Producing Radiation Maps - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 91

send data to Pachube, a public sensor feed
aggregator” 12 . Akiba, Freakslab blog, March 24, 2011
The Safecast group, previously named RDTN, also played
an important role in producing and distributing alternative
counters. This association results from the cooperation
between the Web communication agency, Uncorked Studio,
based in Portland, United States, and members of the Tokyo
Hackerspace, based in Japan. A campaign on the Website
Kickstarter helped collecting enough funds to set up a
network of independent Geiger counters 13 . Subsequently, the
hackers from this network developed their own Geiger
counters, called bGeigie and took radiation measurements by
car before publishing the data on the Safecast Website. The
data from Geiger counters can be visualized on a map while
they are put online for download.
6.1.2. Extracting data from official Websites
While older Geiger counters were being restored and new
ones were being created, another method to obtain data was
to extract them from official websites and to generate
structured files 14 . Marian Steinbach, a German programmer
who describes himself as a “user experience designer” and
“information visualization enthusiast” 15 , was one of the
contributors to researching, collecting and transforming the
radiation data from the Japanese government Website. On
March 15, he launched an online spreadsheet (Googledocs) to
ask for the contribution of Web users in finding online
sources of radiation measurements. Marian Steinback was
searching for data with both temporal values - to be able to
12 See: http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/Hacking-a-Geiger-
Counter-in-Nuclear-Tokyo.html.
13 www.kickstarter.com/projects/1038658656/rdtnorg-radiation-detection-
hardware network-in-ja.
14 The Web scraping technique is explained in section 4.1.3.
15 www.sendung.de.