The Shape of Public Engagement - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 132

A number of data manipulation strategies can be related
to map properties:
- The digitization of radiation data from counters was the
first requirement to make the data re-usable. We have seen,
for example, the work done by Akiba at the Tokyo
Hackerspace to digitize the data from an analogous Geiger
counter.
- The data from official websites are extracted and
restructured to make them easily re-usable. The data must
be structured to be aggregated with a Google Maps base
map.
- The geographic metadata (latitude, longitude) of the
radiation data were necessary as they had to be plotted on a
map, as discussed with Marian Steinbach's work in helping
other Web users to extract and locate the sensors more
accurately.
Furthermore, cartographers also often extracted the data
manually. This was the case of Andreas Schneider who, with
the Institute for Information Design Japan, took over both
the extraction and filtering of the data, along with the
shaping of the base map. Here again, Marian Steinbach's
motive to obtain data originated in his initial project to
provide visualizations of the radiation 5 . The Safecast
association also displayed data collected from the Maps
section 6 of their own website. From the similarities in these
profiles, it can be deduced that these people shared the goal
of producing a map and therefore put in place the means to
do so by structuring the data.
5 Interview with Marian Steinbach, August 25, 2011.
6 http://blog.safecast.org/maps.