wonyoungso / cartographers-of-north-korea

Cartographers of North Korea

Happy to share Cartographers of North Korea: who are the contributors? It aims to discuss the collaborative mapping strategies of contributors in uncharted territories, using North Korea as a case study.

This project was, at first, a pure curiosity after I saw the OSM map in North Korea and I was so surprised: why is it so well mapped?! 🧐 Thus I started to analyze OSM data and to exchange correspondence with over 800 OSM contributors who contributed to the region.

Thanks to the numerous opportunities such as Unmake Lab's exhibition and the viz class at MIT, I was able to tackle the project further: the contributors' motivation and mapping strategies for uncharted territories, a relationship between satellite imagery provider and the citizen cartographers and so on.

Luckily, the visualization got accepted to IEEE VIS Arts Program this year, so see you there if you have a plan to do so!

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to discuss the collaborative mapping strategies of contributors in uncharted territories, using North Korea as a case study. OpenStreetMap (OSM) enables “armchair mappers” to map opaque territories such as North Korea in which the government has controlled internet access to its residents. Here, I ask the questions of who is mapping to North Korea, which tools and methods the contributors use to have access and represent North Korea, and which are the motivations behind such mapping endeavor. To do this, I analyze the technical aspects of OSM data in North Korea, and analyze the structured correspondence I exchanged with 889 contributors.

Data

OpenStreetMap data is used for the research for aggregating the changeset data, I extracted the center point of each boundary that each changeset has.

• North Korean Region data in OpenStreetMap (OSM) downloaded from Geofabrik(http://download.geofabrik.de/)
• ~210 Correspondence with 889 contributors (Anonymized)

License

OSM data is under the Open Database License (ODbL) version 1.0 share-alike license.

Thanks to Fabio Duarte and the MIT Senseable City Lab who provided lots of feedbacks and comments.