July 24, 2012

SheepCamp 2012: Monica Stephens on the Gender Biases of the Geoweb

Monica Stephens' talk is titled Guns, Germans and Strip Clubs, and focuses on the gender bias within the geoweb and how it falls short of the rhetoric of inclusiveness that surrounds Web 2.0 applications. She looks specifically at the case of how "childcare" was not approved as map category within OpenStreetMap.

SheepCamp 2012, Monica Stephens from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

Monica's website: https://sites.google.com/a/email.arizona.edu/stephens/
On Twitter: @geographiliac

1 comment:

  1. OpenStreetMap does not force you to use the tags that others use. Generally people do agree on the tags to use for common features but there are disagreements on some tags. If users want to map a particular feature (such as childcare) they can and should simply get on and do so.

    At the time of writing there are 107 uses of amenity=childcare, the subject of this video.

    Similarly the data is open so that everyone can use the data and are free to produce their own renderings if they disagree with the cartographic decisions of the project at large. Cyclists, public transport supporters and hikers have all produced widely used renderings of OSM data focussed on their field of interest.

    OpenStreetMap is truly inclusive.

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