Advancements in technology over the last two decades have changed how spatial data are created and used. In particular, in the last decade, volunteered geographic information (VGI), i.e., the crowdsourcing of geographic information, has revolutionized the spatial domain by shifting the map-making process from the hands of experts to those of any willing contributor. Started in 2004, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the pinnacle of VGI due to the large number of volunteers involved and the volume of spatial data generated. While the original objective of OSM was to create a free map of the world, its uses have shown how the potential of such an initiative goes well beyond map-making: ranging from projects such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) project, that understands itself as a bridge between the OSM community and humanitarian responders, to collaborative projects such as Mapillary, where citizens take street-level images and the system aims to automate mapping. A common trend among these projects using OSM is the fact that the community dynamic tends to create spin-off projects. Currently, we see a drive towards projects that support sustainability goals using OSM. We discuss some such applications and highlight challenges posed by this new paradigm. We also explore the most promising future uses of this increasingly popular participatory phenomenon.

Following emancipation from foster care, youth often transition into adulthood without the support of family or school. For some emancipated emerging adults (EEAs), alternative support may come from informal educational programs like makerspaces—safe spaces to learn, explore identities, build relationships, and become entrepreneurs. This exploratory study uses Lave and Wenger’s concept of legitimate peripheral participation as a lens to for analyzing the diverse relationships of three EEAs (ages 20, 22, and 25) to the maker community of practice, as they live in a transitional housing facility and engage with its on-site makerspace and its affiliated museum.

This report focuses on the growing interest in the relationship between maps, narratives and metanarratives. Following a brief historical contextualization of these relationships, this report explores their current state in the Geoweb era. Using the distinction between story maps and grid maps as an analytical framework, I review emerging issues around the extensive use of technologies and online mapping services (i.e. Google maps) to convey stories and to produce new ones. Drawing on literature in film studies, literary studies, visual arts, computer science and communication, I also emphasize the emergence of new forms of spatial expressions interested in providing different perspectives about places and about stories associated to places. In sum, I argue that mapping both vernacular knowledge and fiction is central to understanding places in depth.

This paper considers the emerging phenomenon of crowdsourced cartography in relation to ideas about the organisation of contemporary knowledge production in capitalist societies. Taking a philosophical perspective that views mapping as a processual, creative, productive act, constructed through citational, embodied, and contextual experiences, we examine how we might profitably analyse collaborative crowdsourced projects like OpenStreetMap to better understand geographic knowledge production in a shifting political economy and sociotechnical landscape. We begin by characterising crowdsourcing practices in the wider context of Web 2.0, which some commentators assert is rapidly becoming a new, dominant mode of knowledge production. We then contextualise Web 2.0 knowledge production, drawing upon the ideas of sociologist George Ritzer, and his notion of ‘prosumption’, geographer Michael Goodchild's idea of volunteerist ‘citizen scientists’, and economic commentator Nicholas Carr's critique of the ‘ignorance of crowds’. We then go on to discuss the changing nature of cartography in the Web 2.0 era with respect to authorship, ontology, representation, and temporality.

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning of applications of GIS which grant legitimacy to indigenous geographical knowledge as well as to `official' spatial data. By incorporating various forms of community participation these newer framings of Geographical Information Systems as `Participatory GIS' (PGIS) offer a response to the critiques of GIS which were prevalent in the 1990s. This paper reviews PGIS in the context of the `democratization of GIS'. It explores aspects of the control and ownership of geographical information, representations of local and indigenous knowledge, scale and scaling up, web-based approaches and some potential future technical and academic directions.

When various media in their entirety mark how we articulate our social worlds, we need an approach of mediatization research that reflects this transmediality. To develop such an approach, the article first discusses the ‘institutionalist’ and ‘social-constructivist’ traditions of mediatization research. Both traditions concur in their understanding of mediatization as being a concept to capture the interrelation between the change of media and communication on the one hand, and the change of culture and society on the other hand. Taking this as a foundation it becomes possible to reflect on the role of certain media as ‘moulding forces’, i.e. as certain institutionalizations and reifications of communication. Such a conceptual reflection offers the chance to view the mediatization process as the change of transmedial communicative figurations by which we construct our mediatized worlds. Based on this theoretical foundation, the article subsequently reflects a twofold operationalization, i.e. as diachronous and synchronous mediatization research.

