Notes from meeting on 10/4

At the meeting on Sat. for the Disorientation Guide project, we had low attendance but a great discussion.  The next meeting will be this Saturday, 10/11, 12:30-2pm, in the same room (Blegen 115).  

We talked about some cool maps (see the UNC Disorientation Guide, a Sound Map of NYC , and Strange Maps), and we went through a short online lecture – “maps and human understanding”.

Then, we brainstormed about possible projects.  In our first attempt at this class over the summer, we had lots of great ideas but we had trouble focusing them into a doable project.  So, this time, we’re going to try to pick something doable, at least for a start.  In our brainstorming this time, we suggested lots of good ideas, and hopefully next time, we’ll pick a certain mapping project and start working on it.  

Here are some of our ideas:

– our intended audience is mainly students at the U and Macalester 

– mapping the areas around the U of M and Macalester for demographics, corporate chains, history of gentrification, alternative/progressive locations that students don’t usually know about

– thinking about mapping the body as a type of space (e.g., clothing, tattoos, how we present ourselves)

– green spaces on the campuses and in surrounding areas

– separateness of the campus from the surrounding communities – strictness of access to campus facilities (gym, library, buildings, etc.) – can connect this with issue of educational access (e.g., w/ statistics from high schools, w/ history of access struggles) – (possibly could theorize this with ideas of the “enclosure of the educational commons”)

…

If you have more ideas, please post them as comments here. (You can also see the older blog posts for the many ideas from earlier in the summer.)

I hope you can make it to the next meeting this Saturday.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

First Meeting of the Fall Semester

We’ll have the first meeting of the class, Disorientation Guide: Radical Mapping of Twin Cities Schools, on this Saturday (10/4), 12:30-2pm, in Blegen Hall, room #115 (on the west bank of the U of M campus – see map here: http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/maps/BlegH/index.html).

At the first meeting, we will: 1) introduce ourselves, 2) look at some examples of cool maps and disorientation guides (feel free to bring any that you have!), 3) talk about some theories of critical cartography (for this, you could read Wood’s “maps work by serving interests” which I posted here – https://disorientumn.wordpress.com/readings/), 4) brainstorm about what maps and dis-guide we could make, and 5) make plans for future meetings. 

Please let me know if you any questions or suggestions. Feel free to add comments on this page.   I’m looking forward to doing this project with you!  See you Saturday!  

NASCARization of the U

Due to most of us being out of town or otherwise unable to make the meeting today, we canceled it.  Our next meeting will be this Sunday, 3-5pm, in Wilson Library basement (at the long table in front of the Dunn Bros).  Arnoldas and Eli are going to meet tomorrow and come up with a plan, which we’ll post here soon.

Until then, check out this set of pictures of corporatized spaces that I took today in the new building for the business school (and its ideological appendage – the economics department).  I highly recommend exploring this ultra-branded educational space.  I was astounded by how brazenly they present the corporate logos of the rooms’ “sponsors” (note that there are no brands to represent the tens of millions of dollars of public money that went into the building).  My friends and I talked about ways we could subvert these brands, and we came up with a crazy idea that might complement our disorientation guide:  plastering the building with all of these brands makes it seem like a NASCAR.  We could spoof the corporate branding of the U by having an event where we hold a mock “NASCAR” race around (or inside) of the building (e.g., with bikes dressed up like NASCARs), and make it like a carnival by selling food and having games that get spectators involved in the “race” (maybe also making references to the “rat race” of the corporate world).  Many fruitfully disorienting possibilities here…

Notes from Sat. 6/28 meeting

Our next meeting is Wed. 7/2 from 4-6pm in Blegen 105 (note: room change to 105).

At the Saturday meeting, we talked about the maps that we are focusing on, how to make them and the research we need to do.  We also decided to continue the class passed this week, but to start meeting only once per week, on Sundays from 3-5pm, in the Wilson library basement (at the long table in front of Dunn Bros).  So, this Wednesday will be the last Wednesday meeting.

