serendipityoucity

Addendum:

There is a 48 hour grace period for submissions until midnight Tuesday.

I also submitted the following addendum to my earlier submission based on a discussion on CivicAccess List between Jennifer Bell and Russell McOrmond and public education work over at Visible Government. Thanks to both of you!

Another solution to improve Canada’s Copyright law is to abolish crown copyright all together and follow the lead of the NZ Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework. Wherever Crown Copyright would be used, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) would be used instead. The proposal argues:

“Now more than ever is there a very present need to bring information the Government holds on behalf of its people into the public domain so that it may be used in ways that stimulate innovation, generate cultural creativity, social interaction and dialogue, while also kick starting economic growth.”

This is very interesting and could be very helpful for the dissemination of government data. Also, the 2009, UK government’s Power of Information Task Force final report found that Crown Copyright was a major barrier to the re-use of Public Sector Information, and recommended that Crown Copyright be changed to a ‘Crown Commons’ license to encourage re-use.

The creation of progressive unrestricted use licenses by some government departments has moved the access discourse toward citizen participation, these are not global enough across government, but are an extremely innovative and creative step in the right direction.

Today is the last day!

Below is my submission to the copyright consultation. I read a number of submissions, and clearly, I am more of a novice on the topic than I thought. I am not at all an expert in this area, but spoke about what I know, in my own language and hope other non experts will also add their view. I saw that many submissions are about art related content and have not yet come across science nor data topics. If you come across any can you point me to them?

Public Sector Information, Government Data, Government Digital Maps, Publicly Funded Research Data - belong to citizens.

Author: Tracey P. Lauriault

Contact information: tlauriau@gmail.com

I am a researcher and a geomatician. I have worked for many years with a number of community based organizations, not-for-profit groups, research groups and the private sector to create evidence based maps, indicators, tables, analysis, and reports for decision making. I have worked in housing and homelessness, environment, quality of life indicators, child care, education, public health, social planning, etc. I am also a founding member of CivicAccess.ca and a co-author of datalibre.ca.

The greatest impediment to my work has been the high cost of public sector data & information and restrictive licensing regimes that surround these. A few examples help illustrate this: Statistics Canada Data is cost prohibitive and data pricing seems arbitrary; Vital Statistics Data are very expensive; the database that links postal codes to electoral ridings is cost prohibitive; postal code base maps are very expensive; non-private health data from CIHI are very expensive again; there are arbitrary reasons for not releasing non private non security risk data from numerous federal governmental agencies, and there are very restrictive use licenses for public sector information in general and especially the aforementioned Federal organizations.

High costs, restrictive licensing, arbitrary policies and practices, and the government acting as a monopoly on access to public sector data - data citizens have already paid for with taxation - has greatly affected the kinds of research I can pursue, has strained the pocket books of charity organizations and has left citizens and community based organizations marginalized in democratic debates since they do not have access to the data they need to formulate their arguments.

I have tried, as a citizen to analyze the characteristics of my neighbourhood, compare those with others, develop a business plan, investigate the socio-economic profiles of school catchment areas and school closures, or do a spatial location analysis for a new park. I have the skill, knowledge and tools to do this work, however, the cost of the data and use restrictions either a) make it to expensive to do this work or b) restricts how I can disseminate the results.

There seems to be a lack of coherence from the Federal Government of Canada regarding access to and fair use of public data by the public. These are data that the public has paid for already. Crown Copyright and cost recovery for public data impede participatory democracy and puts citizens, community groups and small businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to evidence based planning. It also thwarts innovation since instead of focussing on value added activities, businesses, researchers, non-profit groups and citizens are scrambling to pay for and to adhere to multiply conflicting licenses as opposed to a license that makes it easy to use these data, share these data and add value to them.

To include citizens in the process of decision making I recommend an unrestricted user license such as that developed by two Federal Government programs GeoBase and Geogratis. Also, the government should act less as a monopolist regarding its public data and more as a public agency and abolish cost recovery policies, and create an infrastructure to share these data with their necessary metadata and licenses. We also need to consider the long term preservation of these to ensure they can be disseminated for the long term. This I believe will enable and facilitate the process of citizens and the Government working together. This will also provide a way for us to think together, particularly on troublesome issues such as homelessness.

Sincerely Tracey

I was discussing the use of remote sensing images for a variety of purposes with my academic advisor who recalled a book about magicians who staged a variety of illusions to fool air photographers during WWII. We also discussed the time stamps on remotely sensed images and how some were nefariously used during the first Iraq war to show how the Iraqis were encroaching on Kuwait - photos going to the border but not the photos showing a turn around and move away from the border that were taken shortly after.

Things are not always as they seem and you cannot believe everything that you see!

