Maps and Web-based Data - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 67

All these staged hyperlinks [SOU 03] reveal the presence of
the authors behind their applications and how viewers can get
in touch with them. The five maps presented here were
created by Web developers and they illustrate many ways of
presenting their work to potential future employers online.
The links offer various ways of coming into contact with the
designers. these maps thus bear various goals, from self-
expression (showing their creations) to communication
(coming into contact) to commercial goals (buying a topic).
4.2.2. Managing contingency
The second interpretation of bricolage is the notion of
technical bricolage embodied in the maps and which aims to
manage their technical contingency. Several disadvantages
of online APIs may obstruct the seamless operation of an
application. These include the limited number of queries
toward an API, their control mechanisms, their opacity when
it comes to the data accessed, the adaptation necessary to fit
with updated versions of APIs or changes in the data
sources.
The contingency of APIs is best exemplified by the two
maps of the corpus that ceased to be operational in the
course of the analysis. Firstly, Michael Young's map (see
Figure 4.6) no longer shows the data by the Associated Press.
As mashup dates back to 2005, the Google Maps application
has since undergone three updates, which may have made
the mashup obsolete. Moreover, the AP Website might have
installed barriers against the scraping of its content which
make it difficult to run the application. Another example is
the OWNI map (Table 4.1, map no. 5) which plots the
number of people taking part in demonstrations in France in
October 2011. The map no longer shows data on the map,
although the data are still accessible in a spreadsheet.