Here are the notes (please add anything I’ve missed or continue the discussions by commenting below):

• Lesley will be gone (in Russia) for the next three weeks – when she comes back she can help us make the maps with GIS – So, we should try to get the data and info for the maps ready over the next three weeks.
• In our upcoming classes, we’d like to focus on the research, but also leave some time for discussions of the politics of mapping and methodological issues.  Also, we’ll try to have people with mapping experience come in and give presentations.
• Discussion of ideas for mapping:
  • Student debt -> financial aid info could be correlated with home locations – we should talk with the “students for tuition reform” group.  With rising tuition, we could map where the money is going in the university – to show why tuition is going up (map changes in what that tuition goes toward – and also could map where it’s not going (e.g.,  teaching, w/ increases in class sizes and in # of classes taught by grads or contingent faculty)).  – Amit found a chart of “degrees held due to debt” (on umnreports.umn.edu) – they rose a lot in Spring 2008.
  • Michael and Shivaun are: a) working on learning GIS – b) finding thesis paper titles (to do a world map that shows the places that senior thesis or masters and dissertation writers write about).  – c) mapping general info about the Twin Cities (war profiteers, potholes, abandoned homes) – d) mapping underground passageways under the U (with Emily) – e) general info about radical organizations and things to do in the TC
  • Mapping differences and similarities across the many higher education institutions in the Twin Cities area (e.g., tuition differences, but also similarity of rising tuition – access – demographics, etc.)
  • Anders had lots of ideas for the conceptual map: a) playing with the visual metaphor of the U floating in space – an outerspace theme – b) funding flows – seeing how money flows in, around, and out of the U – c) mapping all the corporate chains on campus, but with a black space where each store or corporate-sponsored room is located – d) mapping all the instabilities – strikes, GC – e.g., show them falling off the map – e) the history of branding the U – f) to show different levels of funding for the different parts of the U, we could bloat the buildings in proportion with the amount of funding (or how much % increase in a certain period of time) – to show the different priorities behind the “driven to discover” slogan
• Lesley talked about what we’ll need to do to make the campus map: the shape files of the U of M’s official campus map are made by some cartographic company that they subcontract to – we’ll need to contact them and ask them for the shapes (they should be free) – otherwise, we’ll need to trace the outlines of the buildings from one of the existing maps
• Then we tried to sketch out the basics for three of the maps on the whiteboard: (overarching theme of subverting the “driven to discover” slogan)…

1. Labor map    scale? – how much space for text?
–     Color? – printing?

–       What we need to focus on:

o   Shapes of buildings – via google or GIS

o   Tying data to the map

o   Deciding how much text

o   Figure out which data (professors or grad student or staff salaries)

2. Twin Cities map

–       w/ census data?

–       # of abandoned homes?

–       Building a story -> focusing on a small area (e.g., 3 blocks) – a more embodied map – giving details about particular people –

–       How do we choose spots?  – census as a start – throwing a dart?

3. Flows map (more conceptual)

–       Scale?

–       U isolated or global map?

–       Mapping brands globally that are similar to “driven to discover”

o   Check other languages too

 

Notes from Wed. 6/25 meeting (Next is Sat. 6/28)

We had a very productive meeting today, with lots of map ideas discussed and tasks taken on. Our next meeting is this Saturday, 6/28, 3-5pm, in Blegen 205.  Between now and Saturday, we are going to start working on the following few maps. For those who missed today’s meeting, it would be great if you could take up a task on one of these projects (I’ll list some possible ways to help out, or you can suggest other possible tasks)… 

