As the saying goes: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. In a project for the Community Mapping Lab, I worked with a representative for the United Way of Northeast Georgia’s 2-1-1 program to develop a web application that allows for visual interaction with services offered in Athens, Georgia. Along the way, I had to weigh the pros and cons such as reproducibility and ease of use of different web application development software. I found that it was impossible to have everything I wanted in a single web framework for software development.

The United Way of Northeast Georgia is a non-profit organization that aims to ensure access to quality education, financial stability, and healthy lifestyles for residents of its service region. They work with stakeholders from different sectors such as schools, businesses, financial institutions, and local governments across the state to promote and improve community conditions. Their 2-1-1 program offers residents the opportunity to speak with or text a representative of United Way about services they may be looking for.

In the fall of 2018, I worked with a representative for the United Way’s 2-1-1 program to develop a web application that allows users to locate services offered in Athens, Georgia through a map interface. Although the call line offers callers the ability to speak with someone who is knowledgeable about the services offered, a web application allows users to explore services at their own pace and see details about the services up front as opposed to hearing about them over the phone.

The web application had 5 important requirements:

1. Users must be able to search for agencies which offer services in Athens, Georgia using service category. Service categories include Education/Training, Family/Child/Community Services, Health/Medical, and more.
2. Users must be able to search for services by language in which the services may be offered.
3. Users must be able to search for services along specified bus route(s).
4. Users must be able to access contact information for each agency.
5. Users must be able to assess eligibility for each of the services.

I looked for ways to meet the requirements listed above, managed data from United Way’s database, and researched the best way I could develop a web application. I did this through an internship with the Community Mapping Lab which actively works to provide students with the opportunity to work with community members as well as apply their knowledge to solve practical problems.

It is important to carefully consider which software to use when developing a web application. In the development process of this web app, I considered using Leaflet or R Shiny. These programs would allow me the greatest flexibility in the development of the application, and it would be shareable for future use as well as reproducible. However, I don’t know JavaScript, so I couldn’t make a Leaflet map, and at the beginning of this project, I had no experience in R. To develop a web application using those tools would be to embark on a long journey of learning for which I did not have time.

I chose to use ESRI’s Web AppBuilder to develop my web application because it was the best tool for me considering my skill set and complete lack of coding experience. I was able to develop a web application with unique visualization features and useful filtering tools. With this app, the users could explore the agencies in Athens, search for service by language availability, visualize the route(s) agencies are on, access contact information, and determine eligibility.
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One of the advantages of my web app is that all agencies which offer services for the general public are listed on its map. Unlike Google or other search engines, the web app shows all the services available from all service categories at once. Google is more likely to display agencies whose names match the keywords input in the search bar. Some of the agency names are not representative of all the services they offer, and because of that, a search engine can be limiting. Additionally, a search engine may not offer as much information as clicking on one of the service icons on my web application may offer. For example, by clicking on a service icon, I can see all the information shown in figure 1, and more.

Yangjiaxin Wei

Over the decades, researchers have increasingly looked into the effect of neighborhood stores and other food options on residents' health (Caspi, Sorensen, Subramanian, & Kawachi, 2012). Many researchers have found that food environments play an important role in individuals’ health outcomes (Bleich, Jones-smith, Wolfson, & Zhu, 2015; Cummins, Macintyre, & Glasgow, 2002; Willett, 1994). The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed), funded by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, also aims to improve the nutrition and healthy lifestyle knowledge of individuals who are SNAP participants and low-income individuals eligible to receive SNAP benefits or other federal assistance. Agencies in each state contract with the USDA to provide classes in nutritional education and sponsor initiatives to encourage healthy food choices. The University of Georgia (UGA) SNAP-Ed program is a collaboration between the Department of Foods and Nutrition and Cooperative Extension that aims to help low-income populations in Georgia establish healthy eating habits and a physically active lifestyle through evidence-based nutrition education and local campaigns to promote consumption of healthy foods. This includes online content showing cooking and shopping tips, advertising campaigns, and outreach to K-12 schools.  

During my Master’s degree work, I was a research assistant for the UGA SNAP-Ed program. I worked with Dr. Jerry Shannon to provide spatial analysis and mapping that supported UGA SNAP-Ed program. Using GIS technology, we mapped out areas with high percentages of eligible populations where more than half the population’s income was below 185% of the poverty rate, areas within one mile from Free and Reduced Meal School, Georgia Promise Zones and Georgia Strike Force zones. Sites intersect with any of these areas above are considered as qualified nutrition education sites and are eligible for SNAP-Ed programming.

