AAG 2015 – day 4 notes – Citizen Science & OpenStreetMap Studies
The last day of AAG 2015 is about citizen science and OpenStreetMap studies.
The session Beyond motivation? Understanding enthusiasm in citizen science and volunteered geographic information was organised together with Hilary Geoghegan. We were interest to ‘explore and debate current research and practice moving beyond motivation, to consider the associated enthusiasm, materials and meanings of participating in citizen science and VGI.’
As Hilary couldn’t attend the conference, we started the session with a discussion about experiences of enthusiasm – for example, my own experience with IBM World Community Grid. Jeroen Verplanke raised the addiction in volunteer thinking projects, such as logging in to Zooniverse or Tomnod project, and time fly-by. Mairead de Roiste described mapping wood-pigeon in New Zealand – public got involved because they wanted to help, but when they hear that the data wasn’t use, they might lose interest. Urgency can also be a form influencing participation.
Britta Ricker – University of Washington Tacoma – Look what I can do! Harnessing drone enthusiasm for increased motivation to participate. On-going research. Looking at the Geoweb – it allow people to access information, and made imagery available to the public, and the data is at the whim of whoever give us the data. With drones, we can send them up when we want or need to. Citizen Science is deeply related to geoweb – challenge is to get people involve and make them stay involved. We can harness drone enthusiasm – they evoke negative connotation but also thinking about them for good – humanitarian applications. Evidence for the enthusiasm is provided by YouTube where there are plenty of drone video – 3.44M – lots of action photography: surfing community and GoPro development. People are attached to the drone – jumping to the water to save them. So how the enthusiasm to drones can be harnessed to help participatory mapping. We need to design a workflow around stages: pre-flight, flight, post processing. She partnered with water scientists to explore local issues. There are considerations of costs and popularity – and selected quadcopter for that. DJI Phantom Vision 2+. With drones need to read the manual and plan the flight. There are legal issues of where it is OK to fly, and Esri & MapBox provide information on where you can fly them. Need to think of camera angle – need also to correct fisheye, and then process the images. Stitch imagery can be done manually (MapKnitter/QGIS/ArcGIS). Possible to do it in automated software, but open source (e.g. OpenDroneMap) is not yet good enough in terms of ease of use. Software such as Pix4D is useful but expensive. Working with raster data is difficult, drones require practice, and software/hardware is epensive – not yet ready to everyone. NGOs can start using it. Idea: sharing photos , classifying images together by volunteers.
Brittany Davis – Allegheny College – Motivated to Kill: Lionfish Derbies, Scuba Divers, and Citizen Science. Lionfish are stunning under water – challenging to differentiate between the two sub species but it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to catch them. They are invasive species and are without predators, exploded – especially from 2010. There is a lot of informational campaign and encouraging people to hunt them, especially in dive centres – telling people that it is a way to save a Caribbean reefs. When people transform themselves from ‘benign environmental activity’ to ‘you tell me that I can hunt? cool!’. Lionfish is tasty so having the meat for dinner is a motivation. Then doing ‘lionfish derbies’ – how many can you kill in a day. Seen a lot of enthusiasm for lionfish derbies. Trying to sign up people to where they go but they are not recording where they hunt the lionfish. People go to another site for competition as they want to capture more. REEF trying to encourage a protocol for capturing them, and there are cash prizes for the hunting. They use the catch to encourage people to hunt lionfish. Derbies increase in size – 14832 were removed from 2009 to 2014 and some evidence for the success of the methodology. There was a pressure on ‘safely and humanely capture and euthanase these fish’ – challenge for PADI who run special scuba courses that are linked to conservation. People hear about the hunting and that motivate people to go diving. There is a very specific process of REEF sanctioned lionfish derby, so trying to include recording and public information. But there are challenges below the depth of recreational divers. She also explored if it is possible to improve data collection for scientists.
