Maps and Web-based Data - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 73

and the project itself is presented as a subjective history of the
place based solely on individual testimonies. In this particular
case, the map is a support to locate the homes involved in the
interviewees' stories. Subjectivity can thus be the main goal
for maps that do not burden themselves with scientific
accuracy, such as the “Newtown Creek Speak.”
4.2.3.3. Shifting the validity criterion
A tension exists with the production of Web maps
between, on one side, its status as a scientific object
(combining a set of skills and a tested tradition of techniques
to record and represent the territory) and, on the other, the
online communication practices which tend toward
personalizing and including subjectivity. Is the desire for an
objective map reconcilable with subjectivity-based creations?
The map made by The Guardian with data published from
Wikileaks about the presence of the American Army in Iraq
plays on this ambivalence. The journalists not only published
a map, but they also made available the data used in the
form of a spreadsheet 23 , and described the various stages of
data processing to get to the analysis they report. Following
the trend of mashup developers to make their application
re-usable, The Guardian journalists encouraged remixes of
the same data by Web users which were then collected on an
online Flickr account. So the question of whether the data
are truthful is no longer situated in the map but with the
data itself: the map is only one way among many others to
use the data and The Guardian 's map takes place alongside
other interpretations of the same data. By publishing the
primary data, the journalists went beyond the status of
evidence encompassed in the map to locate it in the data.
23 www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-data-
journalism#data.