All Day Symposium: Community Mapping and Civic Data (with Keynote by Shannon Mattern)

This event has been designed to stimulate thought and conversation about how humanists might approach data and mapping not simply as analytical representations of reality but as cultural products that emerge from relationships of power and, simultaneously, as tools for imagination and storytelling. 

Schedule:

9:00-10:00 Keynote:

Shannon Mattern (The New School): Local Codes: Forms of Spatial Knowledge

How might a city come to know itself through its mediated representations -- through maps and models, data sets and network diagrams? How might communities join forces with public institutions to generate, steward, circulate, and activate those resources? And how might these collaborations help not only to generate protocols for the critical, responsible use of spatial data, but also to shape the design, maintenance, and administration of the spaces they represent and the values those spatial practices embody? In this talk, I'll address these questions though four case studies: (1) the Civic Switchboard project, which aims to connect libraries and community information networks into "civic data ecosystems"; (2) the Office for Creative Research's traveling Maps Rooms, which provide community spaces for collaborative experimental mapping; (3) the San Francisco Public Library and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's joint-Public Knowledge Project, which examines the media through which a rapidly evolving city can come to understand, and potentially redirect, its transformation; and (4) Peta Bencana, and open-source, community-led platform featuring data about floods and water infrastructure in Jakarta.

10:15 - 11:45 Panel Discussion: Speculative Geography

Laurie Allen, Monument Lab

Rasheedah Phillips, Afrofuturist Affair & Black Quantum Futurism

Meegan Denenberg & Grace Shin, A Dream Deferred PHL: Redlining, Past, Present, Future

Noon - 1 Lunch

1:15 - 2:45 Panel Discussion: Data Equity and Access

Patricia Kim, Data Refuge

Luna Sarti & Martin Premoli, Schuylkill River and Urban Waters Research Corps

Krista Heinlen, STEW-MAP: The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project

3:00 - 5:00pm Hands on Activity: Philadelphia Maproom

Inspired by the St. Louis Maproom, participants will create maps that illustrate how subjective experience of place intersects, challenges and is influenced by historical and environmental processes.

All events will take place in Arch 108 except the final Hands-on Activity: Philadelphia Maproom which will be held in the Weigle Information Commons in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided and coffee/tea will be available throughout the day. The full symposium is free and open to the public.