Actas do Seminário Geografias de Inclusão: desafios e oportunidades 13 de Dezembro 2010, Lisboa: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa ISSN 978-989-97075-0-4
Volunteer Geographic Information: Inclusive Empowerment by Knowledge Cristina Gouveia
Maria João Silva
CENSE – Center for Environmental and Sustainability Research
Escola Superior de Educação, Instituto Politécnico do Porto
[email protected]
[email protected]
Resumo O conceito de informação geográfica recolhida por voluntários é apresentado neste artigo como um meio para promover, de modo inclusivo, o empoderamento de cidadãos e comunidades. Neste artigo, aborda-se ainda a forma como aquela informação, quando integrada na Web, pode ajudar cidadãos e em especial crianças de idade escolar a transformarem-se, mais efectivamente, em agentes de mudança. Apresenta-se um conjunto de projectos de investigação desenvolvidos em Portugal. Nesses projectos, as crianças não só utilizaram informação georreferenciada multissensorial para partilhar as próprias visões sobre as suas escolas e o seu ambiente como também para sugerir alterações, tornando-se assim elementos efectivos no processo de gestão participada das escolas.
Abstract This paper explores the concept of ―Volunteered Geographic Information‖ in what concerns its potentialities to promote the inclusive empowerment of citizens and communities. The inclusion of a diversity of people and places in Web spatial data repositories is addressed, and special attention is given to schoolchildren as digital spatial knowledge producers. A set of Portuguese related projects is presented. In those projects, the use of multisensory georeferenced information empowered schoolchildren to create and publish contents that portray their own visions and suggestions, and allowed them to become actors in public participation processes.
1. Introduction This paper explores the potentialities of volunteered geographic information (VGI) to promote the inclusive empowerment of citizens and communities. Volunteer Geographic Information is the term used by Goodchild (2007) to designate the following phenomenon: citizens voluntarily using the Web to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information. Referring this author, Elwood (2008) defines VGI as digital spatial data that are produced not by
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individuals and institutions formally charged as data producers, but rather, are created by citizens that gather and disseminate their observations and geographic knowledge. Elwood (2008) emphasizes the notion that spatial data are a central mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and disempowerment. This author explains that the exclusion and under-representation of information from and about marginalized people and places in existing data records and is linked to the ensuing exclusion of their needs and priorities from policy and decision making processes. Moreover, she states that identity, power, and spatial knowledge are linked and that what we know about a place depends on what we are in that place.
1.1. Aims and Uses of Volunteered Geographic Information The use of volunteered geographic information (VGI) to promote the inclusion of a diversity of people and places in the collective discourse is not a new idea. Participatory planning is one of the areas where the use of volunteered geographic data to express alternative perspectives has been explored (Elwood, 2008). Volunteered geographic information have been used to keep communities, elected officials, and government agencies informed about the problems that need to be addressed, thus contributing to the increase of public awareness. Generally, the data collected aim to support citizens’ actions. Withelaw et al. (2003) identifies the following four types of citizens initiatives that are based on VGI: - Promoted by official entities. VGI is thought as a way to complement the actions of official monitoring networks and scientific community. The US National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program1 is an example of such type of initiatives. - Interpretive approach which places emphasis on the educational aspects of collecting data. The GLOBE and the Mapping the Monarch migration in real-time project by the Pathfinders Science are examples of initiatives with an interpretive approach. - Advocacy initiatives where citizens use data to ―push for appropriate action to be taken‖. The Anacostia RiverKeeper®2 is an example of a volunteer monitoring initiative focusing on the policy and land use decisions with impact on the river. - Multiparty initiatives, which involves individuals citizens, representatives of civil society organizations, business, government, and others committed to the community. The multiparty approach intends to influence decision-making through cooperation as opposed to advocacy. The Chesapeake Bay citizen monitoring program is an example of such approach. The categories proposed by Withelaw et al. (2003) are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, it is common to find a combination of individual citizens, interest groups, and official institutions involved in initiatives that may have more than one focus.
