 So first speaker is Riju. Riju is one of the guys helping us to run the website, he's going to be editing the future articles that go on great. Hi, so as an introduction to you, my name is Riju. It's not written there. I'm known better as Riju. I'm an economist by training. I'm a map person more by interest and by fortune or good friends. So what we'll do is this is not a technical session at all. I'll try to do, as it says, a brief history of making maps. Some of the maps I'm going to show and talk about are of course classic ones. One of the more radical initiatives taken to rethink maps and reuse what maps can do. Some of them are weird, also because it comes from very personal choices about what are the most interesting maps in the world history. And also some of the look weird, I guess. Let's begin with this map. This is, have you heard of Tartal Huyuk, any of you? So Tartal Huyuk is a Neolithic excavation site in southern Turkey in the Anatolya region. And this is here, so this is, the settlement used to exist during, say, 7,500 to 6,000 BC. And this is, by some part of it, this is here as the earliest example of human-made maps. So as you might guess, the most of it shows a settlement, settlement of the Tartal Huyuk case. On top you have, which was claimed as Mount Hassan, which is a volcano next to the settlement. And of course you see this funny thing you see in older maps where the perspective changes. So this is top-down, where this is a site profile. And it's quite controversial whether it's a taller map because this is the actual image of how it looks. What I was showing you earlier is the archaeologist's imagination of what it might have been representing. So there's always, especially when it comes to older maps, it's always a funny thing to talk about the exactitude of the map and to talk about whether this was really a map or if it was something else. For example, anybody, there's nothing written here. So this is Ptolemy's world map. The funny thing is Ptolemy had a book in, say, 150 AD and it was called Geographica. And there was no maps, there's just surviving maps from that book, but there is detailed description about how Ptolemy saw the world. And in Greater Europe, in say 14th century, 15th century Europe, people started reading Ptolemy's Geographica and recreating these maps. But clearly this is not Ptolemy's map. So if you want to really know or understand how people were thinking about maps in the world in 150 AD, this may not be the best way to do it. This is a very controversial map which came out from China. It is claimed to be drawn in early 1400s, early 1500s. And what it does, as you can see, is it shows North America and South America before Columbus met the trip. So Zanghi, and there's this lovely book called... I forgot the name. So who did the... 1428 or something? No, yeah. So Zanghi is his famous science explorer and this is supposed to be the map that he created. There are a lot of controversies and it was later, again, it's not the original map, it was later redrawn from the original map in 1763. And there's a lot of controversy whether most of the ideas and the shapes come from 1700s and 1400s. But what is interesting is you see here similar kind of depiction and this is... Anybody knows whose map is this? No. So this is the first atlas that was created by this Dutch cartographer named Marketer. And I'm sure some of you are aware of the Marketer projection. So the Marketer projection comes from this Dutch cartographer. And this is the first time anybody is organizing the surface space of Earth using 2D perpendicular axes. And this, as you can guess, is central for naval navigation. You need to have a kind of axis systems which allows you to do trigonometric calculations on the map. So as you set the course for the ship. And as you know from Columbus' experience, it was quite something if you do not know where in the sea you are going to. You can just go to the wrong continent. So this is Marketer. What he has been doing is... So this is the first atlas. So he coined the word atlas. He said that this is my collection of maps and this is called an atlas. Because it's cadding the weight of the knowledge of the world as the real atlas in the atlas could be shot. I'll just run down to another map. This is WG Blackie, another very famous cartographic company who uses Marketer's projection. What it does is... So Marketer created the mathematical formula for this perpendicular axis system. Here what he's doing is he's flattening it out. And this is almost the map most of us are familiar with from our school education. Because Marketer maps remains the most monolithic or important image of how the world looks. Of course, again, most of you might be familiar with the controversy with Marketer map. You can see that the Antarctic and the Arctic areas are expanded to infinity. And the equatorial regions are squeezed. And this is obvious if you're trying to create a 2D surface from a 3D surface. And if you're just spreading it out. There's another...it's a projection, right? So this is the issue of projection. There's an interesting idea in the history of projection. It's called the developable surfaces. Do you know what the developable surface is? Can you tell it? So to take 3D objects, tear the surface out. And then unravel it. And unravel it. You get a 2D planar. For example, Lagina-Karasin can. If you unravel it, you can play that morning. So developable surface is also a particular form of 3D surface. Which you cannot...which you can unfold or unroll into 2D surface without tearing it. So the point is if you tear it, then you'd have tears appearing on the map, right? Which is not a great thing to have. The very interesting, again, mathematician, architect, Buckminster Fuller. I'm sure again some of you must have been knowing him. What he started doing is he was very excited about dome structure. So geodesic domes is really his passion. What he was doing is he was creating 3D surfaces which you can unfold. And creating 2D surface, making it 2D surface. And of course the obvious idea was to see if you can draw the Earth on 3D surface, unroll