 Hi, I'm Mark Wasuda. I'm moderating this second panel. I'd also like to thank Leah for inviting me to do this and for organizing this great event. The session is titled DataScapes, Systems, and Representation. Each one of these terms, data, systems, representation, are all words that we might want to think about, and we should think about, which I suppose is the purpose of this panel. At the very least, the panel will be concerned with what representation means in the context of big social data. Of course, it might mean simply how data is visualized and communicated, and the different inflections, rhetorical deployments, directions, instrumentalizations, and audiences for this visualization. Yet the terms in the panel clearly calls up the issue of data and its intersection with political representation, and who is represented or not represented, and toward what ends, and the degree to which these representations and these absences are made visible and knowable, or repressed by the authority of data. And it may also contend with a more indirect but pervasive system of representation, which is how through data sensing, extraction, compilation, and their impact on cities, our contemporary urban imaginaries are transformed and aligned with the expectation that our participation in cities is both the product of data and the producer of data. In this sense, political representation folds into the construction of us and other urban residents as data subjects. Our first speaker is Taylor Shelton, and some of his recent work, such as the essay, which I will give you the title of, Actually Existing Smart Citizens, Expertise and Non-Participation in the Making of Smart Cities, confronts directly the question and problems of what he calls smart citizens. In other papers, this problem of smart subjectivity informs his reading of what he calls the general citizen and the absent citizen. I'm not sure today he's going to speak about that directly, but just to give you a bit more background information on his work, Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State. He's trained as a human geographer. His work combines critical sociospatial theory and GIS in order to understand, and importantly, to challenge urban inequalities. Thank you, Taylor. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Leah, for organizing. Thank you for to Lila wherever you went. And also to Lucy, I don't know if you're here, but for all of the work on getting our act together and making this happen. I'm really appreciative. And thanks to all of you all for being here. So I'm going to try my hand at a little bit of a provocation of kind of where I see things being at now and also what I think maybe we should be doing. So we'll see how that goes. So as people interested in cities and data and mapping and technology, I see us being confronted with two more or less equally prominent, but kind of oppositional trends today. So on the one hand, we have the proliferation of new forms of big open and user generated data that offer tantalizing new possibilities for urban and social scientific analysis. But on the other hand, at the same time as we're witnessing this explosion and new kinds of data, there's a pervasive sense that facts just don't matter anymore. Instead, we've entered a post truth age where blind faith conviction that one is right and the ability to yell just a little bit louder than your opponents is tantamount. This conditions become so evident that on the heels of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, post truth was named the Oxford Dictionary's 2016 word of the year. But I would say that seeing the last few years as a radical break from that which came before also poses some dangers for us in conceptualizing the role of data in our world. As jazz and often semi argue on a recent issue of social studies of science, that post prefix and post truth is decidedly a historical and that it assumes we were ever in an era to begin with where objective truths reign supreme and data was all you needed to prove a point. Indeed, tucked away in the geographer David Harvey's classic 1973 social justice in the city is this passage, one of my very favorites ever, which points to the earlier origins of this more ambivalent relationship we have with data. Here, Harvey lambast the geographers of the mid 20th century for what he called their counter-revolutionary tendency to map even more evidence of man's patent in humanity to man as it allows the bleeding heart liberal in us to pretend we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not. As he says, there's already enough information and congressional reports, newspapers, books, articles and so on to provide us with all of the evidence we need that inequality does indeed exist. For Harvey, this retreat into empiricism and what he calls moral masturbation ultimately serves merely to expiate our guilt without our ever being forced to face the fundamental issues, let alone do anything about them. All of that is to say that this focus on data has long served not just as a means to uncover truths about the world, but also to avoid them. And even though we've devoted massive amounts of time to collecting and analyzing data in order to better understand society, we also fail to really grapple with the realities of inequality and especially that part where we actually try to do something to solve them. Instead, we put so much effort into collecting data and making maps in an effort to prove these realities to be true, all the while such an exercise ends up becoming an excuse to avoid action rather than to take it. And so while the challenge that Harvey poses is a pointed one and one, I think that remains relevant to us today, some 45 plus years or so later, I think that the particularities of these two competing social trends that I described means that we don't yet need to give up on data and on mapping as an important tool in the broader project of building a more just and equitable society. But what I think it does do is it offers us an opportunity to rethink precisely what it is that makes mapping critical, how we can do critical mapping, how we can use mapping and data to advance this goal of building a more just and equitable world. So the argument I want to make with the rest of my time is twofold. So first, I want to make this kind of argument about where I think we stand now, which is that I think most examples of doing this kind of critical mapping work fall into one of two camps with very different kind of motivations, goals, and ultimately manifestations. So I kind of see this ultimately as these two groups drawing motivation or inspiration, maybe even unintentionally from either Donna Haraway's invocation of and desire to overturn or counteract what she calls the God trick, or the ability to see everything from nowhere in the spirit of objectivity that we commonly associate with the use of mapping and quantitative data, or alternately in the Geographer Elvin Wiley's notion of a strategic positivism, which emphasizes the need to leverage the power of this purported objectivity in order to advance this cause of social and spatial justice as I've described. But beyond just kind of tacking these two theoretical motivations on to all of this existing work in critical mapping, the second thing I want to do is I want to argue that in order to better understand these, or that rather, that better understanding these different visions of critical mapping allows us to put them into conversation with one another and ultimately develop a maybe more unified practice of critical mapping. So first, I'll dig a little bit more into this stuff and why I think it matters what it looks like in practice, and then I'll maybe get to the second point there at the end. So to start with Elvin Wiley, for him, strategic positivism is a way of avoiding both the universalizing and decontextualized epistemological truth claims advocated by hardcore positivists of the mid-20th century, as well as the oppositional universality of anti-foundational thought. Just to make sure everybody gets their dose of social theory this morning. But as Wiley argues further, these more ostensibly scientific methodologies of data and mapping have a distinct role to play in advocating for social change, countering what he calls the ideological facts performed by a powerful right-wing governmentality machine. So contra that enormous body of postmodern or poststructural social theory that's developed over the last 30 years that speaks to questions of social inequality and injustice using kind of highfalutin jargon, Wiley argues that most activists, people actually doing the work of making social change have absolutely