Mapheads and roadgeeks: the new cartography [Technically Speaking]

Abstract

When google launched its Maps service in early 2005, it didn???t include an application programming interface (API), but that didn???t stop Paul Rademacher from figuring out how to use Maps to display markers indicating available apartments in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was not only the first mashup (information created by combining data from multiple sources) but also the unofficial beginning of neogeography and neocartography. · Neogeography is the practice of combining online maps with data–such as blog posts, websites, and annotations–related to locations on those maps. It???s a subset of neocartography, also called citizen cartography, which is mapmaking as practiced by nonprofessional cartographers like Paul Rademacher and, nowadays, just about everyone else. Services such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, as well as the availability of massive location-based data sets, have made neogeographers of many of us. Great chunks of the population have been revealed as mapheads, people who are passionate about maps and cartography. · This cartophilia takes many forms, but one of the strangest (and hardest to pronounce) is cartocacoethes (kart-oh-kakoh- EE-theez), the tendency to see random patterns as maps. This mouthful of a word combines the prefix carto-, ???maps,??? and the word cacoethes, ???an itch or compulsion.??? It has led to the fun disciplines of accidental cartography and found cartography, where everyday objects bear an uncanny resemblance to maps. The opposite, in a sense, is counter cartocacoethes, where maps are concealed from prying eyes by making them look like something noncartographic. · Geonerds combine their passion for maps and their topophilia (the love of landscape) into new hobbies. One of the most popular is geocaching, a type of scavenger hunt in which participants are given the geographical coordinates of a cache of items and then use their GPS devices (smart- phones, nowadays) to locate t- e cache. Geocachers fall into a variety of categories. The megacachers are the alphas of the geocaching world because they???ve found the most caches (numbering in the thousands), while power cachers enjoy the challenge of finding as many caches as possible in a set period of time (often using power trails, paths that yield lots of caches). Extreme cachers take only the most dangerous geotrails, while puzzle cachers have to work out a riddle or similar puzzle before they can locate a cache. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the nongeocachers, who may accidentally happen upon a cache and are sometimes called muggles (because they???re the geocaching equivalent of nonwizards in the Harry Potter books). Particularly prized are virgin caches: Getting to one of these before anyone else earns the geocacher a coveted FTF (???first to find???).