Cheryl Gilge – University of Washington – The rhetorical flourish of citizen participation (or, the formation of cultural fascism?) offered a theoretical analysis of citizen science and web 2.0 as part of a wider project to understand labour relationships and power. She argues that there is agency to the average citizen to link to their environment. They have the ability to contribute, and to receive information is part of Web 2.0. As a technology layer, it changes both the individual and society levels. The collaboration and participation in Web 2.0 is framed around entrepreneurialism, efficiencies, and innovation. The web is offering many opportunities to help wider projects, where amateur and expert knowledge are both valued. However, there is a risk of reducing the politics of participation – semblance of agency. Democratic potential – but also co-opting the spirit is in evidence. There is plenty of examples of inducing individuals to contribute data and information, researchers are eager to understand motivation over a long period. Rational system to explain what is going on can’t explain the competing goals and values that are in action. The desire to participation is spread – fun, boredom etc. From understanding people as ‘snowflakes’ to unashamed exploitation. Why do people contribute to the wider agenda? As provocation, harnessing crowd potential to neoliberalisation agenda of universities. We give freedom to the efficiency and promise of digital tools. Government promise ‘open government’ or ‘smart cities’ that put efficiency as the top value. Deep libertarian desire for small government is expressed through technology. The government have sensors that reduce cost of monitoring what is happening. In the academic environment – reduce funding, hiring freeze, increase in pressure to publish – an assumption that it is possible to mechanically produce top research. Trading in ideas are less valued. Desire for capacity of information processing, or dealing with humanitarian efforts – projects like Galaxy Zoo require more people to analyse the masses of data that research produces, or mapathons to deal with emergencies. Participants are induced to do more through commitment to the project and harnessing enthusiasm. Adding inducement to the participants. She introduce the concept of micro-fascism from Guattari – taking over freedoms in the hope of future promises. It enable large group formation to happen – e.g. identities such as I’m Mac/PC – it is harder to disconnect. Fascism can be defined as an ideology that rely on the masses in believing in the larger goals, the unquestioned authority of data in Web 2.0. Belief in technology induce researchers to get data and participation regardless of the costs. Open source is presented as democracy, but there are also similarities with fascism. Participation in the movement and participants must continue to perform. It bring uncomfortable participation – putting hope on these activities, but also happens in top down and bottom up, and Web 2.0. What is the ethical role of researchers who are involved in these projects? How do we value this labour? Need to admit that it is a political.
In a final comment, Teresa Scassa pointed that we need to consider the implication of legitimising drones, killing fish or employing unpaid labour – underlying all is a moral discomfort.
Afternoon, the two sessions on OpenStreetMap that Alan McConchie and I organised, taking the 10th birthday of OSM as a starting point, this session will survey the state of geographical research on OpenStreetMap and recognising that OSM studies are different from VGI. The session is supported by the European COST Energic (COST Action IC1203) network: European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing.
Jennings Anderson, Robert Soden, Mikel Maron, Marina Kogan & Ken Anderson – University of Colorado, Boulder – The Social Life of OpenStreetMap: What Can We Know from the Data? New Tools and Approaches. OSM provides a platform to understand human centred computing. The is very valuable information in OSM history file, and they built a framework (EPIC OSM) that can run spatial and temporal queries and produces JSON output that can be then analysed. They are use existing tools and software frameworks to deliver it. The framework was demonstrated: can ask questions by day, or by month and even bin them by week and other ways. Running such questions which are evaluated by Ruby, so easy to add more questions and change them. They already use the framework in a paper in CHI about the Haiti earthquake (see video below). Once they’ve created the underlying framework, they also developed an interface – OSM Markdown – can embed code and see changesets, accumulative nodes collected and classification by type of user. They are also providing information with tags. When analysing Haiti response, they see spike in noted added and what they see in buildings – the tags of collapse=yes
Christian Bittner – Diverse crowds, diverse VGI? Comparing OSM and Wikimapia in Jerusalem. Christian looked at differences in Wikimapia and OSM as sources of VGI. Especially interested in the social implications such as the way exclusion plays in VGI – challenges between Palestine/Israel – too contradicting stories that play out in a contested space, and there are conflict and fights over narratives that the two sides enact in different areas. With new tools, there is a ‘promise’ of democratisation – so a narrative of collaboration and participation. In crowdsourced geographic information we can ask: who is the crowd, and who is not? Studying social bias in OSM is a topic that is being discussed in the literature. The process is to look at the database of OSM. Analysing the data and metadata and used the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. Simplified representation of the city, and region are classified by majority – Arab or Jewish. Then used cartograpms according to size of population and the amount of information collected.In OSM, Jewish areas are over-represented, while Arab areas are under-represented. Bias toward male from privileged socio-economic background as participants. In Wikimapia, the process is tagging places and uses visual information from Google. Wikimapia is about qualitative information so objects are messy and overlap, with no definitions of what consist of a place. In Wikimapia, there is much more descriptions of the Arab areas which are over-represented. The amount of information in Wikimpaia is smaller – 2679 objects, compared to 33,411 ways in OSM. In OSM there is little Arabic, and more Hebrew, though Latin is the most used language. Wikimapia is the other way around, with Hebrew in the minority. The crowd is different between projects. There are wider implications – diverse crowd so diverse VGI? VGI is diverse form of data, and they are produced in different ways from different knowledge cultures. He call for very specific studies on each community before claiming that VGI is general form of information.