no problem fusing their politics with the tools of positivist spatial analysis. Maps and numbers wield power precisely because of the prevalence of the God trick. So for Wiley, why not use this power towards more socially just ends? As he suggests in this paper from a decade ago, this ethos is on display in a number of examples. These are not examples he talks about but are good kind of touchstones that I think put it on display. So the work of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities in North Carolina, which has used GIS extensively and a number of lawsuits challenging institutionalized racial inequalities around the country here in a famous case documenting the failure of the city of Zanesville, Ohio to extend water and sewer services to black residents. Or in the work of the now defunct network center for community change in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, which used analog pen and paper data collection to challenge the city government's official measurements of vacant and abandoned properties. Or even in the variety of web-based mapping tools like the EPA's EJ screen or HUD's now deprecated fair housing assessment tool that are meant to make basic spatial data analysis capabilities more accessible to non-experts. In short, these kinds of projects do critique by using spatial data to prove that inequality does indeed exist and to make the case that we need to do something about it, especially through official channels like the legal system, which we talked about just a little bit in the last panel. But it's precisely this brand of critical mapping that's most directly challenged by the current post-truth moment. It's increasingly evident that trying to present just the facts isn't going to convince neoliberal ideologues and city halls around the country any more than it's going to convince the fascists and the White House. But as Gunnar Olson wrote in his 20-ted book, the strength of cartographical reason lies less in its ability to tell the truth and more in its power to convince. And part of that power to convince lies in shifting the frame through which we understand the world. And it's precisely this question that work in the second camps strives to address, albeit maybe to the simultaneous exclusion of some of the concerns raised in the spirit of strategic positivism. So rather than presenting that objective 30,000-foot view of what the reality of things actually is, this approach seeks to challenge some of that detachment, detachiveness, as Donna Harroway writes, by arguing for politics and epistemologies of location. Positionality and situating where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims, advancing a view from the body versus the view from above or from nowhere. For Harroway emphasizing the situatedness and particularity of knowledge, the possibility that there are other ways of knowing, doesn't make such knowledge any less useful or rational. Instead, by being situated in precisely these more subjective contexts, we can instead produce knowledge that's not only more objective in some sense, but that also provides a basis on which we can rethink the categories and methods of knowledge production altogether. So the utility of such a partial situated perspective is that it can be at once disorienting and illuminating. As much of the more artistic, abstract, but also kind of embodied and whimsical representations inspired by this thinking tends to do. So work like the geographer Dennis Woods, narrative atlas of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, or the work of artists like Lizzie Mogul, Ginny O'Dell, and Clement Valla, who rather than using the scientificity of the map to make arguments about the existence of inequality, use these reworked maps to question the epistemological position of the map in the first place to provide alternative non-cartesian ways of looking at and conceptualizing the world to shift the conditions of possibility for how we actually know and represent the world through maps. So while using Haraway and Wiley as my kind of touchstones here might be a little bit problematic for those of you that have read any of these things deeply, there's a lot of overlap here, there may be not quite the opposites that I'm setting them up to be. My argument is ultimately that these two kind of positions give way to very different ways of actually practicing critical mapping and it's precisely through trying to bring these two lines of work together that we might develop a more effective practice of critical mapping that I tentatively call situated mapping, real novel I know. The basic idea of this approach is that we don't have to choose between the twin imperatives of destabilizing our understanding of the objectivity of cartographic knowledge and taking advantage of such a pervasive understanding in order to produce more just social and spatial outcomes. It's possible to simultaneously use maps to prove that inequality exists and that space does indeed matter to the manifestation of these inequalities while also demonstrating that the ways we usually think and talk about these inequalities isn't really sufficient to understand what's actually going on on the ground. The goal and of course the challenge of doing critical mapping in this way is to not just use maps to prove a point but also use maps and mapping as a way of producing new ways of thinking about social and spatial inequalities and indeed about space and society more generally. So it isn't enough to just plot some points on a map or shade a core path to demonstrate the spatial clustering of some particular social ill. Our maps need not only to demonstrate the world as it actually is but to counter prevailing narratives of injustice and provide us with the means to think about and act differently on them. So while there isn't a single way of doing this thing I'm calling situated mapping and indeed I think some of the other folks in the room are practicing it themselves in their own way an example from my own work might be instructive and highlighting what exactly it is I'm getting at here. So for instance when it comes to something like understanding the spatial contours of racial and class segregation in the American city it isn't enough to just map the presence of something like racially or ethnically concentrated poverty this federally defined indicator of census tracts that are both majority non-white and have poverty rates greater than 40%. As you can see here in the case of Lexington Kentucky a place that I spent most of my adult life but neither does adding some qualifications and some gradations on this indicator such as incorporating maybe a locally specific measure of median household income do a much better job even if it can show that maybe racially concentrated poverty is a little bit more widespread than we previously thought it to be. Even if we take inspiration from folks like Ed Getz or Douglas Massie and try to flip this indicator on its head and focus not just on those places where poor people of color live but also where affluent white enclaves exist we still aren't getting the whole picture. We still don't for instance understand how these processes have evolved over time. But again even understanding these historical trajectories have shortcomings. While knowing that the city is increasingly characterized by this kind of bifurcation and segregation is helpful this doesn't give us a complete understanding of how these processes actually work how these things came to be and how we might go about addressing them. So the challenge in a case like this is to draw from the late geographer Jim Blout to show how the ghetto underwrites the suburbs. How these neighborhoods have concentrated poverty and affluence largely situated within totally separate parts of the city and very much distinct in their demographic composition are fundamentally connected and co-produced. So one answer I think in this particular case is to visualize the geographies of property ownership as this map attempts to do by connecting the location of residential properties and areas of concentrated poverty to the locations of these owners these properties owners outside of these neighborhoods. So even though this map is somewhat simplistic in terms of geometry just a bunch of straight lines connecting two points. It provides both a visual and a metaphorical link between places that are otherwise thought to be separate and apart from one another. So while difficult to visualize in a non-cartesian way a kind of classic problem of GIS this map shows the conditions that we usually only visualize at the census tract scale are in fact produced through flows and relationships