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first published week of: 03/20/2017
Render of the Map Room space in Stevens Middle School. Actual Map Room may vary.
St. Louis Map Room is a pop-up community space for map-making and dialogue around civic data.
Maps can be powerful tools for presenting data. Take for example The Racial Dot Map, which draws a dot for every single person in the USA and colors it according to their reported racial group. The map tile interface makes it easy to zoom in and find that one dot that might be you; it’s a good demonstration of how maps can be useful for framing a single point within a dense and detailed geography.
What maps tend not to be good at, though, is allowing viewers to understand other points of view. I’m very unlikely to use the Racial Dot Map to look at another neighborhood in NYC other than my own, and even less likely to look at another city, or a suburb or (gasp!) a rural area. The way that I use this or any other map is very much constrained by my own lived experience. On top of this, the way I typically experience maps (mostly on a mobile phone screen) limits my engagement to a one-person act; maps are a hard thing to have a conversation around. Finally, since I had very little say in how this map was made, I’m constrained by the biases and politics of the map and the data placed on top of it.
Inspired by collective drone-based crisis mapping efforts in Nepal, a 1947 keynote speech by a librarian about imagination, and the rich (and often troubled) geographic history of one of America’s greatest cities, we are elated to be opening St. Louis Map Room on March 3rd. Sited in a shuttered public school in St. Louis’s Vandeventer neighborhood, Map Room combines hi-tech cartographic robots with analogue art materials to make a pop-up space for map making and dialogue around civic data. continued…