1. a geospatial map about labor on the U campus
   • a) looking at wage inequalities between different job types (e.g., tenured faculty, adjunct faculty, grad instructors, administrators, unionized staff, part-time workers, student workers) 
   • b) and inequalities within job types (e.g., massive disparities between salaries of economics professors and of philosophy professors) 
   • -> rationale for mapping these: the amount they are paid shows the priorities of the university b/c how much their labor is valued. Also, connections with the “driven to discover” branding (research generally is valued more than teaching, and hence research heavy fields get paid more – and only more profitable types of research – So, we can unmask the ideology of free inquiry implied by “driven to discover.”) (*We had a rich discussion of this, but I didn’t take notes on it… Could somebody add a comment with more explanation of why we want to map this?)
   • Arnoldas and Amit are working on a database for wages (*Amit, can you comment with the link to the web resources you are using for this?)
   • Gus is going to look up dissertations on the Twin Cities and campus to see if anyone has done work on this already that we could use.
   • One task for this map and the rest is to find a base map of the campus (and the neighborhoods) – which we can use for GIS (*Lesley is going to contact someone about this – If anyone else has good ideas, look into it and let us know…) – (*Also, Gus suggested using some open source street maps for the neighborhoods – could you give us a link to those?)
2. “Driven to discover” map – (more conceptual) – a map of the world showing all of the corporations that use a slogan similar to the U’s “driven to discover.” (e.g., Oracle: “Information driven”; Fiat: “Driven by passion”) – Also, we could map some connections between these ad campaign and the corporatization of the university – (E.g., a history of branding at the U (the old slogans “commitment to focus” and “only at the U” – the Goldy Gopher mascot – branding of environmentalism on campus (“green washing”) – connections to corporations – e.g., CocaCola, 3M, Starbucks, D’Amicos, etc.).  (Check out this critique of the slogan: “Why I’m not ‘Driven to Discover'” by English prof., Joel Weinsheimer.)  — Anders and Eli (and Isaac?) are going to work on this map, starting with the above  inquiries, and other questions: how much $ was spent on the ad campaign?
3. Map of neighborhoods surrounding campus – (lots of possibilities here) – progressive resources outside campus that we could guide students to explore (suggested bike or walking trips to cool places?) – Also, give subversive history of areas near campus (e.g., the Bohemian flats (Gus is going to bring a book about this… *Gus, could you add a comment with the story you gave us in class?). – (*One big task here is to come up with a list of “progressive” places to put on the map – and to be sure that we think critically about what we mean by “progressive” (i.e., talk to activists who aren’t represented in our group) – Arnoldas is going to start on this).  *Also, big task of researching what history to show on this map (*Marie, Isaac, and Gus have given us some cool history already – could you add some of that in comments here? – Any other hidden history ideas…? (for inspiration, check out the “People’s History of Chapel Hill” on the bottom of the UNC’s disOrientation Map)
4. Map of steam tunnels under campus (possibly already some maps by urban explorers). (*Emily is working on this.)
5. Remixing a historic map – Lesley and Eli found some cool old maps in the Borchardt map library of the U of M campus… Apparently U of M map-makers were a lot more creative back in the 1920s and 1930s – they actually made some sort of subversive (or at least funny) maps.  We are thinking of scanning one of these maps and then rewriting some of the text to address our contemporary concerns, to unearth some forgotten history of the U, and to be funny- (*Diana is going to work on this – and others can brainstorm on this too (you could add comments to this post)).  —> Click here for PICTURES of the maps (sorry for the poor quality).    
6. War profiteers map – (Michael might have access to a map of military research connections in the Twin Cities). 

Plan for Wed, 6/25 and Notes from Sunday, 6/22

Plan for Wed, 6/25 (4-6pm in Blegen 205):

1. In Sunday’s meeting, we decided to start working on three or four initial mapping projects (see below notes for discussions out of which these projects/groups were formed). For anyone who was not there Sunday, you can email someone in the group for the project you are most interested in working on (ask Eli for their email address) – or you can join up with a group at Wednesday’s meeting. The three (or four) initial projects. 
   1. geospatial map(s): a. steam tunnels under the campus – (Emily, Anders); b. neighborhoods in the city (with housing inequalities, potholes?) – (Michael, Mark, Siobhan) – (these two can possibly be combined on one map)
   2. a thematic map (wage inequalities on campus, labor struggles) – (Tom, Amit, Arnoldas, Eli)
   3. a conceptual map (“driven to discover,” funding flows, corporatization of the university, land grant institution, etc.) – (Eli, Isaac)
2. If you’re interested in seeing the U’s collection of campus and city maps, meet up with Lesley and others at the Borchardt Map Library a couple hours before class on Wed. (around 2pm?) – in the basement of Wilson library. 
3. Suggested readings (we probably will spend all of the time talking about the projects, but if anybody wants to discuss the readings, we can make time for that too): “What do maps represent? The crisis of representation and the critique of cartographic reason” and “Situated pragmatics: Maps and mapping as social practice” (Chs. 2 & 3 in Pickles’ _A History of Spaces_ (2004)) (start at page 32, because the first five pages are too academic) and  “Counter-Mappings” (Ch. 9 in John Pickles’ _A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World_ (2004))

