Today I am featured in the Weekend Edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nikolas Schiller, working with aerial maps, makes complex new patterns by altering them digitally, and his most inspired pieces are the ones that look easy. Convinced each of us has the capacity to change things, Schiller believes that to change the world, we should start with maps.

Now what I find mildly amusing is that the sentence “Convinced each of us has the capacity to change things, Schiller believes that to change the world, we should start with maps.” was more or less already published in a previous edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The curator of the show chose a quote from the 2007 Washington Post article about me and placed it near my map “Israel / Palestine 1993. What the author of this article didn’t realize was that the Philadelphia Inquirer published a syndicated version of the Washington Post article that contained the exact same quote.

Four artists at Gershman Y

Art from maps, varied, up-to-date
By Victoria Donohoe
For The Inquirer

The “Mapping: Outside/Inside” show at the Gershman Y expands the scope of map-reading in a lively group display that extends from painting with a brush to images involving digital mapping software. Its four featured artists demonstrate how varied today’s map art can be.

What’s remarkable is the artists’ range of styles and techniques in a new synthesis, a layering of energies that brings into focus different periods and influences. The authority of their summation is best seen in works by Joyce Kozloff and Leila Daw.

Kozloff in particular didn’t phase out one format and style as she found another. She’s dealt with them simultaneously to some degree because she has an integrating vision, which also seems true of Daw.

Both show their love of nature and ethnic culture in themes that surface here, and convey the power of visual impact charged with the beauty of color. Daw’s are scintillating, while Kozloff’s high color is always combined with muted tones in her nautical maps. These two, winningly, seem to have an instinct for the age in which we live.

Nikolas Schiller, working with aerial maps, makes complex new patterns by altering them digitally, and his most inspired pieces are the ones that look easy. Convinced each of us has the capacity to change things, Schiller believes that to change the world, we should start with maps.

Eve Andree Laramee questions things by painting faux-scientific maps that reflect her lyrical decorative talent. And she’s quite aware of current considerations about technology’s digital/virtual spaces and the fragile ecologies of Earth’s environment.

Mapping may not be the quintessential art of our era. But it’s a good idea to become aware of artists actually speaking a pure 21st-century language such as these four seem to be doing with their work.

Meanwhile, adjoining this display is an agreeably complementary solo show, “Capturing Sky: Pinhole Photos by Masaaki Kobayashi.”

To the Washington resident starved for the vote the Constitution offered cake: He could be elected President of the United States.

Until the adoption of the 23d Amendment yesterday the Constitution denied him bread: the right to vote for the great office to which he always has been eligible to be elected.

Amending the Constitution is extremely difficult. The approval of two thirds of the members of both Houses of Congress must be won, then the approval of three fourths of the states (either their legislatures, as in the case of the 23d Amendment, or of specially called state conventions, as the case with the 21st Amendment repealing prohibition).

And in the 170 years since the Bill of Rights went into effect the job has been done only 12 times. Several attempts have failed.

The 23d Amendment hardly had the intoxicating, thirst-slaking appeal of the prohibition-repeal Amendment. That it went through 39 states faster than the 21st went through 36 is astonishing.

It is astonishing even if you know of the confluence of luck and circumstance- including the dedicated, devoted work of many persons to a democratic principle, of the fortuitous political self-interest of some, even of the desire to use the presidential vote to head off home rule- that lie behind the 23d’s passage.

The whole story can never be told. But there are several examples of luck and lucky dedication that helped bring the vote to Washington:

+ A ratification resolution squeaked by the Illinois Senate with a 2-vote margin.

+ Tennessee almost certainly would not have ratified had it not been for the decision of Gov. Buford Ellington to rescue an Amendment resolution that a House committee had tabled. Tennessee was the only Southern state that ratified.

+ A House-passed resolution was before the Indiana Senate. Adjournment- until 1963- was but a few days away. It was not realized that the bill had not been lost en route from the printer and was, therefore, not on the Senate calendar.

Because of a routine “How are things going?” phone call from Sturgis Warner, presidential vote counsel to the District Democratic and Republican State Committees, the lost bill was found- and ratified in time.

