Producing Radiation Maps - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 89

- Researching the Navicrawler controversy [JAC 07]
further helped identifying radiation maps, which were then
added to the corpus.
The methodology used here are ethnography and
document analysis. Interviews were carried out by email,
Skype and in person with several of the participants
involved in the production of radiation data or their
mapping. These took place over July and August in 2011 7 .
Moreover, fieldwork in Tokyo over the month of August 2011
enabled us to observe the work done by the Safecast
organization on their data and maps. This ethnographic
approach was also complemented by a study on the
processing of the radiation data prior to maps. Furthermore,
the Navicrawler tool was used to identify sources of mapped
data 8 .
This combination of methods aimed to highlight the
process of map creation, the reasons why maps were deemed
more adequate to describe the situation than official data,
but also the motivations behind the creation of these maps
and the scopes embedded in these applications. With this
methodology, it was possible to trace the different stages
involved in the production of radiation maps and the
cooperation among various Web users to that end.
7 Several persons involved in the various steps of the mapmaking process
were interviewed, either by telephone or in person. Two in-depth
interviews were also carried out, the first one online with Marian
Steinbach, IT developer, and the second in person at the Tokyo
Hackerspace with Pieter Franken, co-founder of the Safecast association.
8 The latter indicates the output links that enable checking whether the
webpage includes the map citing the data sources used.