Eeek! I just realized I forgot to do last week’s blog post on mapping! Being in Australia for 10 days threw me off my blogging game, I promise I will not miss another one! Here is my mapping one:
I thought that the presentation on GIS/mapping as a ~radical tool for activists~ was pretty awesome!! I have to say, I went into the presentation with a supreme negative bias. I took an intro to GIS class in the very Carolina Hall that they talked about, and I HATED it. I loved my professor and I loved my TA, but I just despised ArcMap and QGIS. QGIS always crashed at the worst possible moment for me (i.e. every time I was almost finished with a quiz but had also been woefully remiss in saving my work), and I was in the GIS lab from 3 pm – 12 am on one afternoon georectifying images of of Wake county circa 1950. It was dreadful.
HOWEVER, my perspective on GIS and mapping was positively changed after the mapping for social movements presentation. First of all, I didn’t know there were so many applications of mapping. Maps can be used as representation, as communication tools, as a universal science. There are so many different forms of GIS that I had no idea existed, despite taking a class on it. Critical GIS, feminist GIS, participatory GIS, the list goes on. They also said a few bold statements that really made me think maps were pretty cool. They said “Maps never need to be considered finished” – This made me feel like maps are one big adventure that you can just continue to add on to as you keep exploring. They also said, “All maps are sort of fictions… map to make the truths that we want or find useful. Map to call the world we want into being” and “Maps = storytelling platforms”. These statements were particularly interesting to me because I actually work on a storytelling campaign. I work for an education organization called My Name My Story, and we recently launched a storytelling campaign called “Voices”, that aims to showcase the raw beauty of the human narrative through short videos. It has absolutely nothing to do with mapping, but after hearing this presentation, I have been trying to figure out if/how we could incorporate mapping into our campaign because I just think the idea of maps as a storytelling platform is so fresh and unique. I’m also trying to figure out how I can use maps for my algae farm. Potentially mapping all of the algae farms as we expand! I’m also really excited to map the Greenpeace social movements for our class project. I remember my UNC environmental advisor telling me that GIS is the future of environmentalism. He said that GIS can be applied in so many different environmental health contexts, and that is why I decided to take the intro to GIS class. I just hope that the renewed excitement I have for GIS after seeing this presentation doesn’t become once again deflated when I actually begin to take a stab at the computer mapping software again!
