【讲座预告】Mapping Platforms: the Next Cartographic Infrastructure?
发布时间:2019-09-16        浏览次数:269

Fudan-LSE Lecture Series No.16

TITLE:


Mapping platforms: the next cartographic infrastructure?

地图平台:下一个测绘基础设施?


SPEAKER/主讲人:

HOST/主持人:

TIME/时间:

VENUE/地点:

Dr. Jean-Christophe Plantin

Dr. Qian Haoqi

18:30-20:00, Sep. 18, 2019.

Room HQ 202,Fudan Journalism School

让·克里斯托夫·普兰廷博士

钱浩祺博士

2019年9月18日18:30-20:00

新闻学院HQ202室

THE SPEAKER

Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. His research investigates the politics of digital platforms, the evolution of knowledge infrastructures, and the rise of digital sovereignty. His work has been published in leading Media and Communications journals, such as Media, Culture & Society, New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Chinese Journal of Communication, and International Journal of Communication. His research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the European Regional Development Fund, and the University of Michigan MCubed Program. He is currently writing a monograph on the infrastructural evolution of digital platforms.


ABSTRACT

Google Maps has popularized a model of cartography as a platform, in which digital traces are collected through participation, crowdsourcing, or user’s data harvesting and used to constantly improve its mapping service. Based on this capacity, Google Maps has now attained a scale, reach, and social role similar to the existing infrastructures that typically organize cartographic knowledge in society. After describing Google Maps as a configuration relying on characteristics from both platforms and infrastructures, this article investigates what this hybrid configuration means for public participation in spatial knowledge in society. First, this turn to infrastructure for Google has consequences on the status of public participation in mapmaking, which switches from creating content to providing activities of maintenance of its database. Second, if Google Maps “opens up” cartography to participation, it simultaneously recentralizes this participatory knowledge to serve its corporate interests. In this hybrid configuration, cartographic knowledge is therefore simultaneously more participatory and more enclosed.