The GOP-controlled Wyoming Senate got a do-not-pass recommendation from its Judiciary Committee. Under ordinary circumstances that would have been the end of the resolution.

Mary Bruner, District GOP Committee secretary and a former clerk in the Wyoming House, was horrified. She felt that the central problem was that Wyoming legislators did not understand that the Amendment would give District residents the presidential vote- period.

The Wyoming Press Association was meeting at the time in Cheyenne. Mrs. Bruner’s younger brother, Jim Griffith Jr., editor of the Lusk (Wyo.) Herald, had just been elected president.

She contacted him and influential Wyoming friends, including Lewis E. Bates, editor of the Wyoming State Tribune in Cheyenne, and State Treasurer C. J. Rogers.

Even before the Judiciary Committee action, the state’s lone Congressman, Rep. William Henry Harrison (R-Wyo.), had wired compelling appeals for support.

The Senate constituted itself as a committee of the whole, took the Amendment from the Judiciary Committee, passed it and sent it to the House, which later ratified it.

Perhaps it was luck, too, that Washington’s newspapers- divided on home rule and many other issues- were wholeheartedly united in trying to win the presidential vote.

Last September, The Washington Post set up a network of legislative correspondents in 44 state capitals. Especially in recent weeks, they provided The Post with the caliber of phone and wire coverage of fast-breaking news that can come only from experienced, on-the-spot reporters.

Beyond that, these correspondents themselves became interested in the Amendment. Their interest stimulated that of their own and other newspapers, of state legislators and of governors.

There was one slip-up. The Vermont Senate had passed a ratification resolution. One day, the Vermont correspondent reported that the House had ratified. The report was duly printed.

Next morning, the office of Rep. Robert T. Stafford (R-Vt.) said there must have been a mistake- that the House had approved on a second, not a third and final, reading.

The cleark of the Vermont House, Dale Brooks, confirmed this. He said the House was in session at the moment (the morning of Friday, March 10) but was tied up with a fish and game bill. He doubted that final action could come before the following Tuesday.

The Washington Post reporter, almost speechless at the possibility of having to repeal Vermont, managed to ask Brooks if he would call collect whenever the House did ratify. Brooks said he’d be glad to.

Brooks called back within 10 minutes. He said that he had apprised Speaker Leroy Lawrence of the situation, and that the Speaker had suspended legislative hunting and fishing and called up the Amendment resolution, which was passed- unanimously.

For New Mexico’s ratification much credit is due to the wife of George Dixon, The Washington Post columnist. She is the daughter of Sen. Dennis Chavez (D-N. Mex.) Her name is Ymelda as most Dison’s fans know by this time.

Renewed appeal to Congress to Americanize the 400,000 inhabitants of the Capital by granting them a voice in the national government was made yesterday by the citizens’ joint committee on national representation for the District of Columbia. Every senator and representative was urged to support the constitutional amendment which will empower Congress to give the disfranchised citizens of Washington the right to representation in Congress, and to vote for President and Vice President.

The citizens’ committee mailed to the members of both houses of Congress a copy of the joint resolution providing for amendment of the Federal Constitution as the preliminary step to conferring the vote and representation on the District populace. With the resolution now pending before Congress went two circulars outlining the rights and privileges which its adoption would make possible to the long disfranchised citizens of the nation’s Capital.

One circular explains what the proposed District suffrage amendment would do, and also what it would not do. This leaflet sets forth that by enabling Congress to give the District voting representation in Congress and the electoral college, it will become possible to–

Make Americans of 400,000 people– soon to be 1,000,000- whose present political prospects are less than those of aliens elsewhere in America.

Put in force the principle of “no taxation without representation” at the center of the American republic.

Add representative participation in government to the duty, always borne, of paying taxes and bearing arms.

Remove the present stigma resulting from permanent political impotence of a people more numerous than the population in each of six American States (1910 Census).

Make the heart of our own nation “safe for democracy” while engaged in the world crusade to that end.

Make it possible for the District boys fighting in France to look forward on their return to a voting right in the government they have fought to defend.

Make it no longer possible to say that the American Capital city the only national capital that has no voice in its national government.