between nodes within each of these areas. So once we can both take up the mantle of early critiques of GIS regarding its inability to conceptualize alternative non-cartesian spatial ontologies while also showing the reality of how these places are actually produced in relation to one another or not just produced in relation to one another but largely maybe because of one another. So from the 506 properties seen here that are owned in Lexington's areas of racially concentrated affluence to the 1606 owned elsewhere around the city 542 owned elsewhere around the Commonwealth of Kentucky another 234 scattered across the USA and even five outside the United States altogether over 40 percent of the residential property not which is actually a lowball estimate relative to the number of residential units over 40 percent of all residential property in Lexington's areas of racially concentrated poverty owned outside of these neighborhoods representing a channel through which the already limited financial resources of residents in these places go to subsidize other places around the city or even beyond its borders. Ultimately these outward flows of money not only help to reproduce poverty in these neighborhoods but also to subsidize the creation of wealthy enclaves and other places that end up being insulated from the lived experience of poverty even though they're fundamentally implicated in its production. So this example is part of just kind of a larger paper about about this issue that was published in urban geography last year that you can refer to for more detail but I'll just wrap up this example by saying that I think what's particularly useful and may be powerful and you can question me on that is that it helps us to shift our focus from exclusively being on the places where different kinds of social problems are experienced to instead looking at the people and places that are responsible for producing those social problems in the first place. And so ultimately I just want to come back around and close on this point that I think the data can have a really meaningful role to play here if we treat it not as some proof of an externally produced reality but rather as a vehicle for reimagining social and spatial processes. Again I don't think it's enough to make maps that demonstrate that yes inequality does indeed exist. We need to visualize why it exists how it's reproduced and who benefits from it. Our maps and data visualizations need to stimulate alternative imaginations of these issues that can in turn be get alternative ways of intervening in them targeting the root causes of such inequality rather than just its superficial manifestations alone. Thank you. Next up is Justin Hollander who's a professor of urban environmental policy and planning at Tufts University. He works on land use and environmental planning at the local regional and federal levels. He directs the urban attitudes lab which studies big data and the psychological dimensions of urban planning and public policy practice. I mean some of the projects that it's taken on include social listening as well as using data gathered from Twitter to assess public sentiment in urban space. He's the author of seven books but two recently urban social listening potential in pitfalls for using microblogging data and studying cities and ordinary city planning for growth and decline in new Bedford, Massachusetts. He also has a podcast called cognitive urbanism with recent episodes such as hip hop saves the city and the urban wonders of Montreal. Justin. Thank you Mark and thank you Leah and Lila for organizing this. It's a real pleasure to be here. What I wanted to do today is is the green button this one right there is talk about my experience as an urban planning researcher. I have worked as a planner for about 10 years before getting into academia and when we did community engagement back then this is really all it looked like. So digital urbanism back then meant you asked for people's email addresses at the end of the meeting. So you know we've come a long way. I was part of this this project that we called an open neighborhood so 3d immersive right and and this morning you heard about some other other ways particularly the example in Oakland and the bus project so the bike lanes project so there's there's lots of ways that we can use digital technologies to to engage people and so in my presentation what I want to do is talk about this kind of broader idea of digital community engagement and so I have a few slides to kind of give you some of my thoughts about that and then the rest of my presentation is something that I've been really excited about for a long time which which is really just these unobtrusive insights that that we can get from data so not requiring people to come to a room and then ask them their questions but more of the kind of stuff that that Jennifer is doing and people just like collecting collecting data from our life and and so just to kind of frame a little bit larger what is this all about for me as someone who works as a planner I'm really passionate I devote my work at Tufts to be able to develop tools that planners and designers can use to be more effective in their practice so when you kind of hear me go through this it's really all towards that aim and and so hopefully this will be some stuff that you might even find useful in your own work so yeah so digital community engagement you know it can involve you know those kinds of 3d immersive environments it can involve websites it can be at that that interface between a community meeting and people using laptops I mean so all kinds of ways that we can do this but the problem is once you start moving things online there there are some severe dangers and and that these kinds of processes can be co-opted so you know obviously everyone knows about what happened the the 2016 election but there have been untold number of stories since then just last week we big news broke about this massive effort the Chinese government deploying bots to manipulate just all kinds of political discourse and so what I'm interested in is as we're sending urban planners out there and and designers to engage with communities and find out what do they care about what are what's important to them to what extent are those processes being co-opted as well and and and so I've actually been doing some research in this area I don't know how many of you follow Urbanist Uma this is a good chance right now you can pull out your phones you can follow her and the only problem is she's not human she is AI so so here's what she can do she can like and retweet with comments look right there it's like nice work right I'm in pretty easy stuff she can post images that she scraped from reddit she uses Microsoft has a computer vision program which is basically free so she looks at it and the computer vision explains what is on the image and then we have like a prefix and a suffix before that comment to make it seem human and now this is just something fairly recently this GPT two language models now open open source and so she can just write extemporaneous comments she looks at Reddit forums and then we give her a prompt so I'll give you a chance to read some of these I won't read them out loud I told one of my students that I was coming here and he's like well maybe we can upgrade the model it's much better now yeah so it's a it's a definitely we're not there yet with the free model but the point is that people who have the means can really develop quite sophisticated human like bots and and then of course they can just troll they can hire people slave wage labor wages and and just working in these troll farms and and disrupt our community engagement so like we've went gone so far from that community meeting where there's essentially no internet now we're so much more vulnerable and and so the whole community engagement process is vulnerable so one of the things I'm doing right now with the funding from land economics foundation is is trying to catalog that just to get a a much better idea to what extent these kinds of bots are out there and and how much is our communication process kind of at risk as so many I mean I can't imagine there's a city or town in America that that doesn't do some some sort of online community engagement and so so that's something I'm hoping to have some more results on so yeah I just want to now just shift gears and really talk more about the kind of unobtrusive data this these these measures of what people care about but that we're not actually asking them so I don't know if anyone's ever done like a focus group or interview research these are obviously well known tried and true methods of