Unit 4: Planning a Cultural Mapping Project

Toolkits

Numerous toolkits have been developed internationally to inform, guide, and advise cultural mapping projects. The toolkits provide a useful reference point for helping you think through and planning a cultural mapping project, defining stakeholders, engaging with community members, and considering how and to whom the results should be delivered. They also reveal regional and local cultural specificities and the different contexts and purposes for which cultural mapping is carried out. We encourage you to explore the cultural mapping toolkit examples listed below:

Cultural Mapping Toolkit (2007), developed and published by the Creative City Network of Canada in partnership with 2010 Legacies Now. (https://www.saskculture.ca/content/grant_application_files/cultural_mapping_toolkit.pdf)

Building Critical Awareness of Cultural Mapping: A Workshop Facilitation Guide (2009), published by UNESCO. (http://www.iapad.org/wp-content/
uploads/2015/07/nigel.crawhall.190314e.pdf)

Mapping the Creative Industries: A Toolkit (2010), developed by BOP Consulting for the British Council. (https://creativeconomy. britishcouncil.org/media/uploads/files/English_mapping_the_creative_industries_a_toolkit_2-2.pdf)

Pacific Cultural Mapping, Planning and Policy Toolkit (2011), developed by Katerina Teaiwa and Colin Mercer for the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (www.researchgate.net/publication/216004693_Pacific_Cultural_Mapping_Planning_and_Policy_Toolkit)

Cultural Mapping Toolkit: A Guide for Participatory Cultural Mapping in Local Communities (2019), published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Philippines (https://ncca.gov.ph/wpcontent/uploads/2020/08/WebPosting_
Cultural-Mapping-Toolkit.pdf)

4Is

While it is not feasible to provide a detailed guide to the many aspects of planning a cultural mapping project (which are well outlined in toolkits), thinking about the project in terms of “4Is” – Investigation, Involvement, Interpretation, and Impact – can help you spotlight some of the key questions and topics to consider in its design and implementation.

Considering these “4Is” will help you locate your own approach and orientation.

Investigation	• What do you need to know? • What do you wish to discover, or to make visible? • What types of resources do you aim to connect? • Tangible? Intangible? • Geographic scope and coverage? • Why? • What type of resource do you wish to create? • How? Where? Sources?
Involvement	• Who should be involved? • Who else? • Who’s missing? • How to contact them? How to engage? How to involve them? • What is their level of involvement? • What are the opportunities for co-creation? • When is the best timing for contacting each group?
Interpretation	• How will you analyze the knowledge collected? • How will the participants be involved in the analysis? • How will plurality be treated? • How can the original voices and narratives of participants be maintained during the processes of analysis and communication? • How will knowledge be interpreted and explained? • How will findings be communicated? • How will the participants be involved in the communication? • What are your target publics? City council? Other government agencies? Cultural agents? Tourists? Researchers? General public? Particular groups of residents?
Impact	• To what ends? • How can knowledge and connections be activated? • Who should attend, act? • What next? • Longevity and evolution of the project over time?

Technological considerations

In this unit we have emphasized hand-drawn and hand-made cultural mapping practices as vehicles for planning, identity formation, participatory decision-making, and community engagement. But technological innovations are ever-advancing in the areas of creating data (e.g., compilation of geographically distributed ‘public’ electronic inputs such as Tweets, and intentional inputs from crowd-sourced or other dynamic data streams), meshing together data from different sources (with attention to metadata, system integration and interoperability, and dynamic and interactive presentations), analyzing data (e.g., data aggregation, layering,
mash-ups, modeling, etc.), displaying data (e.g., map layers, dynamic interactivity, ever improving graphical renderings), and mobile usability (e.g., on-site demand, manipulation, and customized uses)—all are influencing the evolution of cultural mapping.

We observe that these shifting and advancing technologies are engendering new ways of collecting and thinking through data, and new vocabulary for technical processes that can become points of connection and shared methods across diverse projects. Organizing and mapping data on technological platforms becomes an integral part of blending together the analysis and presentation processes, with the enabled techniques and capabilities defining and inventing ways of exploring, combining, and understanding the data.

Site-developers must consider different functionalities and infrastructure needs of different types of users, from both back-end and front-end (public) perspectives, preferences, and capabilities. In presenting, (re)presenting, and (re)formatting data and knowledge, there is a heightened focus on ‘hotspots’, ‘trails and pathways’ to navigate, ‘timelines’, and storytelling. As well, attention to contemporary practices of exchange and sharing is evident, leading to the development of integrated dialogue platforms and other sharing modes. These key elements are defining flows and movements through information, enabling new approaches to personalized meaning-making with the data collected, and informing and inspiring new cultural mapping approaches. These new approaches and emerging projects are re-centering neglected histories, telling different narratives, and reformatting and animating knowledge for new generations.

Coupled with the possibilities of the new technologies, however, we must remain vigilant and wary of the potential widening of inequities. For those involved in cultural development work, especially, this calls for heightened attention to questions of access and skills/capacity as well as to the social and political consequences of the societal uses of these technologies. These concerns relate also to issues of relations between outsiders bringing specialized knowledge and cartographic skills into a community-engaged map-making process, and the importance of building cartographic literacy within communities—as is the focus of many counter-mapping and Indigenous mapping initiatives in recent years (see, e.g., Johnson, Louis, and Pramono, 2005). In addition, it is important to recognize that the process of making implicit knowledge explicit, and mobilizing the symbolic forms through which local residents understand and communicate their sense of place, also have ethical and political dimensions.

Unit 4 Activities
Check your understanding of Unit 4 by completing the quick, automatically assessed activities below.
In your reflective journal practice, you will use the 4Is to plan your project from Unit 1.
You are invited to:

You are invited to keep a reflective journal to process key concepts, and to use for future reference. Drawing will be part of your journaling practice; if you choose to keep an electronic journal, you may want to consider ways to add images (taking digital photographs of hand-drawn work, or using a stylus and a tablet). Paper or video journals are another option – the choice is yours.

Project Plan

Create a plan for your Unit 1 imaginary project! Use the 4Is to develop your project’s approach and orientation. Use your journal to best support the way that you learn and understand new things. You can use drawings as well as written words, and work doesn’t need to be linear or have any specific, conventional form.

References:

Johnson, J. T., R. P. Louis, and A. H. Pramono. (2005). Facing the future: Encouraging critical cartographic literacies in Indigenous communities. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4(1), 80–98.