In this article, we present an open source interactive web tool using leaflet JavaScript library for UGA SNAP-Ed to locate eligible outreach sites and obtain qualification results. These years, there has been a shift from “closed” environment to “open source” environment both in academia and industry. Open source usually refers to a product includes permission to use its source code, design documents, or content for free. Comparing to traditional commercial or “closed” software, open source tools provide reproducibility of knowledge, open access of data, adaptability to similar applications, affordable cost, and they are usually contributed by a community of people (Singleton, Spielman, Brunsdon, & Singleton, 2016).

The Leaflet API is a leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive map visualization, and it provides us a powerful set of mapping features. Compared with other online mapping application such as ArcGIS Web App Builder, Leaflet is more lightweight, customizable and extendable. In addition to basic functions and map visualization features, it also has extended open-source plugins which allow you to customize your own application easily and at no cost. We can also integrate it with other JavaScript libraries such as D3.js to achieve better visualization results and functionalities.

This tool provides basic map visualization functions for different SNAP-Ed qualification layers, functions for determining nutrition education site eligibility, and an info box updating site qualification information.

Details on the application
Leaflet has detailed documentation and fundamental hands-on tutorials helping you get familiar with the API. For those unfamiliar with JavaScript and HTML, w3schools is a good place to learn such web technologies. Since Leaflet is code based, we also needed a robust text editor, such as Sublime Text or NotePad++. Since we can only create customized map vectors from GeoJSON objects, we also need to prepare our geographic data into GeoJSON format. GeoJSON is a lightweight and straightforward format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures and it’s also a common format for geographical data in Javascript. There are many tools available online to convert ESRI shapefiles to GeoJSON such as Mapshaper, and you can also do it natively in QGIS.
 
Our web tool has five fundamental features:

1. Basic map manipulations: Functions such as zoom in, zoom out, pan.
2. Layer controls: A layer control panel allows users to switch different layers.
3. Determining site eligibility: determining whether the input site location (pin-point directly on the map or input through Geo-locator) intersects with eligible layers.
4. Geo-locator:  A text box allows user-input site address with auto-complete feature; geocode and add markers of user-input address; update the qualifying information of input address on the Info window.
5. Info window: A info window showing site eligibility qualification information on the right corner of the page.

 
Basic functions such as adding basemaps, layer controls, and adding info window are well-explained in the tutorials and documentations. For me, the major challenge of this map was determining site eligibility and creating the Geo-locator. While Leaflet is a powerful map visualization API, it has limited features on spatial analysis functions. Luckily, we have plugins contributed by other people to realize those functions. This is one of the many advantages of open source software. To determine whether a point is intersected with a layer, we used the “Leaflet-pip” plugin which provides us point-in-polygon calculation support. For the Geo-locator, we used “Leaflet GeoSearch” plugin which is an easily extensible plugin supports address searching and real-time geocoding in Leaflet.
 
This web tool is hosted on GitHub’s online repositories using GitHub Pages. GitHub is an open source web-based version control hosting service, it is free and very convenient for project collaboration and distribution. Click on this link to see it live. For more detailed information and actual code, please visit the GitHub page on this project.

Conclusions
Overall, this web tool using geospatial data can help UGA SNAP-Ed determine nutrition site eligibility more efficiently without communicating with GIS experts. The GitHub repositories can also help UGA SNAP-Ed manage the tool in the long run. Also, the open source code and public accessible data can be easily extended and replicated for SNAP-Ed in other states.

Although Leaflet has many advantages compared with other commercial platforms, it still has some drawbacks: it requires a basic understanding of JavaScript and HTML languages and it is also relatively weak on spatial analysis functions.

One thing worth mentioning here is that even though we provided this tool for UGA SNAP-Ed program, they seldomly used it due to various reasons: First, they still feel better having GIS experts directly confirm eligibility manually. Also, the map is not an adequate stand for specific circumstances. It raised my concern that while our lab has talked a lot about Public Participatory GIS and Community GIS, how to gain public acceptance and further public engagement to it still remains a question.

References

• Bleich, S. N., Jones-smith, J., Wolfson, J. A., & Zhu, X. (2015). The Complex Relationship Between Diet And Health. Health Affairs, 34(11), 1813–1820. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0606
• Caspi, C. E., Sorensen, G., Subramanian, S. V., & Kawachi, I. (2012). The local food environment and diet: A systematic review. Health & Place, 18(5), 1172–1187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2012.05.006
• Cummins, S., Macintyre, S., & Glasgow, G. (2002). “ Food deserts ”— evidence and assumption in health policy making. Education and Debate, 325(August), 436–438.
• Singleton, A. D., Spielman, S., Brunsdon, C., & Singleton, A. D. (2016). Establishing a framework for Open Geographic Information science science, 8816(August). https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2015.1137579
• Willett, W. C. (1994). Diet and Health : What Should We Eat ? Science(Washington), 264(5158), 532–537.