Notes from Sunday, 6/22:

• Recap of last meeting
• Talk about the ideas for maps that we brought
• Decide on a few initial map projects and form working groups around them

notes for 2nd radical mapping class

Notes for 2^nd radical mapping class (sorry for the terrible spelling errors)

Intros

Arnoldas: excited to learn, communicate to a larger audience what’s not represented, challenge conventional frameworks; had talked about immigrant rights with someone earlier—the history of the Chicano movement; introduced the Minnesota Radical History zine—maybe we can have pdfs or links on our website to information about how the U is connected to local history and overlapping communities—it is never self-enclosed

Gus: Film guy, maybe do some film stuff for the project

Anders: a former PSEO student, currently going through the loops of freshman orientation at the U. This process could be useful for the scope of the class

Quin (sp?): History major at the U—did previous work on the history of the U, 1960s-ear protests, and research on the structural character of the West Bank; interested in history and dynamics of neighborhoods—after 9/11 immigration and the effect it has had on Cedar-Riverside, cab drivers, etc. and the ethnic-migratory history of surrounding neighborhoods

Marie (sp?): wants to have a focus group—look at the beginning of school-year, have a product to hand out and a website to drill down, like an “Activist Guide”—look at (Im)moral Hall, ’03 sit-in compared to ’07 arrests over GC sit-ins—what happened during those years? Look at Folwell and 60’s anti-war demonstrations, Gateway/scholar’s walk—McNamera is a private building, not owned by the U. What does this mean?

David: interested in looking at the technocratic nature of GIS—and the appropriation of GIS software for productive ends

Yonna (sp?): interested in mental maps; focus on higher education, study abroad, international students, and how these subgroups play into the radical mapping of the U. Who benefits from the internationalization of the U?

Ahmed: engineering background; got involved in radical outlook of the U during the fall strike; TA’s are not a factory, but are commonly treated like one—highly corporatized, lack of care for workers’ wellbeing; interested in exploring power struggles inherent in the U’s structure, administration policies and research, and departmental imbalance

Leslie: Works for the Minnesota Historical Society, sees a difference between activism and “community groups” and “non-profits”; interested in subverting dominant paradigm, with close attention paid to “deconstructive” vs. “constructive” emphasis; wants to synthesize theory with action—create a mapifesto of sorts, explaining our own representational mapping process, setting a strong example of what a radical map is and looks like; data is already in the process of being collected by all sorts of groups—we could piggyback on other research work being done, creating an effective layered history of campus

Emily: graduated last year from the U; began to open up to the substance of the land and break conceptual patterns through an orienteering class she took at the U; interested in the strange underbelly of the U—abandoned parts of campus, decrepit tunnels, etc.; we should do some orienteering of our own—we think we understand where we are, but how do we triangulate; maybe do a treasure hunt—Minnesota as topography; maps can be dangerous, we can harness this power and use it for productive and dangerous purposes

Tom: works at the U, here to learn about the entire process of radical map-making

Isaac: likes the idea of the dangerous map; interested in an mp3-guided walking-tour of campus and generally building our own maps; what buildings are being destroyed, what buildings are being built up?

