The term literacy simply means the ability to read and write; however, there is nothing simple about it. Humans are not born with reading and writing skills; it is something that is taught to us by our teachers, parents, and peers. In fact, it can be argued that very few of us master literacy, because doing so takes nearly a lifetime of study and practice. Additionally, because language is culturally defined, literacy means different things depending where you are in the world and at what point in history you are becoming a literate individual.
Spatial literacy has been defined as “the competent and confident use of maps, mapping, and spatial thinking to address ideas, situations, and problems with daily life, society, and the world around us” (Sinton 2014). This definition has been provided by Diana Sinton, a geographer at Cornell University, who refers to spatial thinking as “the ability to visualize and interpret location, distance, direction, relationships, change, and movement over space”. Similar to the term literacy, individuals are not born spatially literate. The skills of spatial literacy and spatial thinking are learned over time, through study and practice, and are culturally defined. However, what distinguishes spatial literacy from literacy is that our world is currently experiencing a dramatic paradigm shift in how we use maps, how we produce and use spatial data, and the availability of ways we can harness spatial thinking to address the challenges facing our changing world. The mass network of geospatial technologies and data discussed in the previous chapter have placed us in the midst of a geospatial revolution, and so the need for a spatially literate society has never before been so important. Here we discuss three reasons why spatial literacy matters to you.
1. Ubiquity of Geospatial Technologies: In 2013 the United Nations reported that there are now more people in the world with mobile phones than there are with flushable toilets. This means that there are likely millions of people who live in certain parts of the world who have with them a location-based device that act as a geospatial technology, but lack the basic sanitary conditions that most of us in the developed world take for granted. Geospatial technologies are everywhere – they are ubiquitous. Every phone, whether it be a smartphone or not, contains a GPS receiver chip that can identify the location of the phone (and consequentially the person holding it) at any time. GPS receivers do not rely on cell coverage; instead they utilize the numerous satellites orbiting the earth in order to determine the location of the device (more about this in the next module). Therefore, hundreds of millions of people are connected to a global network in which everyone’s location is known, and that network includes you. Wi-fi enabled tablets, laptops, and even home computers are all part of this network as their location on the Earth is known. Considering your membership to this global network, is it not important to know your role in it? How are your daily activities in which you utilize your location-based device recorded and shared with others? How does your access to this network change when you leave your home, go from indoor to outdoor environments, or enter into a new country? How does your mobile device influence your behavior by navigating you through city streets or providing you with information given your location? Without knowing the answers to this question, we risk being ignorant members in the world’s largest community.
The ubiquity of geospatial technologies also places at risk our current and potential state of spatial literacy. While mapping apps provide us with the opportunity to navigate around the world from the comfort of our own home, they also do much of the work for us in describing out how to get from point A to point B. Figuring out directions to our intended destination before leaving our home is no longer a necessity. When was the last time you found yourself with a paper map in your hands for planning a trip or to find where you are? Our reliance on mapping apps, especially those we use on our mobile devices, potentially erodes our skills in understanding location, distance, direction, and the relationships between features in a landscape. We are currently in a time where the pendulum of spatial literacy can easily swing either way: we can let geospatial technologies mindlessly guide us through our days, or we can become educated on the role of geospatial technologies in shaping our lives and society.
Before moving forward, test your spatial literacy by examining the map below. Where is this lake? How far do you think it is from your current location? What direction is it from your current location? At what scale is this map presenting the world? To help you answer these questions, click on the dropdown arrow in the top-right corner of the map and select Imagery with Labels. You can also click on the “zoom out” button (-) on the left side of the map to get a better idea of where this lake is located. If you don’t immediately know the answers to these questions, you will by the time you complete this module.
2. The New World of Data: Just after the turn of the 21st century, the World Wide Web as we knew it went through a dramatic change. Prior to this point we were consumers of information. We would go online, enter a URL or some keywords in a search engine, and returned to our web browser was a website that contained text, images, downloadable data, or a link to another page or website. The flow of information was one way: from website to user. Email and primitive forms of messaging were the main ways that you were able to input information on the web. Other than that, you consumed what information was put in front of you. Then came along the web 2.0 and everything changed: we became information producers. Facebook is a key example where you are able to not only upload a profile of yourself, but you can continuously add information in the form of messages and photos to expand this profile, and you can provide comments on the content provided by other people. Similarly, Twitter allows you to produce information on what you are thinking, Flickr allows you to produce information on what you are seeing, and Foursquare allows you to produce information on where you are. The term web 2.0 refers to the change in the web’s framework that provided users with the ability to create content (referred to literally as user-generated content) freely and flexibly.
