Ed Webb's Library tagged mapping →  View Popular, Search in Google

By far the greatest hurdle to cartographic literacy in Turkey is that officialdom still regards maps with the same sort of Cold War suspicion it once had for Polaroid photos of tank traps or lemon-juice sketches of naval yards.

Turkey is the only place I’ve been in Europe with no public contour maps at a scale of at least 1:50,000.

 

This is strangely anachronistic in the Google era, when satellite imaging can spot a dachshund on its daily run and Soviet military maps of Turkey at 1:100,000 are freely available on the Web. The Turkish legislation dates back to 1925, when maps were printed on paper and not stored as vectors in digital code. But today the villains bent on using maps to do harm can get their hands on all the data they need, so it’s tourists, off-road bikers, archaeologists and guardians of the countryside who suffer. And in a natural disaster, keeping the 1:25,000 maps under military lock and key means more lives lost.

Libya this week which saw an established humanitarian organization specifically request a volunteer technical community for a live map of reports generated from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and mainstream media sources. Seriously, I have never been more impressed by the humanitarian community than I am today. The pro-active approach they have taken and their constructive engagement is absolutely remarkable. This is truly spectacular and the group deserve very high praise.

we are creating a live map of a hostile situation still unfolding. Haiti provided a permissive environment, politically and geographically. Libya couldn’t be more different. We experienced the serious challenges of crisis mapping a hostile environment when we created a crisis map of Khartoum at the request of local Sudanese activists. This was a stressful deployment but one that was able to provide an important window into what was happening in Khartoum.

 

In the case of Libya, our humanitarian partner requested that the crisis map be password protected. We intend to make the map public after this phase of the humanitarian operations is over. In the meantime, the screenshots below provide a good picture of what the platform looks like. In the first 48 hours since the activation of the Task Force, over 220 individual reports have been mapped, many including pictures and some with video footage.

We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks.

Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to blog anonymously.