social science but they're flawed and there's all kinds of biases I actually teach qualitative research methods and we spend more time on the problems with qualitative research than how to do it and so it's it's not that I want to suggest that it shouldn't be done and and I will continue myself to use obtrusive methods and planners and designers you should do that you should continue to talk to people but there are other ways and so that's what the unobtrusive measures suggest these digital crumbs and so I wrote this book urban social listening three years ago to to try to just show to to practitioners you know what are some really easy ways basically free ways for you to to capture what's going on in people's lives so that you can do a better job of planning for them and one of the things that I started with was measuring sentiment which you know it's just very straightforward you know you're you're just trying to understand kind of what do people care about what's what's in their life what's what's meaningful and I've used Twitter I've also used a couple other apps but Twitter is makes its API available for free so that's really nice we're most most of the social media you can't get it so the process that I write about and I've used in my research you know really starts with just delineated geography on the Twitter API they just want the northeast and the southwest corner latlong so not very advanced there you have to just enter some key information to get onto the Twitter API there's some there's some tokens and some keys not that hard either a few steps and then Shazam you start downloading the data and so you know you're getting you're getting every tweet has a unique ID you get different screen name user ID and then the text date time and latitude longitude of course if you don't have latitude longitude what's the point but no we we get it and we know exactly where you are when you're doing each of these tweets and you know we're not getting the full with the API they're not giving the full population of all tweets it's a sample but very powerful so with the sentiment analysis you can do this in many ways but what we've done is just use a really straightforward sentiment dictionary so this one has 3000 words where the all these words are pre-coded on a balance from negative five to positive five and then you just add it up and I did this project with the New York City Department of Design and Construction we were looking at a bunch of cultural institutions and with throughout New York City and we just looked at the tweets we gave a score based on the sentiment and then percent positive percent negative and you know what's really amazing is that we were able to correlate these this Twitter data with health data that the city collects at I guess the community board level but you know with any of this stuff you really need to triangulate you know you can't just pick this up run the numbers and say these people are happier than these people end of story but it's part of getting insight into kind of what's going on also with DDC we we collected the tweets around museums and tried to see what were people talking about the museum experience do they like it do they not like it and actually I wrote a paper about that so if anyone's interested just let me know but yeah I mean it's it's a really nice compliment to in addition in that study with DDC we also did ethnographic research and and so there's a real powerful opportunity to to get voices that you might not hear if all if all you're doing is the ethnography just another quick example just to show you what that list looks like this is using Flickr raise your hand if you've ever used Flickr before yeah nice nice Flickr group here I spoke recently and nobody had ever heard of Flickr before it's like it depends on where you are well so you know what you're doing with Flickr is you're taking a picture of something that you care about that there's something about that place that that that that you're pointing your camera at that that's meaningful and so I was doing this project with the 1772 foundation and they care about historic preservation and well we're saying let's try to use this kind of urban social listening approach to see what places people care about so so using both Flickr and Twitter and then we also did a community engagement process where we brought people into a room we showed them some maps and and it's a really exciting way to to add to the the conversation about what you know what people care about just based on what kind of pictures they're taking and and what what they're posting this this is a project I'm doing right now I'm having a lot of fun with it because Google Street View also makes their API available has anyone done anything with this raise your hand oh yeah a few so this is again you know nominal costs to download and store and we did this with a grant from the government of Quebec so here what we're doing is using the data set that some other folks developed where they asked actual human beings they asked them which which place looks safer and these are two photographs in Boston and based on that data set we use machine learning to program the computer to be able to recognize an image a street view image as whether it's would be perceived as by a person as being safe or unsafe so then we collect the this new data from from we did it from Montreal and Toronto and ran it through the model and our model was pretty good about 87% accurate so we felt good and we moved ahead and these are the these are the places that our computer was able to you know decided that was unsafe seems good to me seems pretty unsafe and these are the ones that got a safe score and this is just binary that's all that's how we set it up you'll note a lot more greenery so the computer is very sensitive to greenery but frankly so are we that's that's actually something that has been widely established in the psychological literature that that when we see green it's this idea of biphilia love of nature it's we are put at ease and we are more comfortable so this is what it looks like I am what I'm showing you here are the Google Street View images now we collected 30,000 and we weren't able to get every single one so we did in these concentric rings around the center of the city and so what you're seeing here is if the image was classified by the computer as being unsafe it has a the black plus sign and then safe was yellow so those of you who are geographers Travis we start to see some you know some patterns we also looked at transportation policies in the city and we tried to assess where the biggest investment of transportation this is a content analysis of policies that the city was implementing and then map the density of those policies so what here you're seeing now in the background is for the polygons for census tracts in the city the darkest blue are the ones where the there's the most planning emphasis on transportation and we haven't actually run the any space statistics yet but you do you kind of eyeballing at sea that there are there do appear to be some some correlations between where the darkest blue is and where the black is so so that's telling us that places that people perceive as being unsafe are places where the planning infrastructure is in place to to make investments and improvements so that's it for my presentation I look forward to the conversation later final speaker for this session is Laura Bliss who is city labs west coast bureau chief she's a journalist who covers housing transportation climate change and digital digital technologies often with a focus on California she is a self-confessed map geek and she accuses all of us of the same and she often writes through the lens of cartography by researching how maps both historical and digital shape the urban environment Laura thank you Mark and thank you again to Leah Lila Lucia and all of the organizers for today it's really really a cool honor to get to be part of this so yes that was a good introduction in west coast bureau chief at city lab we are a publication that covers urban policy and politics or part of the Atlantic magazine so we have the same kind of national focus and really 80% of what I do has very little to do with maps it's housing transportation although these things ultimately do become linked often but you know sort of bread and butter urban policy issues but I've also really had the pleasure of kind of building a little microbeat and something of a digital community I would say I hope around some of the topics that have been discussed today green button oh shoot we didn't get the new slides up darn okay that's okay I will go back to the previous slide so I was