Tracey P. Lauriault, Sebastien Caquard, Christine Homuth, and Fraser Taylor (Carleton), 2009,  Pilot Cybercartographic Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness in Canada.  May 27 W36 Urban Geography II – Social Session Canadian Association of Geographers portion of the SSHCR Congress.

The Pilot Cybercartographic Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness renders in maps and interactive graphs well defined and accepted Canadian homelessness risk indicators. When these indicators are visualized in an engaging manner readers can more readily distinguish trends, patterns and issues that cannot be conveyed in static data tables. More importantly, they can influence public policy. The Atlas is a partnership project between the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC) at Carleton University and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) Quality of Life Reporting System (QoLRS) in collaboration with the City of Toronto, the Communauté Métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) and the City of Calgary. Atlas modules include the visualization of indicators across time at three scales: Canada, 23 municipalities and 3 featured cities/metropolitan areas. The City of Toronto provides data to show their aging social housing stock; poverty and the disproportionate spending on rent are explored in City of Calgary neighbourhoods while la CMM tells the story of social housing and housing affordability for lower-income renting populations. The presentation will discuss how the atlas was developed, data access restrictions and costs, the importance of innovative partnerships and collaborations with cities.

Lauriault, Tracey P. and Gitte Lindgaard, 2009, Scented Cybercartography: Exploring Possibilities. May 30 s44 Urban Geography VIII – Cultural Session Canadian Association of Geographers portion of the SSHCR Congress.

Olfactory cartography is part of the emerging discipline of cybercartography (Taylor 2003), a transdisciplinary endeavour that investigates, among other things, the integration of multimedia, multi-sensory, and multimodal data into digital atlases and maps. The physiology and psychology of the olfactory system, its special characteristics, its influence on performance and memory, and some of the issues that make the study of olfaction difficult are addressed. Characterizing, classifying, and labeling scents is problematic, and it is recommended that methods from other communities of practice be adopted and adapted by cartographers. Literature from a wide range of disciplines, including olfactory geography, is reviewed, and a number of innovative ideas are provided. In addition, olfactory applications in different areas such as marketing, art installations, film, and virtual environments are described, as are a range of currently available olfactory diffusion devices. These, however, have not been explored in a cartographic context, nor have they undergone usability testing. We conclude that it is too early to provide cartographic guidelines and methods but that scented applications, odour diffusion technologies, and olfactory data collection methods provide knowledge that can be applied toward developing a scented cartography.

Tracey P. Lauriault, Peter L. Pulsifer and Fraser Taylor & Barbara L. Craig. 2009. The Preservation and Archiving of Geospatial Digital Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Cartographers. May 30 S33 Cartography and Spatial Data Session Canadian Association of Geographers portion of the SSHCR Congress.

In terms of preserving our digital cartographic heritage, the last quarter of the 20th century has some similarities to the dark ages. In many cases, only fragments or written descriptions of the digital maps exist.  In other cases, the original data have disappeared or can no longer be accessed due to changes in technical procedures and tools. Where data has not been lost, as with the Canada Land Inventory, the cost of recovery has been high.  Based on experience gained through participation in a major research project focused on preservation, the development of several digital cartographic frameworks, systems and artifacts (e.g. Maps and atlases), multidisciplinary work with archivists, data preservationists, data librarians, public officials and private sector cartographers, the authors discuss possible strategies toward the preservation of maps, geospatial data, and associated technologies – cartographic heritage.

I am really excited that this woman is coming to town! I try to watch the NFB film about her work Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics just before every census. It is because of her that unpaid work gets tracked and women all over the world stopped calling themselves homemakers and started calling themselves nurses, nutritionists, childcare providers, nursing home care attendants, handywomen etc. on the Census.

She was also instrumental at tracking the unpaid work of women in subsistence economies. She revealed how their work, instrumental at the survival of the household, never made it into national accounting systems! She developed time maps to assess how a woman’s day was structured versus a mans. That technique has made its way into many development practices to truly assess the work of women in overseas development projects but also to assess the affects of the decisions made by male leaders on women’s behalf, and that affected women’s lives in a real way. Also, she was instrumental at making New Zealand a nuclear free zone!

Her book If women Counted is what got me to really think about the politics of the census, the politics behind the ‘objective’ and seemingly benign questions that were being asked and how those influence how we envision our societies and what deserved to be tracked across time. That book also got me excited when the long form of the Census would show up at my door or the short form for that matter!

Octopus Books and Oxfam are thrilled to welcome Marilyn Waring and launch her new book 1 Way 2 C the World: Writings 1984-2006 on Monday, April 27th at 7:00 p.m. at the Main Branch of the Ottawa Public Library (120 Metcalfe).