Author
Yangjiaxin Wei is a first year Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia in the Department of Geography. 

At the end of the first day, we identified multiple themes from these shared notes:

• Participation and engagement
• Accessibility and inclusivity
• (In)visibility and representation
• Teaching and pedagogy
• Providing support for community geography
• Power and positionality
• Creative research methods

​Workshop attendees then signed up for breakout groups, each focused on one of these themes. For much of the second day, these groups outlined potential shared collaborations that could be continued after the workshop. Summaries of these discussions are currently being compiled and will be shared on the conference page, linked at the top of this post.

During the second day, we also took a field trip to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, just a short walk away from our workshop site. This field trip got us out of the conference space and provided an opportunity to reflect on other struggles many of us address through our teaching and research.

“Dru gu Choegyal Rinpoche's painting of a dragon sucking up water from a stream in Tibet, 2012” Dragons, Drokpa, and a Drukpa Kargyu Master

In the end, local Drokpa knowledge of dragons may not be commensurate with western knowledge mapping traditions; spatial frameworks that we, as academically-inclined map makers, can know and interpret: 2D, cardinal direction, cartographic maps.  Unless we expand our definition of “map”, perhaps Choegyal Rinpoche’s paintings can simply remind us that the edge of our mappable world does not mean the world’s end. Certain cultural realities and worlds of knowing may simply be invisible to us, unless we choose to radically challenge our own preconceptions, trusting and supporting the deeply held realities of our community mapping partners.

Indeed, there are different worlds in each of us.  There are also shared cultural worlds that invisibly govern our institutions, design our technologies of visualization (i.e. GIS), and condition what we deem “mappable”. What if, when reaching the boundaries of our own mappable knowledge, we consider how to support other worlds of knowing in our work.  We must ask ourselves how we diminish other worlds of knowing by assimilation into our own. Perhaps we can recognize our privileged positionality as map-makers and practice radical epistemological reflexivity, challenging our categories of “data” and “evidence” to produce new maps.  Maybe we map the dragon. As mappable as increasing annual glacial snow melt.  As mappable as declining range and extent of alpine grasslands.  

But can we truly re-consider and re-evaluate our core perspectives, biases, and beliefs during this process? The worlds we know and occupy? Perhaps not completely.  What’s more, would such radical reflexivity necessarily dis-empower our scientific perspective in a post-truth world? I don’t think so. I think it broadens our capacity as social scientists to engage in and practice epistemological humility rather than epistemological assimilation.  

​In my research in Bhutan, known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon, we use participatory mapping as a medium to talk about spatially-explicit, place-based deities, spirits, and divinities that reside and preside over forests, lakes, trees, rivers, and mountains.  These more-than-human beings have significant bearing on the ways people make land-use decisions, and conceptualize foreign concepts of development, conservation, and natural resource management. By including dragon sightings in the Drokpa community map, without pause, without filter, our Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) will not simply pay lip service to aspirations of “participation”.  Instead, the map will be a better reflection of the different worlds that reside in each participant, and more representative of the worlds inherited by our intellectual predecessors.

When the map is complete, it will inevitably be incomplete.  Maps will always hold unknowns & uncertainties, assumptions and biases, at their edges.   If our aim is to challenge these assumptions, we must put the dragon on the map. Beyond myth. Beyond metaphor. We must challenge who has the power to define the “we”: the voices and viewpoints at the table.  A map of this type, however partial, may be a stepping stone to increasingly egalitarian representations of our respective cultural worlds: as academics, international development officers, geospatial scientists, and Drokpa herders.

Author
David Hecht is a PhD candidate in the Integrative Conservation & Anthropology program at the University of Georgia.  His research explores the intricacies of sacred landscapes and lived religion in relation to community-based conservation programs for priority bird species in Bhutan. Follow him on Twitter at @davidmhecht.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source map, an alternative to the ever present Google Map. But it is much more than a data source. OSM is community driven, and its community members host mapathons, participate in FOSS4G and OSGeo activities, and get together to talk about maps, from cartography and aesthetics to the political ramifications of delineating boundaries. These discussions are highlighted at OSM’s State of the Map (SOTM) conferences. State of the Map is the annual, international conference organized by the OpenStreetMap Foundation that brings OSMappers together from across the world. In addition to the international conference one, there are intra-national SOTM conferences that bring mappers within a region together to discuss pertinent regional topics.

I had the opportunity to attend the regional SOTM-Asia conference in Bengaluru, India from November 17 -18, 2018. Over 200 people attended the conference, from students and governmental agencies, to NGOs and academics, to more tech-based companies such as Grab and Facebook. There were country representatives from Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Japan, and the Philippines (and I’m sure many more that I am forgetting!), with a panel highlighting the work happening in each country. The true highlight, however, was seeing the dynamism and diversity of the community. Talks ranged from critical geography to AI-based image recognition, with stimulating conversations at the chai breaks in between.