Tim Elrick & Georg Glasze – University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany – A changing mapping practices? Representation of Places of Worship in OpenStreetMap and other sources. The start of the process is noticing that churches are presented on official maps, but not a masques, noticing how maps are used to produce specific narratives. What happen in new forms of mapping? In Google Maps, the masque is presented, but not the church, in OSM both are mapped. What is happening? In the old topographic maps, the official NMAs argue that it provides a precise representation – but failing to do so in terms of religious differences. Some state do not include non-Christian places of worship – the federal mapping agency came with symbols for such places (masques, synagogues) but the preference from the states NMAs was for a generic mark for all non-Christian places that do not differentiate between religions. USGS just have single mark for house of worship – with cross. The USGS suggested to carry out crowdsourcing to identify places of worship so they are willing to change. In OSM there are free tagging and marks for religion, but the rendering dictate only some tags. In 2007 there was suggestion to change rendering of non-Christian places. Once Steve Chilton created cartographic symbols for the change. OSM do-ocracy can lead to change, but in other places that use OSM this was not accepted – there are different symbols in OpenCycleMaps. In Germany, there are conflicts about non visible places of worship (e.g. Masque in social club). Adaptive approach to dealing with location in OSM. In Google there is a whole set of data sources that are used, but also crowdsourcing which go to moderators in Google – no accountability or local knolwedge. Places of worship is not transparent. Categorisation and presentation change with new actors – corporate and open data. Google use economy of attention.
Alan McConchie – University of British Columbia – Map Gardening in Practice: Tracing Patterns of Growth and Maintenance in OpenStreetMap. Looking at history of OSM. Editing existing features is an important as adding new ones – having to collaborate and dealing with other people data. In the US, OSM is a mixed of volunteer and imported data – it’s ongoing aspect of the project. Questions: do the ‘explorers’ stick around? the people who like empty spaces . Do imports hinder the growth of the community? and does activity shift to ‘gardening’? The TIGER import in 2007 have been significant to the growth of the project. There are also many other imports – address in Denmark, French land cover, incomplete land cover imports in Canada. There was community backlash from people who were concerned about the impact of imports (e.g. Crowe 2011; Fredrik Ramm, 2012, Tobias Knerr, 2015). The debate is also between different regional factions. There is an assumption that only empty areas are exciting. That is problematic in terms of someone joining now in Germany. New best practices that are evolving Imports in Seattle were used to encourage the community and build it. Zielstra et al. 2013 explored imports show different growths, but not so simple as just to pin it on imports. Alan takes the ‘Wiki Gardening’ concept – people who like to keep things tidy and well maintained. Analysing small areas. Identifying blank spots, but trying to normalise across city in the world – e.g. population from the gridded population of the world. Exploring edits per month. We see many imports happening all the time. At individual city, explore the behaviour of explorers and those that never mapped the unknown. In London, new mappers are coming in while at Vancouver the original mapper are the one that continue to maintain the map. There is power law effects that trump anything else, and shift to new contributors and it is not clear cut.
