“Mapping-with”: The Politics of (Counter-)classification in OpenStreetMap

Abstract

In this paper I consider how debates in critical cartography about the classificatory and calculative logics of the map might be renegotiated through the concepts of “making-kin,” “sympoesis,” and the chthonic. Between Haraway’s (2014) Staying With The Trouble and Foucault’s (2002) writings on mathesis and taxinomia in The Order of Things, I argue that a more situated understanding of mapping—as an entanglement between people, tools, landscapes, cultures—might realise a more open, and more attentive, way of mapping. I return to the popular case study, OpenStreetMap, to excavate how the use and misuse of taxonomic and mathematical logics through its collaborative and amateur affordabilities shed light on different ways of sorting-with the world. I argue that, in the unexpected emergence of proposed classifications (and despite the disciplining power of cartographic discourses), roots of a new and more inclusive cartography linger in the archive, waiting to be fertilsed.

Autonomous Political Economies: winemakers, national heritage, and the ethnographic mapping of geopolitics in the Republic of Georgia

“…wine production" (Wilmott, 2019). This approach emulates geopolitics in the political-economic sphere by considering how winemakers express their geopolitical views.…”

From Making Automated Decision Making Visible to Mapping the Unknowable Human: Counter-Mapping Automated Decision Making in Social Services in Australia

“…Subsequent examples of counter-mapping, using participatory or grass roots approaches to mapping, include studies in Australia (Thomas and Ross, 2018), Canada (Barbosa & Burns, 2021), the United Kingdom (Firth, 2014), and the United States (Campos-Delgado, 2018). Many counter-mapping exercises use participatory methods, “mapping with” (Wilmott, 2019), rather than mapping on or over, whether this is reporting on grassroots mapping activism, or reporting on the researchers’ participation in this process. The maps become a vehicle for animating alternative voices and alternative claims over space, culture, and history, with maps not necessarily being drawn on paper, but also narrative, vocal, and sung.…”

Surfacing Algorithms: An Inventive Method for Accountability

“…adjustments to, appropriations, or manipulations of design products and processes [here, the tax letter] to accommodate purposes beyond the common, often historically and professionally constrained, purposes of design. (di Salvo, 2009, p. 52) Therefore, these design tactics are well grouped with the counter-mappings of datafied artifacts (e.g., Didier et al, 2014;Wilmott, 2019) and the reverse-engineering of algorithms (e.g., Koliska & Diakopoulos, 2018). To be more precise, our experiments should not be seen as technological reverse-engineering but the mapping of social, arithmetic, and institutional dimensions of algorithms, in this sense, we performed what Brett Neilson has called "the reverse of engineering": recovering the joint work of social activities, policy values and forms of organized life subjected to processes of algorithmization as well as accounting for the qualitative excess of practices underpinning the work of computation and automation (Neilson, 2020).…”