Written In the Land, the Life of Queenie McKenzie

This very visual book tells the story of the life of an indigenous ‘law woman’ from the East Kimberley area of Western Australia, Queenie McKenzie. Queenie was recognised as an Australian Living Treasure before she passed away in late 1998 for her cultural leadership and contribution to the arts. What is different with this book is that the story of Queenie’s life is placed within the landscape that she knew as her traditional land. The cover image, is a topographic map of the women’s sacred dreaming site that no longer exists, it is now a diamond mine. Each of the five chapters is spatially located within the landscape of Texas Downs, Queenie and her peoples traditional lands that were ‘settled’ in the late 1880’s by white settlers who claimed the land.
The story is told often in Queenie’s own words and shows the many ways that indigenous people are connected to the land, it discusses issues such as mining of sacred sites, dreaming sites, skin groups - the Australian indigenous governance system, rainbow snake, massacres and parts of the history of growing up as an indigenous child during the impacts of white settlement. As Queenie was an acclaimed artist it also contains many images of her artwork, her maps of her country and sacred sites.When Queenie passed away these traditional ‘law’ practices ceased. Many years before Queenie had revived these annual practices after they were stopped during the settlement time, it was in the 1980’s that she insisted that they begin again. It has been 10 years since her death and the work on the book began between the author and the female elders, to keep Queenie’s legacy strong. Funds from the book are returned to the community for that purpose. It is a tragic reality that Queenie’s generation are the last remaining elders of the area who hold the land based knowledge of sacred sites, these people will all be gone within 2 years yet this is not seen as an urgent need in Australia by the Government, to provide resources and training to indigenous people to map these sacred locations and the associated knowledge.

For more information about the book go to http://www.writtenintheland.com/ or http://www.culturalmapping.com/

2009 PGIS / PPGIS Photo Competition launched by CTA

The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) has launched a Photo Competition. Participants can win prices up to a maximum of EUR 900! CTA and partners are creating a multimedia multilingual training kit to support the spread of good participatory mapping practice. The training kit will promote examples of participatory mapping from around the Globe. A collection of images will be included in the photo library of the kit.

The competition has been launched to enrich the library with a wide variety of examples and applications from around the world. The competition allows development practitioners and researchers to share photographic records of their experiences with other peers and contribute to a product (the training kit) which will be freely available in different languages in 2010. More about the competition, its legal conditions, guidelines for submission and procedures of selection and awarding is found on the recently launched CTA web site dedicated to Participatory GIS (PGIS) practice.

Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0

Geospatial expert Andrew Turner discusses the current evolution of Where 2.0 and how it is affecting the entire landscape of Web 2.0 and next generation applications. This webcast was recorded live on Oct. 24, 2008.



Andrew also published a book: "Introduction to Neogeography" published by O'Reilly.

Photo Geotagging & GPS Photo Trackers

Geotagging photographs has become an increasingly important aspect of PGIS / PPGIS practice. While the Internet already offers a wide range of online applications (Google Earth, Panoramio, Flikr, etc) where to geo-locate images, offline solutions (hardware & software) are still to be made available or even known to the many of us. I have compiled some data based on an online research dividing the available devices in three groups: Group one includes GPS-enabled cameras. Group 2 includes devices which have to be directly connected to the camera. The third group includes devices which operates separately from the camera and harvest data which have to be matched with the images taken through a three-steps process.

All result in adding latitude, longitude, altitude and time data to photographs taken with digital cameras.

More information on the research is found here.