it and make it work like this. This might not be most efficient for naval navigation, as you can see. But it really...it's really more accurate than Buckminster has been written. A more famous version of, again, Buckminster Fuller's map. Which is a very interesting picture of how the land mass of the world are mostly connected. Which is not how it appears in marketers' map, really. So if you look at it from Arctic, you see how everything kind of works together. So from Arctic, let's go to the opposite side. And this is another funny situation where the technicalities of mapmaking, of projection and the political issues come together. So do you know how Antarctica is politically divided? So there's a political map of Antarctica. And as you see, it's rather orbit. I mean, how you carve up a place where nobody really lives, right? So what people do, they do the obvious thing that you follow the lines that you have and have these bi-slices belonging to different countries. So that is how Antarctica has really been cut up. So the logic of it comes from maps. It comes from how the space in Antarctica has been already imagined. And with these imaginary lines, and then you get the political boundaries on top of that. I'm mentioning this to just remind that politics and maps have a very long history of working together. Anybody knows what is this? It's written probably. This is a map of the Fort of Bangalore, which no longer mostly exists. Interesting, again, these maps were created by British armies which were invading, which were attacking the fort. And it was created to help the British generals to make decisions regarding where to attack the fort. It has these very interesting locations of cannons on the fort wall. And you, if at least people here at this, can see these red lines, which show all the cannon lines, okay? And there's a larger map, and it goes down into the environs. And you can see that it tells you where the British army should be avoiding, which parts of the great area right here. The same thing, this thing about maps and maps giving the generals a sense of what to do in the battlefield. It of course continues still very recently, really, right? And this is the famous map of how Osama bin Laden would be captured and would be bombed in the, what is the mountain? It continues with the Iraq war as well. It tells you that this is Al-Assad airport here at the WMDs. And this is why we need to attack Iraq. The reason we show you is to tell that, what I was talking about earlier about the navigational usage of maps and the importance of maps to be exact, to be accurate, to help people to move around places. Suddenly change, suddenly maps change or go through transformations that do not satisfy those functions anymore. Here the importance of the map is more in terms of a knowledge claim. More in terms of saying that the US government knows enough about Iraq to attack Iraq. It's a kind of a posterity, right? And that again has a long history. So this came out in early 20th century. And this is almost the beginning of a famous series of octopus maps. Here, whatever the enemy power is identified as, is always depicted as the octopus. Right here is Russia and how Russia is engulfing, is eating out the whole of Europe, right? So this is not the only map. And finally you have, so this is Russia and this is Europe, and there is almost no China here, right? Now what happens when Chinese people start making the same maps, right? Then you have a huge China, not so much important Europe, the same Russia as the octopus, yeah? And of course you have Stalin as octopus, you have Churchill as octopus, of course everybody gets a like to be an octopus, and you have Putin as octopus, it's quite recent 2008, right? And again I'm showing this to talk about the rhetorical, the discursive logic of maps tells you, it doesn't only tell you what is there on the land, it also tells you how you see the land, how you see the space, right? Interestingly, just to come to the next discussion, you have geographic boundary, and you have something sitting on top of that, right? And this always has been how maps work in a big way. Everybody knows about it, I'm not going into this one, but just to tell you the fact that there is a road network map, there is an infrastructure map, and then there is a mortality map all on top of each other, right? So that is the key functional logic of how maps work. And this is not working, this is not happening only now because we have digital data, it's happening over a long time, the techniques were different, this is happening over a long time. Again, a very famous image, I'm not talking about it at all, you can always know what is this. The same thing happens, you have a region, you have a movement path, you have a number of army personnel, you have temperature, all on top of each other, all layered on top of each other, and that is exactly how maps work. What really happened with GIS, and this is one of the earliest GIS maps for urban development or understanding urban spaces developed in India by the BVMP, of course. What happened really with GIS is, unlike say John Snow's map, or Colleran map, or the map I showed you right before, the movement of Napoleon's army, what happened with GIS, the information system, and the information system embedded or maps created by information systems, is there was a separation between the information and the map. And this is what allowed for, so right here what we see is the map, but what it is created out of is not the map. That is information, right? So we have a form, we have a final form which is different from the original form of how the map is stored, is held, is used. And that is a very fundamental change that happened with GIS. Unlike say for John Snow who is making the Colleran map, he has to work with a real layer of road network information which is in the shape of map, which is not in the shape of a JSON file. And that really made the difference of what can be done with digital maps. Of course, Dump 2, 2005. This is the big moment, of course. This particular map is quite famous one. Google had a minor bug, and