/disorder’ across the city of Manchester. This arbitrary set of rules and constraints has been adopted in the spirit of the Oulipo school of social analysis and textual production (associated with Queneau, Perec, Calvino) so that we might ‘vandalize dormant energies’ in the city ‘by an act of ambulant signmaking’ (Sinclair, 1997:1). Recalling the ‘collections’ made during a series of walks/inscriptions completed in the summer of 2007, the paper attempts to make sense of what Benjamin (1999:846) calls ‘the street insurgence of the anecdote’ that is made available by this unfolding relation with a ‘nonpresent potential to vary’. The conventional genres of academic disciplines and narration are made difficult if not impossible in this treatment of organizational topography giving rise to forms of what Abbot (2007) has recently called ‘lyrical sociology’, a mode of composition and being-in-the-world that in our journey from somewhere to now-here invites us to consider the city as a organizing phenomenon that is somewhat out of our control, partly self-acting and semi-autonomous, but also a participant in what we might call a post-human becoming whose ‘language’ and ‘interests’ we have yet to discover.

Challenging Anti-Production: Schizocartography as Method and Practice - Tina Richardson

This paper offers a method of cartography that both questions dominant power structures while at the same time enabling subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

Embodied mapping of Platt Fields - Emma Kerry, Helen Parsons and Naomi Hurrell

Mapping is a medium that is particularly well suited to challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about the world. Most mapping practice denies subjectivity and purports to offer an authoritative and neutral representation. This paper tells the story of an artistic mapping encounter which challenges these assumptions. It explores the strongly situated practices involved in the making and performing of an embodied map of part of Platt Fields Park Manchester. The park can be a dangerous space and map-art can be a mechanism for contesting existing power relations. The mapping was drawn in situ, photographed and documented, and subsequently deployed as part of a political process to reclaim the park. Evoking Ordnance Survey styles this strongly personal artwork subverts established representational cartographic practice and celebrates the potential for a feminist reworking of mapping that embodies aesthetics and political challenge.

Mapping and performances of embodied mobility are related artistic techniques, historically recurring in post war 20th century avant gardes and movements. The use of GPS technology by artists over the last decade, much of which has been grouped together under the genre category of locative arts, is a recent manifestation of this pairing. This paper will consider the production of indexical traces of mobility in such artworks, and will consider the ontological issues for cartography raised by writing mobility back into the map in this way, with reference to recent work on the emergence of non-representational theoretical frameworks for understanding mapping.

What I Heard About The World: Research Map - Third Angel & Mala Voadora

A co-production with Sheffield Theatres, Teatro Maria Matos, Pazz Performing Arts Festival and in association with Worldmapper.org.
Performance companies Third Angel (Sheffield) and mala voadora (Lisboa) are collecting stories for a new theatre piece, What I Heard About The World, for autumn 2010. Stories of replicas, fakes, stand-ins and simulacra. They are attempting to catalogue every country with at least one story: mapping the world with post-it notes, cartoon icons and two-word titles.
Positioning the countries from memory, they invite stories and anecdotes from the audience. The artists will run their research map throughout the day and in the final session of the day, reflect on their findings so far.

OS OpenData consultation: the politics of empowerment? - Bob Barr

The announcement of an intention to release free data, followed by a swift consultation which attracted a large number of well considered responses, has marked a watershed in UK geo-data policy. The genie of publicly owned data and maps has been let out of the trading fund bottle and will be difficult if not impossible to return. However this poses a challenge to the geographical analysis and cartographic communities. Will the free data generate public goods, or new enterprises, that justify the cost of collection and maintenance? Or would a simpler and more focused initiative serve us better.

Why OSM won't be bulk importing OS OpenData - Andy Robinson

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project started in the UK because of a lack of easy and open access to geographic data. Now that there is a plethora of open products from Ordnance Survey why is it that OSM is not making full use of them and importing the products directly into their own database? Andy will discuss and demonstrate the differences and practical issues that exist between the two data providers and explain why a more thorough embrace of OS OpenData is unlikely. Andy Robinson is a professional civil engineer and former director of OpenStreetMap Foundation. He has a long active history with the OpenStreetMap project having been an active contributor in many areas over the past 5 years.

Making maps with Ordnance Survey OpenData - Richard Fairhurst

Ordnance Survey's mid-scale OpenData products were primarily released for "hackers" and web developers - but are also of great use for cartographers. This talk will look at the pros and cons of each OpenData product, including completeness, accuracy, and feature coverage; explain how to use them in vector graphics programs such as Adobe Illustrator; and discuss the copyright/attribution requirements.
Richard Fairhurst was among the first to rework OpenData for cartographic purposes and now produces a monthly set of maps for Waterways World magazine using the Meridian2 OpenData product.

OpenStreetMap is coming of age, but as it starts to be used more in the mainstream, the age-old questions of quality and completeness are coming to the fore. A range of data sources have been used to build up the map in the UK, from GPS traces to aerial imagery, historic mapping, NaPTAN and the OS Open Data release, each with their own benefits and limitations. This talk looks at a number of studies and tools developed to quantify, compare and address accuracy and coverage of the project in the UK, in an attempt to answer the key questions - is it complete yet and just how good is it?

Data.gov.uk is a key part of the Government's Transparency programme for the UK public sector as a whole. Working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Tom Steinberg and other members of the Cabinet Office Minister's new Public Sector Transparency Board this site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data becoming available. It's under constant development and we want to work with all interested parties to make it better. In his talk, Richard Stirling who heads up the implementation of the project, gives an overview of the site and services, and the direction for open data within government. Although he is the first to admit he is no geo specialist, Richard will also cover the fundamentals of the importance of government's open data initiative regards locational data.

The announcement, in late 2009, of the UK Open Data initiative was accompanied by a call for innovations and a challenge to 'get excited and make things'. Online maps are a popular way in which location data can be made useful and accessible. Powerful browser-based applications can now be developed using open source components, agile development techniques and standardised data protocols that allow open data from a number of sources to be combined. This talk looks at some of the many ways in which open data can be rendered onto online maps, and considers the challenges in getting open data from different sources to 'play nicely' together.

We've been mapping the world around us for centuries, even before the Mappa Mundi first appeared in Hereford Cathedral. But now, as location becomes ubiquitous (if you have a smartphone and you're not in an urban canyon), as the major and minor players coalesce into the nebulous thing we call the "geo industry" and as there's sources of geographic data everywhere, suddenly the map isn't the important thing anymore. Now, it's all about the data. At this year's Where 2.0 in the heart of Silicon Valley, a veritable geo-fest if ever there was one, the map was strangely absent. Instead we have data, lots of data. Some of it commercial and authoritative (Navteq and Teleatlas), some of it niche and authoritative (Urban Mapping), some of it country specific and authoritative (Britain's Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap). But there's also data from unlikely allies, from geo-tagged photos (Flickr), from location based social networking services (FourSquare and Gowalla) and from forward thinking experimental authorities (Vancouver's Open Data Catalogue). Data, data everywhere. Some physical, some spatial, some subjective, some colloquial. But all of it locked in its own private little data silo. There's much irony here as well, as previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey) and open, crowd sourced data become locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license. You could call this Geo-Babel and we're in the midst of it right now. How can we recognise this and, more importantly, how can we as part of the geo industry dig ourselves out of this hole?