The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially ‘‘mapping for the masses,’’ while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication.

In contrast to recent sociological emphases on the social shaping of technology, this article proposes and illustrates a way of analysing the technological shaping of sociality. Drawing on the concept of affordances (Gibson 1979), the article argues for a recognition of the constraining, as well as enabling, materiality of artefacts. The argument is set in the theoretical context of one of the most recent and comprehensive statements of anti-essentialism (Grint and Woolgar 1997). The position is illustrated through a reinterpretation of some case studies used by proponents of the radical constructivist position.

This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalogue of ever proliferating but discrete technologies. As a consequence, with polymedia the primary concern shifts from the constraints imposed by each individual medium to an emphasis upon the social, emotional and moral consequences of choosing between those different media. As the choice of medium acquires communicative intent, navigating the environment of polymedia becomes inextricably linked to the ways in which interpersonal relationships are experienced and managed. Polymedia is ultimately about a new relationship between the social and the technological, rather than merely a shift in the technology itself.

A variety of maps depict a usefully approximate but inexact network of roads, rails, sea lanes and other infrastructures to represent something called China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And yet, for a global programme that reflects and advances Beijing's new position as a leader of international development, BRI maps remain largely imprecise and unofficial. Taking this as a starting point of critical cartography, I ask why BRI development throughout the Tibet-Himalaya region remains conspicuously blank on most maps, and what work is accomplished by such cartographic silences. In contrast to this apparent invisibility, however, the BRI is very much present in Nepal - discursively, materially and cartographically. Chinese development programmes are widely anticipated, embraced and promoted as grand and spectacular things throughout Nepal. Following this friction of representation in the case of Chinese development in Nepal, I argue that the apparent paradox between the BRI as invisible thing and BRI as promised future reveals the manifold ways in which infrastructures articulate politics and, vice-versa, how politics articulate infrastructures.

GIS eased into geography without much discord until the 1990s, when a flurry of commentaries about the relative merits of GIS made their way into a number of geographic journals. The ensuing decade was marked by varying degrees of friction between GIS practitioners and their critics in human geography. Despite the methodological chasm between the two groups, little discussion of the implications of these differences has ensued. This article fills that gap with a historiographic examination of critiques of GIS. Critiques of GIS are organized into three waves or periods, each characterized by distinct arguments. The first wave, from 1990 to 1994, was marked by the intensity of debate as well as an emphasis on positivism. By 1995, the conversation waned as the number of critics grew, while GIS practitioners increasingly declined comment. This second wave marked the initiation of a greater degree of co-operation between GIS scholars and their critics, however. With the inception of the National Center for Geographic Information Analysis (NCGIA) Initiative 19, intended to study the social effects of GIS, many critics began to work closely with their peers in GIS. In the third wave, critiques of GIS expressed a greater commitment to the technology. Throughout the decade, debates about the technology shifted from simple attacks on positivism to incorporating more subtle analyses of the effects of the technology. These critiques have had considerable effect on the academic GIS community but are presently constrained by limited communication with GIS practitioners because of the absence of a common vocabulary. I argue that, if critiques of GIS are to be effective, they must find a way to address GIS researchers, using the language and conceptual framework of the discipline.

Information systems researchers have shown an increasing interest in the notion of sociomateriality. In this paper, we continue this exploration by focusing specifically on entanglement: the inseparability of meaning and matter. Our particular approach is differentiated by its grounding in a relational and performative ontology, and its use of agential realism. We explore some of the key ideas of entanglement through a comparison of two phenomena in the travel sector: an institutionalized accreditation scheme offered by the AA and an online social media website hosted by TripAdvisor. Our analysis centers on the production of anonymity in these two practices of hotel evaluation. By examining how anonymity is constituted through an entanglement of matter and meaning, we challenge the predominantly social treatments of anonymity to date and draw attention to the uncertainties and outcomes generated by specific performances of anonymity in practice. In closing, we consider what the particular agential realist concept of entanglement entails for understanding anonymity, and discuss its implications for research practice.

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