Showing the other side of the shield, the circular then sets forth that a constitutional amendment does not propose statehood for the District; does not propose destruction of the “ten mile square” provision of the Constitution or lessen in the slightest degree complete control of the nation over the District; it is not a measure for local self-government, and does not disturb in any way the financial relation of the nation and Capital, either by the abolition or perpetuation of the half-and-half law.

The joint resolution proposing the amendment necessary to the Constitution as a condition precedent to the granting by Congress of District suffrage, was introduced in the Senate by Senator Chamberlain, of Oregon, while in the House it was offered by Representative Austin, of Tennessee. This resolution when passed by a two-thirds vote of the Senate and House and ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States provides that:

“The Congress shall have power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing power.”

Under the caption “Americanize Washingtonians,” the citizens committee in the other circular sets forth that the 400,000 Americans in the District constitute the only community of intelligent, public-spirited citizens in the United States which is denied representation in the national government.

“As a suitor in the courts of the United States,” runs this appeal for congressional support, “the District resident has, the Supreme Court says, a lower standing than an alien.

“In relation to national laws the sole function of the District resident is to obey. They take no part in making the laws which they must obey.

“In relation to national taxes their sole function is to pay. They have nothing to say, like other taxpayers, concerning the amount and kind of taxes they shall pay and how the tax money shall be spent.

“In relational to national war their sole function is to fight in obedience to command. They have no voice, like other Americans, in the councils which determine war and peace. They have no representation in the government which requires them to fight, to bleed and perhaps to die.

“National representation is a distinctive, basic right of the American citizen- in a government of the people, by the people, for the people- in a government which roots its justice in a consent of the governed- in a representative government which inseparably couples taxation and arms-bearing as a soldier with representation.

“Since the 400,000 Americans of the District pay the national taxes, obey national laws and go to war in the nation’s defense, they are entitled on American principles to be represented in the national government which taxes them, which makes all laws for them and which sends them to war.

“The constitutional amendment which we urge empowers Congress to correct this inequity without disturbing in the slightest national control of the Capital or the present form of municipal government. Congress retains every power in these respects that it now possess. All that happens will be that the District becomes a small fractional part of that Congress, and politically an integral part of the nation which that Congress represents.

“National representation will clothe the Washingtonian with a vital American privilege to which he is undeniably in equity entitled; will cleanse him of the stigma and stain of un-Americanism, and, curing his political impotency, will arm him with a certain power.

“It will relieve that nation of the shame of un-Americanism at its heart and of impotency to cure this evil.

“It will inflict no injury or hardship upon either nation or Capital to counteract these benefits.

“Consistency and justice; national pride and self-respect; the will to efface a shameful blot from the national escutcheon; the spirit of true Americanism and righteous hatred of autocracy in any guise; the patriotic impulse toward full preparedness of the nation as a champion of democracy and representative government everywhere in the world- all combine to make irresistible at this very moment our appeal for the adoption of this amendment.

Arkansas yesterday rejected the proposed Constitutional Amendment that would let District residents vote for President and Vice President. It is the first state to do so.

The Arkansas House of Representatives refused to ratify by a vote of 59 to 26. Ratification is possible only with favorable action by both the House and Senate.

Rep. Marion Crank of Little River County led the fight against ratification. The Associated Press reported from Little Rock that he told the House:

“They propose to create another state. Giving them electors is the first step.”

Several cries of “Amen” were heard when he finished speaking, the AP said.

Rep. Jack S. Oakes of Woodruff County, a proponent ratification, brought Washington’s Negro population into limited discussion.

He said he understood that the City was 80-per-cent Negro, but Arkansas should not deprive the District of the right to vote.

“This just gives them another propaganda weapon,” he said.

Oakes’ estimate of the District population is not supported by the Census Bureau. The Bureau said on Jan. 16 that preliminary figures show the population is 53.9 per cent Negro.

As to Crank’s assertion that the Amendment is the first step toward statehood, Washington leaders of the campaign for national suffrage pointed out that Congress carefully framed the Amendment to do only one thing: to allow District residents to vote for presidential electors.