1
For more information please refer to http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/
2
For more information please refer to http://www.anacostiariverkeeper.org/
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1.2. Using Senses, Sensors and Virtual Globes to Create Volunteer Geographic Information The information collected by volunteers vary and can include: (1) opinions, or individual complaints, through written or spoken messages; (2) objective and factual information, such as the detection of specific species within a geographic area, using texts, photographs, sketches and videos; (3) measurements using sensors such as a pH meter or a GPS. Due to their nature the first two data types may have a strong sensorial component, as it is through human senses that volunteers interact, in a first approach, with their environment. The sensory component of volunteered geographic data is usually translated by the production and collection of multimedia data a phenomenon that is attested also by the by the success of sites such as Flik(r) or Youtube. The availability of increasingly sophisticated sensors has also impacted positively the ability of citizens to collect data and raise their voice in any particular topic. Mobile phones are a key example of a, widely available, information gadget, that are becoming increasingly more equipped with a large variety of sensors: from GPS and digital cameras to gyroscopes and noise-level recorders. Additionally, mobile phones have a diversity of communication channels from voice and text messages to Internet access, which makes them an attractive advocacy supporting tool. The number of mobile apps that allow people to geolocate, tag and share any type of information with others is massive. Examples such as Glow (http://glowapp.com/) collect emotional data allowing to map neighbourhood auras while others are more trivial and document local problems such as illegal garbage dumping. The Love Lewwisham Project3 is one example of the latter. Geo-locating is no longer a major issue for VGI as GPS are available in most Smartphone and even if there is no GPS applications such as Navizon can provide citizens with a location system .http://www.navizon.com/. The spatial data infrastructure required to publish and share content is provided by virtual globes and webmapping applications such as Google Earth and Google Maps. The Google Earth is an example of making land-use data available to the common citizen enabling to perform spatial multimedia operations, such as flyovers, graphical and alphanumerical searches, and 3D modelling, which were before restricted to professional GIS experts.
1.3. Children and Youngsters as New Actors in Volunteer Geographic Information Elwood (2008) argues that the recent shifts in the hardware and software related to Volunteer Geographic Information have the potential to alter which individuals and institutions can and do act as data producers with implications for access, participation, power relations,
3
For more information please refer to http://www.lovelewisham.org/Reports
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and data content. In this section, two projects – where children and youngsters significantly use and produce sensory geographic information – are briefly presented The ―Sound Scavenging‖ project focused on how marginalised students can use sound to map local environment (Proboscis et al., 2006). In a series of workshops children explored ―how they listen, different types of sounds they hear, favourite sounds and how to map and link the sounds geographically‖ (Proboscis et al., 2006). After the workshops the students’ sounds and pictures were mapped using the free Google Earth application. This method was found ―valuable to allow marginalised pupils a voice‖, ―to enable pupils to kick-start change and improve society‖ (Proboscis et al., 2006). The Panwapa project (Panwapa, 2007) is a Sesame Street project targeted to children, ages four to seven. The Panwapa Website georeferenced local multisensory information in a global context to develop the understanding of the link between local communities and national and global issues. The activities included in this Website intend to motivate children to participate in and contribute to one’s community locally and globally. The next part of this paper will address diverse Portuguese projects in which elementary school children are Digital Geographic Information Creators, playing a part in Volunteer Geographic Information.
2. Schoolchildren as Digital Geographic Information Creators This section presents a set of Portuguese projects that allow schoolchildren to georeference observations, sensations, emotions and opinions in the context of curricular activities. A common feature of all these projects is the use of multisensory information. Multisensory information is the integrated information acquired by the different human senses (Silva et al., 2009). Multisensory experiences are subjective and inseparable from the context of the time and space of situated experiences (Silva et al., 2009b). They are embodied and geographically situated. It is important to strengthen the evidence that everybody uses multisensory information everyday, for instance, when driving a car or when monitoring home’s safety (Silva et al. 2003). However, this use is seldom valued and knowingly applied in formal education contexts (Silva et al. 2003). This presentation of a set of projects in which schoolchildren are creators of digital geographic information aims to highlight that it is possible to use multisensory information to improve everyday awareness, communication and inclusive participation. In this set of projects there is an emphasis on developing environmental sensing and participation as well as on giving voice to children of schools located in diverse regions of Portugal.