GIS: Geographic Information Systems

Most is done in desktop mapping

Neogeography—all mash-ups

Since 1969, U of M created 1^st GIS map—for about 40 years people have been creating data with which to map MN; neogeography is not taking advantage of this wealth of data

Coming together of Science (clunky, dry, analytical) and neogeography (sexy, pretty aesthetic, free from science tropes); Google Earth is changing all that; pulling in old data sets: debate over whether or not Google Earth is neogeography

Old GIS was done on desktop–$1000s to operate, inaccessible to most people; neogeography is all web-based, mostly open-source—open to almost anyone

ESRI: Environmental Services Research Institute

Open source GIS—mapserver foundation—Steve Lime (sp?), a DNR guy, alum and current teacher at the U. True North—4^th-10^th grade level technology

GIS potentials:

1) Ability to overlay multiple layers of maps

2) Ability to link locations o fmaps to information on that location—pull different data from all different sources, utilize data sources that already exist (cessions and treaties, e.g.)

www.mnhs.org/truenorth

Creative cartography (science of map-making): U of N. Carolina offers exemplary map

Grass—open source GIS

What is a map? Representation of special (and temporal) data; three kinds:

1) reference

2) thematic (population densities in an area, e.g.)

3) mental (conceptualizing space)

Maps are a simplification of reality, selective representation of data, based on subjective choices of people, decided by whoever makes the map. Earth is a Geoid—some projections preserve integrity of angle, area, etc.—depending upon what the cartographer is mapping, what interests she’s trying to serve (political foundation of maps)

Color—has importance in determining a hierarchy of data (darker and darker shades of red has different connotations than darker and darker shades of green to correspond to data categories, e.g. races of people)

Radical mapping: challenge the representations of space we see reinforced ever day; every cartographer has a choice in reinforcing what it is they reinforce

Geocoding: like mapquest, gathers cultural knowledge—representations of vs. representations for

www.colorbrewer.org– color blindness and ways to see things

larger project for the class: disorientation guide in form of booklet or zine; what is the priority, and what is realistic?

Who is the audience? Incoming students, surrounding communities; create something that helps break the spell that says the present situation is how it always has been and how it will always be, connecting to past and to present overlapping communities, practical-use guide that challenges real relationships, exposing the political reasons for not grounding people and not allowing space for people to map their own genealogies and geographies—there are multiple views of a single place and a single time.

This project could be the genesis for a grant…

Prep for 2nd Meeting (6/18) (and notes on The Power of Maps)

For our 2nd meeting (Wednesday, 6/18, 4-6pm, in Blegen 205), please try to do the following:

1) Read the previous post summarizing the research topics we proposed in the 1st meeting, and reply with any additional topics and any interesting ways of organizing these topics.

2) Think about the four questions raised in the previous post about our audience, purpose, map form and content, and central themes.  Add comments in response to any of these questions (or at least be prepared to discuss them in class).

3) We would like to make part of the 2nd meeting a skill-and-knowledge sharing workshop.  It would be great if you could prepare a short presentation on some skills/knowledges/technologies that you think are relevant for the project (e.g., where to find research data on the U, where to find maps, how to use GIS, etc.).

4) Explore the maps linked here, especially UNC’s disOrientation Guide and Mapping Comic Book.

5) If you haven’t already, please read “Maps Work by Serving Interests” – Ch. 1 of Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps.  For a more basic introduction to mapping, you can read these lectures from J.B. Krygier: “Maps and Human Understanding” and “Cartographic Maps”.  Since only a few of us read the Wood chapter, we won’t officially assign any additional reading for this Wednesday, so that the whole class can try to get on the same page.  Feel free to read some of the other articles, such as “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” which gives theoretical and historical background.  Also, for those of you who have some experience with cartography and GIS, please recommend to the class any articles, books, or websites that you think would be helpful (either by email or commenting here).

The Power of Maps by Denis Wood — The following are my notes on some of the key ideas from the introduction and Ch.1, “Maps work by serving interests”…

Brainstorming topics for our disorientation map

At our first meeting (Sat., 6/14), we introduced ourselves (our interests and skills), explored some helpful readings and inspirational maps, discussed the politics of mapping, and brainstormed possible topics to research for our project.  