Are you familiar with Twitter and Flickr? If not, now is a great time to get started. Go to their respective homepages and find out what they are really about. Also, if you sign up for a Twitter account you can search tweets in the map below. You can also search for images on Flickr in the map below, but you don’t need an account for this. Once you have created your account, go to the “Explore Layers” tab in the menu of the map below (third icon from the right), then select “Social”. Next, click on the unchecked box next to the Twitter icon, and provide your username and password. You should now be able to return to the Social window and enter in search terms that will allow you to see tweets and Flickr photos related to these terms. The default term is “weather”; however, you can click on the settings icon (the blue cog wheel icon) and change the search term. Now you can see people’s individual location where they expressed a thought or took an image of what they believed was something interesting.
This new world of data, where anyone can create content and share it around the world in just seconds, has important implications. First, and most importantly for us, is that social media applications like Flickr, Twitter and Fouresquare can all provide information about where you were when you created the data. Consider what you could do with this vast array of location-based information. For example, what if all the Tweets from a single time period with the same #hashtag, were collected from the web. You could place all these tweets on a map and show how people’s location influences what they think about a particular topic. Similarly, all the tweets with the same hashtag can be collected over time to see how a particular event took place over space and time. The availability of lots and lots of data on the web (what some would refer to as Big Data – more on that later) that is created from social media and other forms of data production are available for all of us to utilize to make sense of the world. However, it will take a spatially literate mind to do so.
The flip side of this new world of data is that we make ourselves available to the world in ways never before imagined. It does not take much computational expertise to find out where we were when certain photos were taken or where we were when we tweeted something about our day. The web 2.0, social media, and location-based services thus present a nuanced security risk. The more content we generate to the web, the more information we reveal about ourselves, our behavior, and the location of where we live our lives. Thus, being part of the geospatial revolution, the web 2.0, and the network of millions of people across the world requires an informed mind – a mind that is not only spatially literate and understands how geospatial technologies work, but also a mind that understands the broader societal use of geospatial technologies and the consequences of the new world of data.
3. Democratizing Mapping: There once was a time when only cartographers made maps. Much training in the art and science of map making was required before an individual had the required skills to create an informative and visually pleasing map. Once again, times have changed. There now exists a variety of mapping tools available over the web, such as Google Maps, ArcGIS Online, and MapBox, amongst others. These mapping applications allow users to take data from the web and easily create a map at scales ranging from the neighborhood to the world. Map makers do not necessarily need to concern themselves with much of the technical details that goes into to properly representing the three-dimensional surface of the Earth on a two-dimensional computer screen as these applications take care of that for us (but these are things that can be learned in more advanced geospatial courses). Some mapping applications make it as easy as dragging a text file with location-based data from your desktop and dropping it on a map in order to have points appear. Adding photos, text, and other data to maps can also be easily accomplished with these applications, potentially enriching one’s map far beyond what was possible with paper maps. Furthermore, rather than making a paper map that requires individuals to have a physical copy in order to see your work, mapping applications can easily be shared with the world over the web.
Map making has become democratized, and the implications are profound. Online newspapers and magazines as well as independent websites all utilize web-based mapping as a way of helping to tell a story. You too will soon have the capability to make a web-based map and share it with the world. You too will have the ability to download data from the web and combine it with data you create yourself in order to develop a customized map about a topic important to you. You too will know how to tell a story using a web-based map that can address ideas, situations, and problems with daily life, society, and the world around us.
To see how easy it is to map your location, click on the Find My Location icon in the map below, and the click on the red point in the contents window in the left side of the map, and then click on the blue dot in the map. You can enter your name to let others see that you are a member of the global geospatial community, and you can click on the red points in the map to see who else is involved. You can also enter your role in this community: are you an Instructor, Student, an Entrepreneur, or just an interested Citizen? You can also use the tools on the top-left corner of the map to navigate your way around the map. Don’t be afraid to explore! If you ever get lost just click the home icon.