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"MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. Collecting information about people, places, events, and notes, can help to document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based Hubs. The project is in development.
"MapHub researches the introduction of a geographic and historical data sharing application in an urban landscape. MapHub is a peoples’ map - a map of an urban geography determined not by traditional methodology but instead by the members who participate and contribute everyday in the experience of urban life. MapHub is both a tool and a platform that gives users pen and paper to record their unique and situated perspectives and then deliver that documentation to others.
"The web-based software facilitates individual spatial and temporal narratives managed and distributed through a simple social network. Based on a Geographic Information System (GIS) backend built on open source packages, MapHub manages data as visual symbolic objects specific to Hubs organized thematically. Aside from having a personal Hub based on immediate to distant social or participant networks, alternative Hubs based on themes such as health code violations, past job experiences, safe biking routes, or corporate violations of local regulations are possible. These thematic Hubs will help to promote alternative and peripheral knowledge of the cultural, historical, and current urban geographical landscape of localized spaces."
MapHub grew out of conversations between the Carbon Defense League (CDL), a self-described media arts and engineering practice and writing collective, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). IAA appears to be dormant, but their mission was/is "to study the forces and structures which effect self-determination; to create cultural artifacts which address these forces; and to develop technologies which serve social and human needs." IAA's last documented project was a van which could print messages on the pavement that would then be visible from tall buildings and low-flying airplanes; sort of like skywriting in reverse.
Posted by Chris Hodge at May 25, 2004 03:21 PM | Links to this post