hoping to show a slide of the map that really kind of started triggering my interest in these topics maybe four or five years ago so I'm definitely a newcomer to this world but it's the whole house maps and papers and there may be many people in this room who are familiar with that project that was a set of maps created by the settlement house workers of whole house in 19th century Chicago these were largely a group of women who were kind of pioneering social work and also social science at a time of expanding urbanization and industrialization and rapidly growing inequality in this country at that time and they were doing kind of you know extending English language education and child care services and kind of trying to work in a heavily immigrant and and poor neighborhood to extend you know sort of new services and also conducting research of their own so they went around and gathered nationality wage and language spoken data sets for this kind of immigrant heavy neighborhood that they were working in and they mapped it it was really one of the first examples of urban data mapping in the United States if not the first 1895 I think and it's really a quite beautiful object and I'm sorry I can't show it to you because I don't have it in my old slides um no it's okay but you should also go go look it up and it really triggered my interest I think initially because it was colorful and pretty and two was like created by a bunch of untrained women which like fascinated me at the time and you know add that to like the pile of stories about advances and you know science or academia that are like written out of history because they're women but then over time it's really increasingly continued to to fascinate me because of these two themes the story is a point that have continued to come up again and again and in my work around this topic of mapping and one is representation so you know putting these sort of existence and and you know some sort of data face right on on the realities of living in this neighborhood you know where people were not making very much money and living in in pretty crowded conditions in some cases and also for lack of a better term surveillance which might sound like a stretch for a 19th century map but maybe overmapping is is like a better term for it and this kind of relates to Taylor's presentation to some extent right because when I started learning more about the legacy of these maps and sort of one of the earliest examples of urban data mapping let's see yeah there it is thank you awesome support staff learning about the legacy and reading some of the scholarship around this you know these these maps really kind of helped were made with good intentions right like these women wanted to help like advocate for these neighborhoods that they thought needed help and like you know they showed these maps to the policy makers at the time and they did actually succeed in getting some change affected but they weren't super great like consultants they didn't do a lot of you know community engagement let's say around on the map making process and in any case I mean when you look at kind of the visual like language that was starting to develop you know around the time that this map was made and you look at you know the zoning and later like redlining maps made by the city of Chicago and other kind of you know government affiliated entities you see that like there's this becomes a statistical language like for poverty in places that are like less than in some way and so ultimately this very neighborhood ended up being raised in the 1960s to make way for the university of Illinois so the site you know tension between representation and overmapping or surveillance I think later is is something that has been a kind of constant theme in some of my work as a journalist and as a writer skip these so I'll just kind of talk about some of the things I've just reported on so really kind of covering you know the industry of of digital map making and and GIS you know sometimes more philosophically others sort of analyzing you know new changes on google maps this is more recent reporting looking at the city of Los Angeles's efforts to they're they're happening now they're gathering you know real-time location data of people taking scooter trips and these sort of larger idea behind that is one that's gained a lot of popularity among really all the big map making companies here Microsoft Google certainly of making it's like this Borgesian idea of like the one-to-one map of reality right but in this case it's real-time and like you see everything that's happening and and in this case like these policymakers and city officials like could help manage traffic but it's also like wow so anyways that's from July and I'm continuing to report on this and if anyone else is following this story in this room I'm like desperate to talk to people who are not like intimately associated because I'm still reporting and I also wanted to mention too I have touched on we work certainly on sidewalk labs and and I think I've written about Numina a little bit so definitely have have touched on some of the work that's been presented on this room two years ago we launched map lab which kind of came out of a recognition of this sort of being an interest in maps I mean again people like to look at them on the internet but also you know interest in just this growing world that we've all been talking about of this explosion and in kind of you know location data collection efforts and sensors and cities and text influence and so forth and and in a location focused way and so map lab is sort of my baby it's every two weeks it generally has kind of a Newsy I'm gonna skip ahead well yeah and sometimes sometimes Newsy is Game of Thrones sometimes there's like the biggest headline in the country is like totally about a map in this case the infamous Alabama map so yeah so sometime you know it's the every issue almost every issue has kind of a Newsy like top line little mini future and kind of Russell's with the Mappy here sort of location data issues coming into play other times it's it's like a little more fun this is like a you know Game of Thrones like end of the series like fan map project and again you know I think between some of what I'm writing about in the newsletter it follows along is this sort of tension right between representation it's like one of my favorite kind of like you know map projects that we've just like written about and it's called queering the map and it's a project I think out of Quebec this is I think of in Montreal but it's mapping crowdsourced stories of of like coming out or other kind of experiences related to queer identity around the world and it's a really cool project that I've never seen anything like and then again to surveillance right or this idea of over mapping or and and the kind of questions around that and and really what I want to say about the the newsletter is I mean other than becoming you know another like place to put all these ideas and sort of stories happening out you know in my work and others work it's also it's become a I think a pretty cool community so I've got about 30,000 subscribers and they're all around the world and and they are very interested in maps and it really ranges from like you know retired like geography professors to you know folks working in the same kind of fields that some of you have been presenting on to urban planners and and again it's probably a bit of confirmation bias but like I do get probably the most feedback about sort of surveillance-related stories which maybe makes sense it's a very hot button issue but also that sort of representation issue what else do I have us oh yeah so I don't know how I am doing on time but out of map lab has come more recently a series and that we launched this summer called the maps that make us and this is a series of more personal essays exploring the power of maps to shape public and private life so many peas I'll be aware of that and it's been a really lovely series we've had a lot of great contributors you know one woman recently reading about finding her her mom's old London tube map you know after she passed away and and kind of connecting to her through that object I'm gonna come back to that another one that I really love was this writer who who lives in Iowa and like passed through this town called Atlas and this like crazy like galaxy brainway and and the experience of living in a place that like Google Maps like slowly over time just sort of dropped off the map like you can't search for this place because it's so underpopulated and and then I think probably one of my favorites oh no this is an it's animation you should