Are Your Maps Lying to You? Let’s Talk About Subjectivity in Maps and Geospatial Information

Metadata

• Author: The Rockefeller Foundation
• Full Title: Are Your Maps Lying to You? Let’s Talk About Subjectivity in Maps and Geospatial Information
• Type:
• Topics: #geospatial #data
• URL: https://medium.com/matter-of-data/are-your-maps-lying-to-you-lets-talk-about-subjectivity-in-maps-and-geospatial-information-63794ca6e147

Highlights

• Even with the algorithms to classify areas of potential wheat disease, we can tune them to either classify densely unhealthy areas with high confidence or to identify outlier “hot spot” areas with high confidence — but not both. (View Highlight)
• Here are some helpful questions to ask yourself:
  • Should you prioritize communities that are most marginalized, even if in the minority?
  • Should you prioritize areas of most disease, even if preventative management in lower disease presence regions might be a more cost-effective approach?
  • Would it be more prudent to prioritize densely populated regions to reduce localized food insecurity, at the risk of overlooking remote and vulnerable families?
  • Did you consider cultural demarcations or histories of tension in the region? If so, how do you weigh information about different groups?
  • In how you visualize the areas of disease, do we quantify uncertainty in any way? How? (View Highlight)
• Haraway describes knowledge as always coming from a specific point of view (and therefore, is situated in that perspective), and is incomplete (partial), which impacts the production, interpretation, and visualization of geospatial knowledge. (View Highlight)
• The consequences of this partiality are multiple. The first is that perspectives and real lived experiences are both highlighted and erased, whether unintentionally or maliciously. (View Highlight)
• Second, maps rarely quantify errors or specify their positioning, and culturally we are not accustomed to understanding multidimensional error. We are used to seeing maps as carrying ultimate truth, which isn’t the case — we are almost certainly bound to mis-read the perspective of the map if it’s not contextualized for us, further complicating how we understand the space and time described. (View Highlight)