Monica G. Stephens – University at Buffalo – Discussant: she started looking at OSM only few years ago, because of a statement from Mike Goodchild that women are not included, so done survey of internet users in Google Maps and OSM. She found that geotagging is much more male – more then just sharing image. In her survey she noticed gender bias in OSM. Maps are biased by the norms, traditions, assumptions and politics of map maker (Harley 1989). Biases – but biases of map maker – bikes in Denver (what interest them), or uneven representation of Hebrew in Jerusalem, or Religious attributes. Also there is how the community makes decision – how to display information? what to import? There are issues of ethos – there are fundamental differences in UK and Germany communities to US mapping communities. This lead to interesting conversations between these communities. There are also comparison, Wikimapia, Google Maps, Topo Maps – the tell us what OSM is doing. OSM democracy is more efficient and responding to communities ideas. The discussions on tagging childcare – rejected but there are discussions that led to remapping of tags in response to the critique. Compare to Google Maps, who was creating local knowledge? in Google Maps 96% of reviewers are male (in Google Map Maker 2012), so the question is who is the authority that govern Wikimapia.
OpenStreetMap Studies 2 included the following:
Martin Loidl – Department of Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg – An intrinsic approach for the detection and correction of attributive inconsistencies and semantic heterogeneity in OSM data. Martin come from data modelling perspective, accepting that OSM is based on bottom-up approach, with flat data modelling and attributes, with no restriction on tag usage. There are attributive inconsistencies. Semantics heterogeneity is influencing visualisation, statistics and spatial analysis. Suggesting to improve results by harmonization and correction through estimation. There has been many comparison of OSM quality over the years. There is little work on attribute information. Martin suggested an intrinsic approach that rely on the data in OSM – expecting major roads to be connected and consistent. Showing how you can attributes in completeness. Most of the road in OSM are local roads and and there is high heterogeneity, but we need them and we should care about them. There are issues with keeping the freedom to tag – it expose the complexity of OSM.
Peter A. Johnson – University of Waterloo Challenges and Constraints to Municipal Government Adoption of OpenStreetMap. The collaboration of MapBox with NYC – agreement on data sharing was his starting point and motivation to explore how we can connect government and citizens to share data. Potentially, OSM community will help with official data, improve it and send it back. Just delivering municipal data over OSM base map is not much – maybe we need to look at mirroring – questions about currency, improvement of our services, and cheaper/easier to get are core questions. Evaluating official data and OSM data. Interview with governments in Canada, with range of sizes – easy in large cities, basic steps in medium and little progress in rural places. No official use of OSM, but do make data available to OSM community, and anecdotal evidence of using it for different jobs unofficially. Not seeing benefits in mirroring data, and they are the authoritative source for information, no other data is relevant. Constraints: not sure that OSM is more accurate and risk averse culture. They question fit with organisation needs, lacking required attributes, and they do see costs in altering existing data. OSM might be relevant to rural and small cities where data is not being updated.
Muki Haklay – University College London COST Energic – A European Network for research of VGI: the role of OSM/VGI/Citizen Science definitions. I’ve used some of the concepts that I first presented in SOTM 2011 in Vienna, and extended them to the general area of citizen science and VGI. Arguing that academics need to be ‘critical friends’, in a nice way, to OSM and other communities. The different talks and Monica points about changes in tagging demonstrate that this approach is effective and helpful.
Discussant: Alan McConchie – University of British Columbia. The later session looked at intrinsic or extrinsic analysis of OSM – such as Martin’s work on internal consistency, there are issues of knowing specific person in the bits of the process who can lead to the change. There is a very tiny group of people that make the decisions, but there is a slow opening towards accountability (e.g. OSM rendering style on Github). There are translation of knowledge and representation that happen in different groups and identifying how to make the information correctly. There is a sense of ‘no one got the right answer’. Industry and NGOs also need to act as critical friends – it will make it a better project. There is also critical GIS conversations – is there ‘fork’ within the OSM studies? We can have conversations about these issues.
Follow up questions explored the privacy of the participants and maybe mentioned it to participants and the community, and also the position as participant or someone who alters the data and as a researcher – the implications of participatory observations.