all this is a reason to go look at this series but this was a from a friend of mine and an animator and writer Nicole and Tebi who grew up in El Paso along the U.S. Mexico border of course and the the border there is the river right the Rio Grande Rio Bravo and so she wrote about sort of her journey as an artist and kind of think or to find a map that like really did justice to this fluid border and could not and so she actually animated her own I wish I could play if that's okay so where to I think if there's one thing I've observed through you know my reporting and kind of stoking of this little mapping community of readers and sort of interested people clearly like this this tension between representation and surveillance is constant and and very much I don't know in this kind of opposed relationship and it seems to matter very much you know who is doing the mapping as a kind of resolution to that like tension if there is one and beyond that where to I don't know just more reporting I guess as I mentioned that I am really very focused on L.A.'s kind of scooter data mapping really data gathering efforts right now among many other projects that have nothing to do with maps but more broadly as a kind of a call out to you I'm always interested in learning about your work and your research and I definitely invite you to follow me on Twitter and to check out our work on city lab so thank you I want to start with you and it seems like that you are thinking through and and formulating and and trying to address in your own work something that maybe is an unresolvable paradox which is that if we no longer trust data and its mobilizations and for good reason on one hand yet on the other data speaks especially through maps with all too much authority and claims to factual objectivity and so it seems like it's almost impossible to know where to operate within that space because on one hand we are either naive or we are cynical and which is to say that we don't trust anything and so part of the problem then is like how to not only how do you produce a system of representation that somehow speaks critically back to the the history of mapping and its failures and its over claims and its simplifications but how do you produce a system of representation that somehow manages to swerve between both the failure and the over statement of data authority I mean I think the what you said the unresolvable paradox is kind of the long and short of the answer in a way but I think there's both a kind of technical element to approaching these challenges and then certainly well there's a epistemological element but then there's also just kind of a social element and how we uh once we make a map once we do data analysis once we create a product of whatever kind right on the one hand we often just kind of like let things out into the world and see what happens and you know kind of absolve ourselves of what happens with with those products and stuff but so each of those has to be grappled with right like on the technical side GIS has very significant limitations in terms of representing alternative ways of thinking about the world there's been some really cool work done on this Nick Lally and Luke Bergman who are both geographers at Kentucky and UBC have done this thing called unfolding where it's like you can basically you know whatever digitally fold the map back together in order to create the kind of linkages between places that I was trying to show with just my you know two-dimensional straight lines but then epistemologically this is where the hair away et cetera comes in but then socially how do we make maps that actually even if they don't necessarily come from the community even if they're not necessary necessarily participatory maps how do they represent the the kind of experiences and values and the political positions of people that are in marginalized positions and how do we use them to kind of further those goals and stuff but unresolvable paradoxes probably really the it's something you grapple with even if it is unresolvable I think is maybe the thing I would say all right oh maybe we can come back to that paradox in a second but you know because maybe this is following a similar line of thinking in your project Justin it's at least for somebody who knows very little about these procedures of community engagement it seemed like the way you framed the history and its evolution over the last decade it was quite surprising in the sense that only 10 years ago community engagement looked like speaking to people and now it seems to be listening and listening what did you is an unobtrusive engagement and so you know part of me is wondering how what this shift has allowed in terms of your own work but also in a more broadly disciplinary discursive sense like what what to put it differently is is new forms of are new forms of community engagement new forms of community engagement I guess that would be the first question like what how do we how do we analyze and assess what engagement looks like in these contexts and so how does how does technology reconstructed notions of engagement and and what are the potential benefits of that the because the other term that came up in your talk that I found really helpful and pivotal was the way you described the vulnerability of different communities to forms of I don't know postures and fake engagement and so it seems like engagement is a term that not only has evolved but that has evolved in relationship to new technologies and evolved in a way that makes even the basis of engagement vulnerable to mistrust and abuse and so in some ways it's follows up on what I just asked Justin is how do we understand engagement then as being some kind of productive form of of work that anybody would be willing to participate in given its vulnerabilities yeah well so I think it connects to the kind of title of this session which is around representation and so the that first image I show you I didn't spell it out but the people who are represented in that in that public meeting were very narrow subset of the population I think they were all white they average age was about 50 and so what you have in any time you have a communication process that requires people to take time out from their schedule and travel you're always going to systematically exclude some populations and so the question is can we come up with methods to be able to tap into that those digital crumbs that in an unobtrusive way to tap into what people care about what's meaningful to them what kind of improvements they want for their community can we do that now I'm not going to suggest that in my presentation that I've succeeded I'm hoping that some of my research it helps advance the ball and maybe many of you can continue to advance it because there's definitely challenges it's it's not the it's not the end it's the beginning of trying to find find ways to get more people's voices heard and not require them to come to the library at seven o'clock on a Wednesday great but so one of the I mean clearly one of the observations that one can make about today already is that the new technologies of data extraction and manipulation and representation are profoundly consequential for how we think about our cities and about our relationship to the cities and also about how we perform as subjects in this city and and it seems like even for disciplines like planning and geography we have difficult problems of how to use that data to construct a meaningful set of representations and and how to construct those set of representations like a map that might speak in response to the long history of mapping and data representation and its if not its abuses its biases let's say and so a complicated task within the discipline and so how does one address a similar set of questions when your audience isn't an academic audience isn't a technically um facile audience but it's a general readership how do you point to the complexities of something like map representation and the way in which something like bias and subjectivities inscribed in that because I presume that the reason that city map lab exists is because these are pressing questions for contemporary cities and these are pressing journalistic questions and not just academic or planning questions and so how how then does let's say the representation of systems of representation operate within journalism I don't have a PhD so I'm not sure that I can answer that question if you answer it well maybe they'll give you one I guess I can answer the question in the way that I understand it which is like how do you how do you talk about this for a lead audience right um and sort of brush up and how to make them