Producing Radiation Maps - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 98

- by extracting data from a website to generate structured
data;

- by going through websites that gather together

radiation data feeds, such as the Pachube platform;

- by entering the data found online or coming from Geiger
counters manually, instead of extracting them automatically
or going through any aggregating website.

As shown by Morita et al . [MOR 13], the constitution of a
public willing to produce radiation measurements is part of
an “infrastructural inversion” [BOW 94]. This method starts
with the idea that infrastructures are so embedded in our
everyday life that they become invisible, except once they
stop operating. In the present case, the different strategies
given to counteract the inefficiency of the government and
TEPCO in providing information on radiation levels drove
some citizens to shed light on the government radiation-
monitoring network infrastructure. Once the inversion was
made, and in the face of the multiple available sources, on
what did cartographers base their choices for selecting data
for their maps? Why did they use certain types of data and
leave out others?

6.2. Three attitudes toward radiation data sources

It is possible to categorize the choices made by radiation
cartographers when it comes to what data to feed their maps
into three types: the cartographers who used only alternative
data, those who used only official data and those who used
data from both sources.

6.2.1. Using alternative data

The potential flaws in amateur radiation monitoring and
the slowness with which a production and sharing network