reading response

I found Laura Kurgan’s You Are Here Museu, example particularly interesting because it speaks to the embedded inaccuracy of GPS that we had issues with in our mapping of menhirs. In some cases it just seems that verbal descriptions and addresses would result in a more accurate description of place than a GPS point. The point or coordinate only does so much. It is a rough grain indicator. It seems like in order to understand our GPS points we had to go from GPS to GIS to Google Earth to Google Maps street view to find that it might be more accurate to just give a verbal description. (i.e. “it is the 3rd mural on the right if you approach balmy from the north side”) But it seems the coordinate gives legitimacy because it is not influenced by human error. It is how we are taken “seriously” it gives a scientific aspect to mapping and therefore gives legitimacy.

One of the main ideas I extracted from the street science article is the that utilizing GIS does not necessarily imply legitimacy because in fact GIS can compound errors entrenched within the data and that a truly effective map must be some media that uses both legitimate mapping software like GIS and adds in a layer of human observation or adding the “historical patina” that Abrams is talking about with the navigation system for Nissan.