Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2013. xi and 396 pp., illustrations, index. $179.00 cloth (ISBN 978-94-007-4586-5).
The way information is gathered is fundamental to the study of geography. Our research once relied heavily on data gathered by governments and is still largely dependent on the census. The private sector has been increasingly involved in acquiring spatial information and for evidence we need search no further than Google. This particular twenty-chapter edited volume examines the next phase in data collection: deriving spatial information from the “crowd” that have willingly armed themselves with mobile devices to collect all types of spatial information—not the least of which is their own position.
The volume has its origin in a 2011 Association of American Geographers preconference workshop from which a majority of the chapters are derived. Although there are many books on crowdsourcing in general, there is no other current work of this type that addresses geographic crowdsourcing, also referred to as volunteered geographic information—a central element of neogeography. As the editors define it, “the general idea coalesces around the use of the Internet to create, share, and analyze geographic information via multiple computer devices/platforms (traditional desktops, iPads, or smart phones)” (p. 2). Individual chapters deal with such topics as the economic value of the data, types of data, metadata, government uses, computational issues, 3D data, the relation to Wikipedia authorship, language issues, mapping by indigenous populations, and applications involving the topographic base map, demography, storm reporting, navigation, public health, and education. The first and last chapters are by the three editors.
Of the thirty authors, twenty-three are from North America, with only one other region represented among the seven remaining authors—all from Europe. Sensitized by my international colleagues to the lack of illustrations in North American publications, it was revealing to find that only six of the twenty chapters include a map, and eight have no illustrations at all. In addition, Springer, the publisher of this volume, printed the book in black and white even through it now routinely prints other edited books in color. A number of illustrations have been rendered meaningless by their conversion to black and white. Presumably, color is incorporated in the individual chapters available through the publisher's Web site, which is the way most now access such material.
In the initial chapter, the editors make the case that “a profound transformation” has occurred in “how geographic data, information, and more broadly, knowledge have been produced and disseminated” (p. 1). The distinctions among data, information, and knowledge are never properly addressed, as if one could begin to speak of geographic knowledge systems (GKS) instead of geographic information systems (GIS). After the title and the introductory chapter, the flirtation with the use of the word is dropped. Although several of the chapters deal with knowledge formation, none even pretend to advance that crowdsourcing directly captures knowledge.
Edited volumes such as this provide an important forum for researchers to examine the meaning of new directions in research. Journals are too narrowly focused to provide an outlet for the often wide-ranging and innovative ideas that can be incorporated in an edited work. It is curious, therefore, that the editors have themselves cited no edited books in their first and last chapters. A combined total of 118 citations to books, journal articles, proceedings, and Web sites are included in these two chapters, but not a single edited volume or chapter is referenced. The numerous edited books on location-based services in Springer's series could have been easily cited. All of these works deal in some way with the acquisition of information from mobile devices. Many of the authors of the remaining chapters cited these and other edited volumes.
Although it is difficult to make any generalization about such a diverse set of chapters, one observation is the lack of a historical perspective. In general, the chapters impart little sense that these recent changes in the gathering of geographic information have corollaries in history. Obviously, there have been changes in how geographic information has been collected over time. Commercial map houses in the port cities of Europe during the Age of Discovery relied on sailors to both buy their products and update their maps. Following this commercial endeavor in crowdsourcing, geographic information became controlled by various parts of government—primarily the military. At various times, the collection of geographic information and the dissemination through maps became important commercial activities that addressed a need among consumers. Corrections were often directed back to the publishers that were then incorporated in the following editions.
A second observation is that the book does not directly address the important programming or database issues that are involved in the processing of crowdsourced geographic data. By sidestepping these concerns, the book offers few solutions for dealing with data sets so large that they become difficult to process using traditional data management techniques. Working with big data is a very real and quantifiable problem and would need to be directly examined in a work on crowdsourcing.
The chapters are well-written and edited and all present interesting and timely information. The book could be used as part of a seminar on geospatial science and provide fertile ground for discussion. Many chapters deal with specific applications and there are a multitude of other applications that could be envisioned. Although mentioned in several chapters, issues such as privacy concerns are in need of much greater discussion. Data storage and the processing of big data are major issues related to crowdsourcing that will take decades to address.