Maps on the Web: How far have we really come?

By Martina Miliani

If there is a message conveyed by Walter Crane’s Imperial Federation Map, it is the power of the British Empire. The Imperial Federation Map dates back to 1886. Here, not only do the cartography elements remind the viewer of the supremacy of Britain on the whole world, but so do the subjects appearing as a frame around the map. At the feet of Britannia sit two women who represent the colonized citizens, clearly in submission. And although Crane was a socialist, an endorser of work-based cooperation between communities, it is precisely the empire, celebrated in his creed, that is the only one which can be the herald of “freedom” and “fraternity”.

But let’s go back to the proper map. Britain is bigger than it really is, and also other countries’ proportions are misrepresented. This is the effect of the so-called Mercator projection, which increases the size of the objects farther away from the equator. Very useful for nautical purposes, this projection seems to be the ideal in order to represent Britain and its colonies more extended than they really are.

However, from the past to the present day not so much has changed. If we think that the online maps we use when looking for a restaurant or trying to reach a new friend’s home are fairer, we are probably mistaken. Let’s take Google Maps for example: it uses the same kind of projection—the Mercator one. The transparency and objectivity of maps on the web is an issue on which many contemporary geographers are focused.

The invisibility of places seems to be not only a consequence of “offline” causes. One billion users employs Google Maps. The Page Rank classifies web pages and gives them a certain position in the SERP—or, the Search Engine Results Page—based on the link computation; the more a page is linked by others, the more it is considered “relevant”. According to the Menlo Park techno-giant, the rank of the pages based on this algorithm works only for the user’s query on the search engine. Meaning, it does not affect the position of places in the user’s research results in Google Maps.

In his paper “Mapping Narrative Cartography”, Sébastien Caquard seems not to agree with Google; he explains “the impact that the Google ranking algorithm plays in ordering and framing places of interest” should also be considered. Caquard, Geography professor at the University of Concordia, refers to a study performed by Matthew Zook and Mark Graham in 2007, who used Google Maps to look for places such as restaurant and alcohol treatment centers. In spite of distance from the location of the researchers—as the human geographer Tim Cresswell reports of the experiment in his book “Place: An Introduction”—at the top of the result list were “institutions with large corporate presences”. Cresswell continues, “local business and services are often demoted or invisible – even when they are closer and more convenient. Thus invisibility in the software is reflected in invisibility in place”. So, if proximity isn’t the only feature taken into consideration by Google Maps, what else is?

OpenStreetMap (OSM), instead, is known as the Wikipedia of maps. It provides a free, open-source base map for the entire world, and it counted over 387,000 users registered in April 2011. As Wikipedia demonstrates, users can have a strong motivation to contribute and share, and the user-generated maps created in OSM often have nothing to be jealous of in government-created maps. Furthermore, for those who want to use OSM maps, whatever their purpose may be, a source quotation is enough.

Nevertheless, in 2010 geographer Jeremy Crampton asked “is OpenStreetMap an ‘indigenous’ project?” The high-definition satellite images available on OSM, indeed, are provided by Microsoft. And while Bill Gate’s company allows users to collaborate and keep the ownership of their own data, at the same time users “are granting to Microsoft free permission to use, copy, distribute, display, publish, transcode and otherwise modify [their] submission”, according to Microsoft’s terms of use. So, it is thanks to Microsoft that a project like OSM was born, but the corporation keeps all the rights on users’ work.

The impartiality of user-generated content needs to be examined closer. In a paper titled “Gender and the GeoWeb”, Monica Stephens of the University of Arizona writes that “as a result of low female participation, the features and the attributes in OSM reflect a male view of the landscape”. She also discusses how offline issues of access to technology, income and race continue to have repercussions online.

Thus, similar to Google Maps, a project such as OSM could also seem to be not so “open” or “egalitarian”. Maps have always been the outcome of a subjective vision over the world. One should be aware that the arrival of the Internet didn’t change that.