Marilyn Waring is a truly absorbing figure known as a distinguished public intellectual, a leading feminist thinker, environmentalist, social justice activist, and for her early political career after election to New Zealand’s parliament at age twenty-three. Assembling some of her most thought-provoking writings, 1 Way 2 C the World is a compelling collection of essays and reflections on many important issues of our time. Written in lively, crisp, and often humourous prose, Waring provides illuminating commentary on topics such as gay marriage, human rights, globalization, the environment, and international relations and development.

Including accounts of being in India at the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and in Ethiopia’s during the 1984 famine, Waring’s vivid writing remains contemporarily relevant, while this collection includes recent writings on the post-9/11 world. Brimming with pieces that are essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the world, 1 Way 2 C the World is bound to fascinate and inspire.

What! Getting inspired by the history & philosophy of science, mathematics, & statistics!

Not in my wildest dreams would I have thought this was to be my fate! But alas here I am digging up papers and books on the issue and can’t wait to get out the pillows, a blanket, get on the sofa with a pot of tea on a Friday night to read these juicy academic accounts of numbers, methods, models, categorization and the unique arrangement of scientific factoids shaping and being shaped by us!

Yesterday I attended a great lecture by David N. Livingstone : Cultural Politics and the Racial Cartographics of Human Origins, where he discussed his investigation of expressions of genetic narratives and how their resulting mappings are culturally appropriated, made real and considered ‘objective’ science.  In his lecture he made reference to Theodore Porter’s work on the history of statistics.  I did some digging and can’t wait to get my hands on The Rise of Statistical Thinking & Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life - sounds like wonderful socio-technological imaginings stuff.  And as previously mentioned elsewhere my discovery of Ian Hacking’s work, and his paper Making Up People which discusses the power of statistical categorization and how socially constructed nomilazations are made ‘real’ and make ‘real’.  Making ‘real’ is important, since once the category exists, as Livingstone pointed out in his lecture yesterday, a community emerges.  He made reference to the discovery that there are quite a few 25 year old gentleman who marry 75 year old women!  Where is the movie I wonder? We normally only ever see the older (usually unfit fellows!) with young babes in films. But I digress!  Benedict Anderson, in Imagine Communities also makes clear how the colonialists institutions of Map, Census and Museums in Asia, said something about the subjects they counted, categorized, rendered in images and organized into collections but also say much about what the colonialists were thinking and potentially less about the subjects they were studying - creating - imagining - manufacturing.

This is wonderful stuff, and inspiring as I am embark on the study of the history of Canada’s Census, the mapping of Canada’s territory, the infrastructures associated with these, but more trying to understand how infrastructure, mapping and statistics make us up, how they help us imagine ‘us’, their import in state formation and the absence of citizens in that process, and what does it mean when citizens, the doers of citizenship do not have access to the means to do citizenship - do not get to help with the story telling, questions the stories being told - or what happens when geographic imaginings are only governmental.  I want to understand who gets to count, map, make categories, judge and enact policies that are performed daily and how they got the mandate to do so.

It is also about placing in conceptual space, the pragmatic work I have been diligently doing for quite some time, helping me frame it in a broader context, how I have been implicated in ‘making stuff up’ and not necessarily in a critical way, not in a bad way, but mostly not thinking about the implications of that work, just doing it.

I am looking at Many Eyes and some of the NYTimes multimedia interactive reporting visualizations, and well, they are producing truly wonderful stuff. What an awesome team (sigh no girls though!)!

Here are links to some of their work, each and everyone is beautiful and tell a story with data:

• Election Results
  
• Faces of the Dead
• The Election Day Word Train 
• "I Hope So Too."
• Innaugural addressess
• Republican Debate: Analyzing the Details
• A Year of Parking Tickets
• Represent
• All of Inflation’s Little Parts

Here are a few articles:

• A conversation with Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter about interactive graphics at the New York Times (jon Udell)
  
• Talk to the Newsroom: Interactive News Collaborative
• The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady
• Making sense of data at The New York Times
  
• Old Media Interview: Aron Pilhofer, interactive guru, editor at The New York Time

For those of you who would like to see me be very nervous, and more importantly who wish to make me more nervous by being there - here is your chance!

Ph.D. Thesis Proposal Presentation

Candidate: Tracey P. Lauriault

Time: 2:00 p.m., Thursday, January 15, 2009

Place: Room B341 Loeb Building

WORKING TITLE:

Data, Infrastructures and Geographic Imagination: Mapping Data Access Discourses in Canada

Micheal Geist and Dan Albahary produced this documentary film about DRM and issues related to copyright law in Canada.  Yours truly appears a few times talking about DRM and data.