aware that the reason this exists because it's important right right yeah I mean other other than sort of pointing it at things and saying this is bad you know um you know I think I it's uh the answer is the same answer that any you know reporter or writer really is is using as as the the tool in their tool box which is stories right and and stories about real people in the world so you know the the best example that's coming to mind you know I I I'm one one example I think is pro-publica they've done some pretty phenomenal um you know data driven but also you know heavy heavily reported investigative work around Facebook's algorithmic biases around homoaning opportunities I might be like butchering this because it was a few years ago now and just sort of taking stories of people who you know were not shown certain opportunities to to buy homes in certain areas and others you know that did have that opportunity based on where they were located and other kinds of profile metrics another example I can think of you know that not a not I but another a colleague at city lab wrote about about a year and a half ago is the efforts of missing maps which is a kind of humanitarian map making organization that that pulls satellite data and traces it on to open street map as a way to create like physical access for women in particular in parts of the world where they don't have necessarily clear road access to like the bathroom right for when they're menstruating or you know marked safe spaces when they're feeling like they're under threat in some way and so you know that story was one that came with really kind of concrete examples of how these issues of what's on the map and what's left on the map and and sort of who's included and who's left out actually really mattered right so I don't know why I feel compelled to do this but following Molo's model a question for all for all of you that you know you might answer in your own way you might not answer because I'm not even actually sure how to formulate this but it seems that that all of you and everybody here in this room who's speaking is in some way trying to contend with the implications of you know what we can call something like an observational paradigm that observed and that emerged in in the world in the 60s and 70s and has accelerated since and and everything you're describing around the particularities particularities of data and mapping seems to be a very contemporary subset of that paradigm one of the curious features of this observational paradigm is that we have no idea really what it's observing what we have is as you know we have some occasional hints we have some occasional moments of insight or communication we have some sometimes paranoid sometimes not paranoid enough idea of what the scope and scale of global observation is and how we're positioned in it and so it feels like you know this is something like the 21st century condition of you know data subjectivity this is this is what has formed us but but it's formed through a kind of paranoid imaginary and again maybe not paranoid enough but so how how does one pose and how do you think about your counter projects because each in your own way a kind of public literacy project an engagement project a counter mapping project each of these are projects that speak back not just to the particular objects that you study but to the this observational paradigm speaks back to the complex structuring of our political social financial cultural world through data collation and and manipulation how does how do you even begin to speak to that dimension of observe the observational paradigm that that we work in and and so how does a counter project get us to there and not just within the particularities of our own representational systems and maybe that's impossible like maybe that just you know maybe that's what we're here to do or maybe you each have thoughts on how you how you approach that I can respond to this one of you or start at least I mean one of the things from the kind of work that I do I mean calling a counter mapping I think it's probably fair but the part of that is that almost all of the projects that I've worked on whether it's that whether it's work that I've done with social media data that tries to kind of develop a similar analysis ultimately of the connections between different kinds of places that we usually think of as being separate but is that it always actually starts with some other kind of data representation right it always starts with a particular slice a particular look at one set of ostensibly authoritative data and says well maybe this isn't actually the story we should be drawing from from this ostensibly authoritative representation how can we either look at the same data quite differently how are the possibilities embedded within each individual dataset not really being realized because either they're too technically difficult the kind of blind spots of of our analytical procedures or even just our ideologies what we even measure so how can we introduce other kinds of data into the the equation to think about the same very issue differently right I mean in the the case of the stuff in Lexington right I start with the racially concentrated area of poverty if we you know rewind ourselves back to the Obama presidency when HUD was even mildly functioning right and affirmatively furthering fair housing the imperative of affirmatively furthering fair housing was to reduce the total number of census tracts qualified as racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty how you did that was kind of like like it's up to you kind of situation right and so the way that that's measured and mapped and managed is a very short-sighted thing that doesn't kind of appreciate that projects like hope six and the way that hope six has been used to eliminate racially concentrated areas of poverty but just by displacing those folks to other areas and creating new areas of racially concentrated poverty elsewhere right so that's the kind of dynamic that the map ultimately that's where that comes from obviously didn't get into all of that in the talk but right it always starts from something some existing representation really and saying how can we look at it differently yeah i'd like to give you a response that's who like I was thinking about this morning professor Hudson introduced us in the that first session and mentioned William Mitchell at MIT so he's was the author late author of the book city of bits which I've been thinking about actually a lot lately you know Mitchell's vision was that architects and planners were going to shape this internet world this digital world the city of bits and actually he was wrong architects and planners have been totally uninvolved in shaping this this virtual world that that we all inhabit on our phones and our computers we're barely involved at all and and I think it's a it's a tragedy and and I think that when we think about the community engagement challenges that I spoke about that that's that's an opportunity you know so it's a place for us to reassert some authority the fact is that the internet is is this lawless anarchy realm and that there's there's very little control there's very little regulation in the way that the real world is this highly regulated place you can't cross the street without there's some sort of regulation governing how you act online it's not true so online you can do whatever you want really and and it's it's not okay and I and actually I wrote about this I did an op-ed recently about hate speech and I think we can do a lot more because a lot of the hate that festers online then gets translated into actual real violence and so in terms of community engagement and planning and design I think it's the same thing that the stuff I'm doing with Urbanist Uma that's about trying to understand how these bots are operating how these nefarious actors are going about their business if we can understand if we can as skilled designers and planners we can detect what's happening then we can shut it down and then we can create processes that are just and open and fair I'm not sure if I'm answering this question but I but I I think it adds to the overall conversation and maybe a follow-up to my previous comment first I just want to say I'm so interested in learning more about these bots because Urbanist Twitter is already bizarre enough but I'll just add too as reporters as journalists it is our job I mean you know while CityLab you know has certainly given a platform for voices that are critical you know of certain data gathering projects happening in cities you know our reporting work you know is really meant to come from as fair a