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Visible communities : designing a socio-spatial map / Designing a socio-spatial map

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 90-96). / This thesis presents a collaborative human-machine crowdmapping approach to creating socio-spatial maps that represent both spatial and social aspects of communities. Our implemented system combines satellite image analytics, a mobile mapping app, and social survey data. The system is designed to provide an end user experience that aligns institutional interests with grassroots interests, resulting in a self-sustaining system. In collaboration with the global health organization Partners in Health, we tested our approach with local health workers in Rwanda. Better maps can improve local visibility and empower communities to share knowledge, trade goods, and access medical services. Assisted by automatically annotated satellite maps, the community-driven mapping resulted in detailed spatial and social maps for four rural villages. With the collected data, we designed a novel socio-spatial map for this community that combines knowledge about household locations, paths, inhabitants of those homes, and social relations between residents. Generalizing from this map, we propose a framework to organize people, places, paths, and relationships to reason about the intersection of social and spatial mapping. Furthermore, we derive design characteristics of our human-machine mapping system that can guide the development of new systems in related contexts. Socio-spatial maps have the potential to be used as critical decision-making tools for individuals and organizations alike. / by Raphael Schaad. / S.M.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MIT/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/112545
Date January 2017
CreatorsSchaad, Raphael
ContributorsDeb Roy., Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
PublisherMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Source SetsM.I.T. Theses and Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format112 pages, application/pdf
RightsMIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission., http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

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