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2.1 The Internet@EB1 Project: A story on the inclusive importance of being on the map Internet@EB1 was the first Portuguese project aimed at promoting the educational use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in all the Portuguese primary schools (Silva et al. 2005). From 2002 to 2005, all the public primary schools received the visit of elements of the Internet@EB1 project staff to support the development of the website of each school with the participation of children and teachers. In 2002, every primary school had one computer and an Internet connection. However, a considerable number of Portuguese primary schools had only one teacher, less than 10 children and were geographically isolated. It was very difficult to discover the location and the way to such schools: they were not on the map! (Silva et al., 2010). By 2005, almost every Portuguese public primary school has developed a Web page with the support of the Internet@EB1 project (Silva et al., 2010). This way, one of the most relevant results of the Internet@EB1 project was the geographical visibility of Portuguese primary schools.
Figure 1 – Examples of georeferenced information created by children and teachers in the context of the Internet@EB1 project
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The Internet@EB1 project made it possible for schools to communicate their location, contacts and their situated everyday activities (Ponte et al. 2006). Schools’ community and environment were central topics within schools’ WebPages, a huge quantity of geographic information have been created (Silva et al. 2005; Ponte et al. 2006). Geographic information created by kids and teachers blends different levels of abstraction and links rational and emotional dimensions within information (Silva et al. 2005). On the other hand, although present in drawings and texts, multisensory information is underrepresented in the schools’ WebPages (Silva et al. 2005). To georeference the environmental information, children and teachers used the geographic resources, such as maps and photographs, and they created their own resources as well (see figure 1). During the Internet@EB1 project, it was meaningful to observe that the more geographically isolated schools often reacted in a more engaged way than the richer urban schools (Silva et al., 2009a).
2.2 The SchoolSenses Project: Using Mobile Phones and Google Earth to map multisensory schoolyards Based on the lessons learned in the previously mentioned Internet@EB1 project, the SchoolSenses research project aimed at making a sensory portrait of schoolyards, by inviting elementary school children to create georeferenced multisensory messages with GPS-equipped mobile phones (Silva et al., 2009b). The created messages were automatically published in Google Earth to share children visions and opinions with other schools and communities in real time (Silva et al., 2009b). The creation of local multisensory information together with its browsable presentation in large-scale contexts contributed to giving voice to the more digital excluded children, and to making school communities more visible, even the more geographically isolated ones (Silva et al., 2010).
Figure 2 – Creating georeferenced multisensory messages. The message contains a soundclip with the sound of a toilet flush, and a caption with the text: ―This garbage-bin smells bad‖
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The children that participated in the SchoolSenses project, both boys and girls, had no difficulties in using mobile phones and Google Earth to create and share their multisensory georeferenced messages, regardless of having had previous experiences with mobile phones or not (Silva et al., 2009a). On the contrary, all children enthusiastically engaged in producing creative sensory visions (see figure 2) of their schools’ positive and negative highlights (Silva et al., 2009a). This project gave voice to all the children of the participant classes (from two different schools), thus allowing them to produce multiple environmental views and representations that enriched the participatory process of creating and sharing personal and communal geographies (Silva et al., 2009b).
2.3 The USense2Learn Project: Using Senses and Sensors to Assess Georeferenced Schoolyards USense2Learn was a small project that involved a class with 25 children from an elementary school in Porto, Portugal. This project aimed to develop an ICT tool that could scaffold the complex task of linking concrete and abstract learning experiences (Silva et al., 2009a). The Usense2learn platform was designed, implemented and used in that curricular context, to enable children and teachers to use sensory information together with quantitative environmental information acquired by portable sensors in meaningful environmental education activities. Turning into reality what the SchoolSenses project defined as future work (Silva et al., 2009b), in this project children not only produced qualitative multisensory information (using photos, sound and text) but also enriched that information with videos and quantitative information acquired with portable electronic sensors (Silva et al., 2009a). The Usense2learn platform supported children in linking the abstract quantitative data from sensors to the concrete qualitative data acquired through senses (Silva et al., 2010). To create their visions of the environmental characteristics of the schoolyard, the children created georeferenced multisensory messages with a GPS enabled mobile phone, that also displayed in real time the data acquired by the sensors (Silva et al., 2009a). This combined information (photo, sound, text, video, and sensors’ data) was published on Google Earth (see figure 3).