place as possible right and from a place of inquiry into you know why and sort of what is happening rather than coming from a place of sort of ideology about about or even you know sort of academic framework for thinking about this stuff although I find these ideas fascinating and maybe some creep in so you know we're just as interested in in what the people you know and the entities that are doing some of this work that we've explored today you know think about it and and this the choices that they're making right and and why they think it's a good thing in addition to you know the elements of their of their work that that are concerning or or have a very you know provable bad outcomes so well thanks for no it's a the specter paranoia maybe still still here do we have time for questions from the audience what I thought fascinating was the fact that we have given been given presentations but there has been no downsides that we have been advised about in other words as in the marketplace there should be truth in lending and if we are presenting stuff that has implications for negative I think we as consumers need to be advised about that I agree I mean yeah many many instances of mapping these very same issues I think are counterproductive and that's where I mean I can't get into all of the reasons why in the context of the presentation format and stuff but I think it's certainly fair to say that many if not maybe most things are actually counterproductive in terms of how we use data in some of these ways so how can we do it differently is the question I'm trying to answer maybe you can't but what would be the driving purpose and hypothesis behind this map well again as I explained my instruction this is a tool for planners and designers to understand what's going on in a place and using the technology that's available through the machine learning and using the data that's available through Google Street View and I would certainly not expect it to be the sole data source that a planner might use in making any important analysis of recommendation but it certainly can give you some really interesting insight I have to say that I am simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the we've moved from speaking to people to listening to people great synthesis I mean it assumes first of all that we didn't listen to people before I mean maybe it was imperfect but we did listen to people but I want to challenge the assumption embedded in that in that the way we used to do it didn't scale and that we must scale yeah no I agree I think that makes sense yeah so there's no reason that we should stop listening to people but you're right the history of Sherry Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation and I mean it's it's a dark dark history of listening to people of ignoring them placating them and so if we can do a better job of understanding what they care about without pretending to listening to them that seems pretty powerful in a good way the 2020 election I mean the census is coming up next year and have you looked at the impact of technology and gerrymandering especially Taylor because 2021 is when Republican states would be restricting especially urban areas and there's a fear that because of the Supreme Court decision that urban areas would be losing representation have you looked at the weird maps that they be making I haven't done anything you know kind of specifically investigating gerrymandering a number of people that know much more kind of about those particularities do but I mean I think it's just a and to take your point and make it just a little bit more abstract is that gerrymandering and the entire way that our electoral system is based around very particularly drawn spatial units as a one way of obfuscating kind of the underlying realities of things right if you shifted state boundaries for three counties in the United States in 2016 you would have had a different electoral outcome for the presidential race right because of suburban areas in Chicago Philadelphia and what Milwaukee maybe or something so yeah I can't speak to it anymore but you're right that that's a kind of key issue and one of the places that maps are being used incredibly nefariously and have been for quite some time now yeah we at City Lab and through the newsletter that I was featuring had it in my earlier slide deck it's definitely been one of the you know ongoing the biggest mappy news stories of the last couple of years and so we've pretty closely followed you know each state level court battle and of course the recent Supreme US Supreme Court decision around gerrymandering and as well as looking into what you know the possible implications could be for the upcoming elections and into the future and of where the battlegrounds are now as well as you know profiles of people who've been involved in those like legal fights and map makers coming up with potentially better less biased ways of drawing election maps and I would add too that we've also been covering this is more my colleague Kristen Capps covering the ongoing question around the census next year when you talk about you know the data that goes into policy you know policymaking and and critical federal funding decisions you know what it means that there's been this ongoing question hovering around citizenship for the 2020 census and even if it's not going to be on it right it seems like there could be damage that's already done in terms of people showing up and responding to those surveyors and what that you know says about population counts and representation in that sense so so one comment and one question and this could lead into the afternoon as well I think maybe what was being raised earlier is this question of I mean I'm excited about machine learning and computer vision but in that paper from MIT they trained it on MIT students how they read the environment of where it's safe and you could just see the class positions of how to read the environment right so we want to think again about the algorithmic justice issues I think but I guess my question is for Laura I think we're all talking about how to engage socially with maps and data maps and I'm curious about the role of journalism and media and you must think a lot about who is your readership and you know the public disc the role that public discourse plays in how our societies and politics move so who who reads that you have and which is it people like us only or are we reaching other populations as well do you think and you said the main issues they're interested in our surveillance and representation and I wonder if you could talk a little bit more what are they interested in about those issues yeah what's your data on your readership Laura I am not at liberty to share extremely discreet data on our readership but first of all I'll just suggest the last thing you said so it's surveillance and representation so that was kind of a two things that I was identifying and like my maps maps related coverage so our coverage is much broader than that we write about cities and kind of urban policy and politics writ large for a few million readers a month predominantly in the United States and also other many other places around the world like we're part of the Atlantic magazine so we share that sort of national focus and kind of like what's the big idea here sort of slant who reads us certainly we have a lot of passionate urban planners and city officials and sort of policymakers working at the local level and state level and federal level reading our work because a lot of it is about policy and the sort of outcomes and sort of processes of working it out and then you know a wider sort of concentric circle around outside of that of people who are just fascinated by cities and care about the places they live and might be you know working in their communities in some other way and then that's like our core readership and then you know certainly we have we have a fair amount of reach and certain stories like certainly do break out of that kind of two first rings so to speak and reaches I mean anybody on the internet you know I mean we've we've had stories that you know touch on super wonky like what you know were maybe previously more like niche urban planning you know issues like a story on you know why the United States abandoned public transit and this was just just like brilliantly argued you know peace with great visual accompaniments by a freelancer that had this like he was actually Columbia PhD and the story of transportation that just really laid it out and that really broke through to actually a much wider range of just general readers so check us out great thank you again thank you all