Of the folks in attendance, our skills and knowledges include: – filmmaking – GIS – cartography – free and open source GIS and mapping resources – urban geography, sociology, forestry – political science – computer programming – anthropology – website design – institutional memory (knowledge from attending and working at the U for a long time).

In our discussion of possible research topics that we could include in our map, we came up with the following list (see below).  Please feel free to add to this list by replying in the comment box below.  Also, I have not organized this list much, because that is a task that we should do collectively — so, please feel free to comment with interesting connections that you see between these different topics, and to think about the following questions:

1) Who is our intended audience for a disorientation guide/map?

2) What is our purpose with it?

3) Given our audience and purpose, what is the ideal form and content of our disorientation guide/map?  How can we compose a map (or maps) that would most effectively represent all of our different sources and types of data?  (Keep in mind that with a website, we could have lots of interconnected maps – for example, see http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap). 

4) Are there limits to how much research we should try to include, and if so, how should we prioritize it?  Are there some central questions/themes that could help us focus the scope of our project?

The list of possible research topics that we came up with in class: 

– research contracts (corporate, military – contributions to the war effort)

– model of a desirable university

– relationships and flows between the University and surrounding communities – mapping connections locally and globally (showing that the U extends beyond its borders – destabilizing the U’s fixed boundaries – challenging the idea of the U as a discrete place)

– where professors and faculty live in relation to the U

– disparities in resources between different departments and schools in the university (e.g., disparity between CLA and IT salaries for TAs and professors)

– critique of the U’s branding programs

– adjunct teaching labor

– a mapping strategy to assist social movements (as an activism tool)

– integrating different data types and sources on one map (with GIS)

– gentrification

– public transportation

– tuition structure (increasing economic and educational inequalities)

– student debt

– classroom sizes

– representing the U as a place of production (e.g., – work loads for everyone – seeing students as workers – unions – precaritization of labor)

– showing connections between conflicts in the U (common concerns for different groups activists to organize and mobilize around)

– diversity of workers, students, faculty

– histories (e.g., eugenics, military research – strikes, sit-ins, struggles for access)

– “land grant institution”

– buildings (e.g., funding for new buildings (more profitable departments, schools, and activities get better buildings than others), Coffman student union built on a shopping mall model rather than as a hub for student life)

– animal testing and human testing

– regents’ meeting (seeing who is talking – map the meetings’ politics) (and the secret meeting that they have the day before the public meeting)

– the roles of different figures in the university (e.g., the president gets money, the provost makes the real decisions)

– rise of permanent fundraising positions

– who makes decisions about branding, marketing

– U presidents convention (mapping connections at the university elite level)

– communication flows (who has access to mass email lists)

– communication between administration and unions

 

Welcome! – first meeting, Sat. 6/14

The first meeting of “Radical Mapping: a disOrientation Guide for the U of M” will be this Saturday, 6/14, 3-5pm, in Blegen Hall 205, on the West Bank of the U of M campus (see map).  If you haven’t registered through EXCO yet, please do so here (click ‘subscribe’ at the bottom). 

Before the first meeting, please try to read “Maps Work by Serving Interests” – Ch. 1 of Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps (about 24 pages).  Wood helps us think about how maps can be very political things and how they construct our reality.  If you have time, check out some of the other links in our sections of readings, mapping collectives and blogs, and especially the disorientation guides from other schools.  To get our discussions rolling, please feel free to add comments on any of these pages (in the “leave a comment” part on the bottom).  You could respond by telling us what you’ve found interesting in any of these resources, or you could give links to new stuff you’ve found. 

Agenda for the first meeting:

• Introductions (basic info about ourselves, and our interests, skills)
• Arnoldas and Eli (the facilitators) will give an intro about this project and EXCO
• We’ll collectively explore some of the online resources as well as books and maps that we’ll bring to class.
• Discussion of the politics of mapping.
• Brainstorming about possible topics to research for our U of M Disorientation Guide.