The Citizens for Presidential Vote says in its official brochure: “The Amendment would not make the District of Columbia a state, nor endow it with any attributes of a state. Neither would it give the District any representation in the House of Representatives or the Senate.”

Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus did not endorse the Amendment, although he had said in September that “I cannot conceive of a situation where I would refuse to let anyone vote.”

In the Ohio Senate yesterday, a ratification resolution was introduced by Minority Leader Frank W. King (D-Toledo). The Amendment has the backing of Gov. Michael V. DiSalle.

Five state legislatures have approved the Amendment, leaving 33 to go. Ratification resolutions are pending in at least 10.

In Maryland, both houses have approved resolutions whose texts differ slightly. Final action awaits agreement on a single resolution.

Similar resolutions have been approved by the Pennsylvania House and the Minnesota and Oregon Senates.

Text & content from the Chronicling America newspaper collection website

Text & content from the Chronicling America newspaper collection website

The Washington Times of 100 years ago that I’ve been republishing here recently is not the Washington Times of today. The original Washington Times was founded in 1893 by William Randolph Hearst and eventually merged with the Washington Herald in 1939 to become the Washington Times-Herald. In 1954 the Washington Times-Herald was purchased by the Washington Post and merged into the Washington Post and Times-Herald. The Washington Post eventually dropped the Times-Herald from it’s masthead in 1973. In 1982, less than a year after the the demise of the Washington Post’s rival daily newspaper, The Washington Star, the contemporary version of the Washington Times was created by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon. In the archives on this blog, I have not made any attempt to separate the two Washington Times, nor do I plan to. All one needs to do is see the original date of publication and they should automatically know which Washington Times is being written about.

He wears “Colonial” garb to make the point that, in his words, “the status of D.C. residents has not changed since Colonial times.” But there was, of course, no District of Columbia in colonial times.

You are correct. There was no District of Columbia in colonial times. However, the Seat of Government, now known as the District of Columbia, was the only territory explicitly defined in the United States Constitution. This important document happens to have been written in “Colonial times,” and needs to be updated, again.

Through the passage of “An Act for establishing the Temporary and Permanent seat of the Government of the United States” on July 16th, 1790, the “district of territory” became the permanent Seat of Government on December 1st, 1800, and Congressional representation was lost shortly thereafter.

Unlike the Maryland license plate, the license plate of the District of Columbia has a phrase that dates back to Colonial times, “Taxation Without Representation.” I don’t know if you’ve sat through a Congressional hearing, but signs are not allowed in hearing rooms. Fortunately, an elaborate costume is allowed. (Except hats, I guess?)

If you were to read my quote differently, “the [present day] status of D.C. residents has not changed since [the Americans in] Colonial times,” you might understand that the residents of the District of Columbia are present-day colonists who have the displeasure of “Taxation Without Representation” through the denial of federal representation, and I’m only dressing up as one to make the point you obviously missed.

There was a city of Georgetown, in Maryland.

In 1800, the year the Seat of government moved to the District of Columbia, this city was called George Town, Maryland. Two Words. You can look it up. The concatenation took place soon after and today those residents lack representation in Congress.

There was another city & county located in the Seat of Government that you left out: Alexandria, Virginia. In 1846 the residents voted to cede back into the Commonwealth of Virginia, but unlike the Georgetown residents of today, the citizens of Alexandria & present-day Alexandria County (Arlington County) have Congressional representation.

Mr. Schiller also needs a new costume consultant. His coat is cut incorrectly, and I hope he doesn’t really wear German lederhosen, as he said, but rather correctly cut knee breeches when he isn’t wearing blue jeans.

This ad hominem argument misses the entire point of my ongoing protest. While you might have “Taxation With Representation” in Riverdale, Maryland, I, a colonist of the District of Columbia, do not. No costume consultant is going to give me Congressional representation, are they? I don’t think so. I’d rather have Congressional representation so I can retire this colonial outfit for good.

But in the meantime, you could always attend the next hearing on the status of this federally administered city-state known as the District of Columbia. Maybe you could come dressed in period clothing as well? There have been suffragists since 1800 working to change this faux-pas of the Founding Fathers. Do you think a Senator or U.S. Representative would ask you to take off a bonnet or headscarf? You won’t know unless you try.