if you search for Russians in which Georgia, Google was filling certain regions in Georgia which is being invaded by Russia. It's a funny bug. Anyhow, but of course in 2005, when Google map, and it's the beginning of a very different era of mapping, right? Difference with... So what Google map allowed you to do, and as you were saying, the separation between the map and the information is that Google map is giving you... We all know this, I'm just repeating. It gives you the base map. You have your own information. You take it, you put it on the map. There's Oliver O'Brien, and there's a bicycle share map of London. And that is really cool, right? So you don't need to have your own geodata. As long as you have your own geotagged data, you can take somebody else's base map and just put it on the map. Sometimes, even if you do not have base map, your geodata is already so powerful, there's Eric Fisher, a very fantastic coder, an artist, who took all the images, the location of the images that was taken around in New York. Blue is by people who were visiting New York. Red are people who live in New York. Red are people who are visiting New York. Blue is by people who live in New York. Just to see where in New York people from outside, where in New York people from New York click pictures. Of course, right. There's a base map here. There's only geodata. If you've seen the Facebook world map, the Facebook map of friendships, something like that, there's your base map. The geodata is already so powerful that it can create the shape of the world. At the same time, if Eric Fisher's or, say, Google or Oliver O'Brien's, their initiative is to take information that has already been created by other people and collecting it together, collecting it together. That was the attempt. OpenStateMap, which we were talking about right now, took a very different approach. In some parts of the world, this is how the base map looks. Any guess where this is? This is a very famous OSM example. Chennai, this is not Chennai. It's Port of Skade in Haiti. So this was during when the earthquake hit Haiti. So what OSM did is we do not have maps of certain parts of the world. We do not have geodata, but we have recent satellite images. So what we can do is we can use that satellite image and start doing the thick descriptions, the thick mapping of the places. The point of interest data, the thinner data, what is this place actually called if my house is here? That can always come from the people living there. That can always happen later. But at least the overall idea, the road networks, the land users pattern can already be created with people living across the world. And this is a very, very different approach to mapping, of course. OSM took a different way. It said that we already have the Port of Spain geodata being created by OSM. What we need is to locate people in it. So what it did is as you know the OSM platform what you can do is look for particular places by going here and submitting that I'm talking about this place and this is the problem getting there. This is again Haiti and they're also doing reconstruction support work and anyway. And using this particular form of geotagged crowdsourcing of information crowdsourcing of geotagged information just to help the work. If those things were done by people outside the place this is the key where I'm at again a very famous key this is done by people in where they live, right? So this is Kiber Islam just to give a quick view this is how Google shows the place. That's okay, that's okay. It's fine. This is how the place has been mapped by the residents of Kiber with the help of certain people of course I'm running really. If those things were about sorry? So if those things were talking about real maps where real maps are in a real world maps so the distance in the real world should be proportional to the distances in the map world. Those kind of maps. We also talk about creating a database and of course it does which can rival the proprietary geodatabases of the world and it has to be that accurate to challenge it sufficiently. Again, along with that there are very different kinds of currents in the mapping in the mapping world. This is again quite a famous map created by this group of artists, activists the situation is international nobody knows about that. So this is France. This is 67th in France. Mostly Paris. What they were doing is they were talking about the fact that let's not get stuck with the real distances in the real city. Let's talk about the mental city. Let's talk about the mental maps we carry when we move through cities. For example, I stayed in Shantinagar and my friends are quite angry with me that over the two years I mostly traveled between the Shantinagar Buster to MZ Road in Amnesty Street. So that's the kind of area that anybody who is familiar with Bangalore will understand. There's the kind of area where you can which you can walk in 30 to 40 minutes max. And I quite made a point that I'm not going to any place to have a view beyond beyond beyond that region. So that was really my mental map of Bangalore. That is how so for me Bangalore is probably now I guess because of these people moving to Seattle, this is don't do this becoming part of my mental map of what exists in Bangalore. It was very, it was very localised because Shantinagar MZ Road church, double road kind of a location a lot of that max. So what they were doing what they were talking about the fact is that so these are the neighbourhoods where we live which we move around what is in the middle we do not have the right to talk about either. So this is not a map of how Paris actually is but this is a map of how a certain group of people perceive Paris and lives in Paris. If that was about how certain group of people lives in Paris in actuality this is a project in New York where this organization in the Institute of Applied Autonomy what they did is they mapped all the surveillance cameras in New York and if you just give an end point a beginning point and an end point like Google map gives you a pedestrian path it gives you a surveillance free path. So