Boundaries of Home: 12/27/10

Boundaries of Home by Doug Aberley was another of my GIS research books. It came up when I was reading about public participation GIS, a term coined by the author actually five years after the book was published.

As the book was written before GIS became widely available for public consumption through DGI (distributed geographic information), Aberley seems down on maps. He describes them as something for mass consumerism and not something that's taken seriously by the public. In the introduction he describes how the public has lost all context of where they live beyond being a small dot on a fold-out map.

The book goes on to explain how small community groups and individuals can create personal maps either by drawing maps based on walks through the neighborhood and surrounds or by augmenting professionally made maps (like the USGS quadrangles).

The USGS quadrangle suggestion was something that struck home with me. Back when we were still living on the peninsula we bought the map of our area (the northern half of San Mateo County) and marked with pins. We still have the map (minus the pins) in our downstairs hall way, and it was one of the things I referred to when the San Bruno neighborhood was on fire after the PGE pipeline explosion.

Now though, there is a faster, more immediate way to custom map one's neighborhood, Google Maps. As the book predates Google Maps by twelve years, I found the frustration over map access, especially for cooperative mapping, interesting in its historical context.

Comments (2)

Comment #1: Tuesday, December, 28, 2010 at 10:44:12

Regulo Zapata

Thanks for sharing your comments and stopping by at Desperate Lands. Thanks for the nice comments! I Look forward to Following your review Blogs!

Comment #2: Monday, January 3, 2010 at 21:35:04

Pussreboots

Thank you for stopping by.