In the US, the OSM community is technologically-driven, with few recognizing the critical geography theory behind their actions or the societal consequences. This mirrors a similar split within the discipline of geography itself (Wilson 2015). And so, it was refreshing to hear discussions on participatory mapping, empowerment, and how to democratize maps and knowledge at what I had expected would be a tech-centered conference. In fact, this was the final message of the opening keynote address, recognizing that open maps aren’t necessarily democratized maps.

Historically, maps have been used as a tool of colonization, with the methods to create them and the resulting knowledge only available to a select few. An infamous example of this is the resulting map of the African continent following the Berlin Conference, in which European powers divided the a whole continent into colonies under their control. But we needn’t look to the 1800’s for examples of exclusionary mapping. OSM itself was founded in 2004 in response to the UK’s ordnance survey, a government-run project that created a map of the UK which was not freely available. Since then, OSM encourages “the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and [provides] geospatial data for anybody to use and share.” (OSM Wiki)

An OSM map is ‘democratized’ in that anyone can contribute to or edit it and the resulting data is free to use for all. Relative to other sources of geospatial data and technologies, this is certainly true. However, we should question who is included in the idea of ‘all’. While the SOTM-Asia conference had a wider diversity of participants than OSM activities in the US,  we were all educated, spoke English (in fact, this is a big issue in OSM in Asia in particular, and was brought up by multiple speakers), and boasted a relatively high digital literacy, representing a small portion of the global population. In order to contribute to OSM, one must not only have an internet connection, but also the computer skills to use the editing software. Actually downloading and using the data represents another technological obstacle.  The recent development of more open-source, user-friendly software tools has helped reduce this digital divide, but technology still determines who are the mappers and who are the mapped.

In this age of rapidly accumulating open data, there is a concurrent call to engage critically with emerging technologies and question how it is changing how knowledge is produced and valued. One session focused on an older ‘technology’, the role of Helavaru storytellers as the archivers and narrators of families’ histories in Karnataka. Helava communities travel with centuries old documents detailing the history of a family and a village, and share the story of a place through a narrative or song (you can see the video from SOTM-Asia here). Following the presentation, a discussion unfolded about how this data could be recorded, and whether computerized technologies such as AI could contribute to an automated process. However, there was push back to this suggestion. What would be lost in the translation of this narrative style into numbers and GPS points? As TB Dinesh said, “Maps are denotational, but storytelling is connotational.” Whose knowledge is this and who has a right to capture and/or disseminate it? And perhaps more importantly, what would this mean for the Helava community if the records become digitized, and telling stories is no longer sustainable?

I spent a large portion of the conference wrestling with these questions and, based on my discussions with others, I was not alone. Like other FOSS communities, OSM aims to democratize data and the tools to create and analyze the data. ‘Open’, as discussed above, can be a relative term, and ‘putting people on the map’, so to speak, is not always in their best interest if they are not involved in the process or have access to the data that is created. OSM and other open GIS systems, particularly Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOTOSM), are often critiqued for a reliance on remote mapping (Palmer 2012), whereby those in the Global North map out the Global South, meeting Pickles’ prediction of a ‘new imperial geography’ (Ground Truth, 1994).

OSM chapters and contributors in Asia are working against this critique through their use of participatory mapping and field-based projects. However, even within a chapter, inequality exists, particularly around gender. OSM has a reputation for being dominated by men, which translates into maps that are not representative of everyone’s landscape. During the SOTM Asia country panel, this issue was brought up, and OSM chapters are working hard to ensure their meetings and mapathons are safe spaces for women and others. In fact, this reputation may be changing. As OSM chapters are moving from simply documenting the world to responding to natural disaster crisis and creating data specifically to address social injustices, new members are getting involved. Programs such as Youth Mappers and Let Girls Map are working to improve inclusivity in the OSM community, and show those working in social justice and advocacy how OSM can be a tool for change.

OSM’s creation caused a radical shift in mapping, opening up control of the map to a much wider audience than had previously been allowed. Over a decade after its creation, however, the community is reflecting on just how ‘democratized’ open data is. I’m optimistic that a combination of FOSS-based tools and community-driven critique and discussion, such as took place at SOTM-Asia this year, will continue to expand our notion of ‘all’ in the effort to democratize the map.

Note: In addition to these more theoretical discussions, there were also some workshops on cutting edge software and tools and presentations highlighting innovative applications of OSM to a range of societal issues. Once the slides and videos are made available, I will post a link to them here, and I highly recommend checking them out.