Ordnance Survey Workshop

BBC screen showing Exploring Places by Active Ingredient

This Wednesday I travelled through the Tube Strike and the floods to get to Southampton for a workshop on mapping at Ordnance Survey.  I was invited to take part I in response to Active Ingredient’s work with mapping through Heartlands (‘Ere Be Dragons), Exploding Places and Love City and my work on ‘performing data’. It was a chance to extend the impact of my research to geographers and mappers and was an interesting opportunity to meet people in other disciplines dealing with some of the same questions.

I was in the ‘uncertainty’ group discussing how Ordnance Survey can represent uncertainty within their data. We discussed many elements attached to this including how OS databases are updated 5,000 times a day. We discussed how the medium of the map enables different assumptions and opportunities to reveal uncertainty in the data – with the majority of OS maps being static there are limited opportunities to layer, play or disrupt the experience of using the map to reveal uncertainty whereas in interactive maps there are many more opportunities to use temporal, narrative and sensory interventions on traditional mapping.

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