what it does is if situations international were saying that how you perceive the city let's talk about that. They say that if you want to do certain things in the city I give you some information about the infrastructure in the city already and you can make your decisions regarding living in the city based on such information. This is anybody familiar with the image? This is Christian Nold largely worked in UK. This is a fabulous fantastic map of what he was doing this is in Greenwich he created a lie detector kind of a machine which keeps track of your biorhythms, your heart beats blood pressure stuff like that. And he got a friend blindfolded the person got a GPS and walked through the city of Greenwich and what you get is geotagged information about the emotional biorhythmic behavior of human beings and it's not only in Bangalore here in Greenwich the busy traffic crossing really has a huge spike. So mapping is also about creating these new informations about the city. This is the same kind of work so you can guess that if you have spikes and you have different heights you can create a topographic map out of it it's impossible to read but that's a separate question I guess. Almost there but at the same time you have to use that sophisticated machine rhythm as Christian Knowl does this is the pine cross and this is probably my most favorite map of the model it's very simple what it's always doing is it's taking information out of there putting on top of each other and treating something that is really striking. So what it does is it takes the size of Africa and it fits in different countries according to the marketer projection but according to the real size of the continent So you have China here India, Eastern Europe US, Spain, France, Germany and Italy and you give it on the graph, what's this place? Everybody knows that. So just to finish two last points okay anybody aware of what this is? London? Anything more? So there's Stephen Walter a graphic designer and as I was talking about the Christian International's map of Paris of a map which talks about how he perceives Paris this is a map of London and it's talking about how he perceives London and it's not only about neighborhood it's about the damn detail of the city so if I just zoom in a bit so this place is apparently pleasant there's some very interesting points the secret lives of poverty and all of these all of these point of interest data clearly comes from our biographical clearly comes from her student waters that have moved through the city and have understood or seen the city the point I want to make is that really not a digital data but the same thing there's a lot of digital information of similar kinds sometimes geotag, sometimes not geotag which do exist right and when we're mapping we're not only crowdsourcing information but it's also possible to individuate the crowdsourcing process to find how individuals move through cities and create data while moving through cities the point I'm saying is that if this is giving a very claustrophobic sense of the city similar claustrophobic sets of data is also possible in digital formats at the same time I'm just provoking you to think that how this might work for what you're doing a lot of it is about using that very thick very messy data in certain ways and among the certain ways is this fantastic so all the sub-world maps the London Tube map is really chemistry so this is Tokyo map created by this fantastic information designer the godfather of the more richer woman and what he did is he took the very messy subway map of Tokyo and treated a map that actually gets you where you want to go which is the Imperial Palace and that's also the point that that exists this messy very thick sometimes urban urban data some of that are geotiles some of them are not the point is of course to work with that messiness and also to produce maps that you can actually use and maps that actually filters through all that messiness it tells you it helps you to do the things you want essentially I think in summary I'm trying to understand individual perception of the map to what a crowd perceives and what you on the feet of the street perceive your ecosystem but how do you collate all this data how do you first collect it let's get to collation related what's in that case do you face its GPS those are cool things that are coming now but I'm just going to work on how you did it hello so there's one aspect of it which is in terms of community building and which I thought maybe I might respond to which is about creating a community which really works in Chennai and Bangalore we have excellent open street map maps which is an important part but of course also what you're asking me is what kind of technical possibilities that exist and more of a technical but how do you get the GPS things like that you might have actually one thing is of course a lot of us would have a smartphone and you already have a GPS there but accuracy but accuracy is an issue but then it also depends on so first the thing is that if accuracy is really an issue you take data from a lot of people and you see how the error margin can be minimized using data about the same place from multiple people which is why the open street map has an editorial panel which is looking into for each area mostly which is looking into the kind of data contributing to ASM right now map box a couple of days back got a grant from the Knight Foundation to make open street map more user friendly because clearly the interfaces the techniques involved contributing data back to it it remains a challenge I think you're right at the same time there are other kind of eating into someone's time please tell me now okay so the last thing so there are other kind of people like 4square which takes the same data from you which makes you part of the community I won't always tell you that the fact that you're taking the data from you a Google map maker does the same thing it asks you to contribute the data but you can never take it back from them so that's another kind of working with digital data that works but maybe you should discuss this later