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Figure 3 - A georeferenced multisensory message augmented with temperature (25,1º C) and humidity (24%) data, with a caption with the text ―We shouldn’t waste water‖, and a soundclip with the voice of a child saying ―The water is cold‖
The Usense2learn platform promoted inclusion by allowing each and every one of the children, together with their teachers, to explore (in the field with sensors and senses and in the classroom with Google Earth), create, communicate (both with the mobile phones) and reflect on qualitative and quantitative environmental information in their everyday contexts (Silva et al., 2010).
2.4 The School (Re)Creation Project: improving the quality of the digital inclusion through the creation of multisensory learnscapes Also fostering inclusion in Portuguese primary schools, the School (Re)Creation project was designed to address the collaborative use of ICT to support the participatory design and development of multisensory learning landscapes (learnscapes) in schoolyards. This research project will investigate how children can use electronic sensors to create schoolyards’ interactive objects that will contribute to diminish the ecological footprint of each school. The School (Re)Creation project will also study if the use of those interactive objects affords lowering the abstract level of environmental analysis (Silva et al., 2010). In future work, the School (Re)creation project will invite children and teachers to use environmental sensors, arduino platforms, virtual globes and augmented reality to assess their schoolyards and to create virtual and real objects and landscapes to reduce their ecological footprint.
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Aiming the engagement of marginalized and demotivated schoolchildren in curricular activities, the projects presented in this section allowed children to create, georeference and share their visions and opinions about the positive and negative characteristics of their schools, empowering them to participate in school life.
3. Conclusion This paper presented and briefly discussed the use of Volunteer Geographic Information as a way to empower citizens and communities to raise their voice. VGI has many flavours and should be used to maximize its impact. Sensors and other information gadgets are powerful allies to support the process of collecting, publishing and sharing VGI. A set of Portuguese projects were presented to illustrate the potential for inclusion of the creation of georeferenced multisensory information by schoolchildren. In the described projects, all the participant children, including the more disengaged and demotivated ones, played a part in the projects’ curricular activities that consisted of creating, georeferencing and publishing multisensory information about their schools and neighbourhoods. Those activities made it clear that children can create significant Volunteer Geographic Information, and that these new forms of knowledge participatory creation can contribute to enhance inclusion in elementary schools, making it possible for all children to have a voice in the context of their everyday activities and to make school communities more visible.
4. References Elwood, S., (2008), Volunteered geographic information: Future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS. GeoJournal, 72(3-4): 173-183 Goodchild, M. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69: 211–221. Panwapa world (2007), [Acedido em Dezembro de 2010] http://www.panwapa.com/ Ponte, J. P., Oliveira, H., Silva, M. J., e Reis, P. Internet@EB1: Relatório de Avaliação (ano lectivo de 2004/2005). Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional, Lisboa, 2006. Proboscis, Loren Chasse and the Jenny Hammond Primary School (2006). Sound Scavenging Report, http://proboscis.org.uk/topographies/SoundScavenging_Report.pdf [Acedido em Dezembro de 2010] Silva, M. J., Ferreira, E., Gomes, C. A. (2009a) Fostering Inclusion in Portuguese Schools: Key Lessons from ICT Projects. In Proceedings of IDC 2009 – Workhops. ACM Press: 298—301. Silva, M. J., Ferreira, E., Marcelino, M. J. (2010) Sensing and Georeferencing Schoolyards to Develop Inclusion. In Proceedings of the INCLUSO 2010 Conference on Social Media for
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Social Inclusion of Youth at Risk. Leuven, Belgium: 171-178. http://www.incluso.org/sites/default/files/proceedings_of_the_incluso2010_conference_pdf.pdf Silva, M. J., Gomes, C. A., Pestana, B., Lopes, J. C., Marcelino, M. J., Gouveia, C., Fonseca, A. (2009b) Adding Space and Senses to Mobile World Exploration. In Druin A. (ed.) Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. Morgan Kaufmann, Boston: 147—170. Silva, M. J., Hipolito, J., and Gouveia, C. (2003) Messages for environmental collaborative monitoring: The development of a multi-sensory Clipart. In Rauterberg M., Menozzi M. Wesson J. (eds.) Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT’03. IOS Press: 896-899. Whitelaw, G. S., Vaughan, H., Craig, B. and Atkinson, D. (2003) Community Based Environmental Monitoring in Canada. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 88: 409– 418.
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