Colonially Yours,
Nikolas Schiller

ps.
The colonial attire was purchased from Backstage in the Barracks Row neighborhood on Capitol Hill. Feel free to contact their costume consultants for further inquiry.

“A D.C. statehood activist’s historical breeches”

A D.C. protester garbles the garb
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Nikolas Schiller seems to lack a clear understanding of the history of the District of Columbia ["Hats off to D.C. statehood," the Reliable Source, Nov. 19]. He wears “Colonial” garb to make the point that, in his words, “the status of D.C. residents has not changed since Colonial times.” But there was, of course, no District of Columbia in colonial times. There was a city of Georgetown, in Maryland.

Mr. Schiller also needs a new costume consultant. His coat is cut incorrectly, and I hope he doesn’t really wear German lederhosen, as he said, but rather correctly cut knee breeches when he isn’t wearing blue jeans.

Ann Wass, Riverdale

When I got back home from yesterday’s hearing I wrote my friend at the Washington Post the following e-mail:

Subject: Are Tricorn Hats illegal in hearings around the U.S. Capitol?
Date: November 18, 2009 3:08:43 PM EST

There was a hearing today about DC’s legislative & budget autonomy.
http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=27&extmode=view&extid=95

I attended in my colonial attire that I’ve worn for 5 years to nearly every hearing that concerns the federal oversight of the District of Columbia. I’ve never made a disruption. But before the start of the hearing, an unnamed Hill staffer walked over to wear I was sitting in the third row and told me to remove the hat before the start of the hearing. I asked her why? And I stated that I have worn the hat for years, even in the very same room. She said it was the Chariman’s rules (Stephen F. Lynch). I told her I would, but she didn’t believe that I would take if off before the start of the hearing and called the U.S. Capitol Police.

Less than 5 minutes later, two officers entered the room, asked me to get up and come with them to the hallway. I obliged and was escorted out to the hallway. They asked for my ID and I asked if I was under arrest, they said not at the moment. They proceeded to run my name through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center to check to see if I had any existing warrants or previous arrests for civil disobedience. They asked for my social security number, for which I declined to provide. Since I came up clean in their records, and promised to not wear my hat for the duration of the hearing, I was allowed to return to the hearing, which had already started, still wearing my purple 18th century overcoat.

My question is: are tricorn hats now illegal in hearing rooms? Are all hats illegal? What about yarmulkes?

In Mary Beth Sheridan’s article from January she indirectly mentioned me wearing the tricorn hat:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/27/AR2009012703300.html
“one in a purple colonial-style coat and a tricorn hat.”

A month later, I was cordially greeted by Senator Joseph Lieberman as “one of the District’s oldest residents,” while wearing the outfit.
http://nikolasschiller.com/audio/senator_lieberman_greets_the_dc_colonist.mp3
http://www.nikolasschiller.com/blog/index.php/archives/2009/02/11/2280/

In 2007 I was Roll Call’s photo of the week wearing the outfit (but outside).
http://www.nikolasschiller.com/blog/index.php/archives/2007/04/18/1011/

With the somewhat recent co-opting of colonial era attire by tea party protesters, do you know if there have there been more arrests on the Hill by people wearing tricorn hats? Or was this just a staffer on a power trip? What does Rep. Stephen F. Lynch think about tricorn hats? I have every intention of carrying on this form of protest in the future until DC residents are fully represented in Congress, but am I going to have to wear a big white wig? Call me if you have a moment.

Sincerely,
Nikolas Schiller

Instead of trying to sift through thousands of photographs, few of which containing the D.C. Colonist, I decided to put the outfit back on, put my camera on a tripod, get an extension cord for my lamp, and relocate to my hallway. I placed the tripod opposite my 60″ x 40″ polyester map of the Mount Pleasant Cross and took about 10 photographs of myself using the timer function. I downloaded the photographs off my camera & did some minor color correcting, and sent her six self-portraits. Here is one of the other photos that they chose not to use:

Most of the photos were blurry due to the cheapness of the camera.

Until now, it was easy to pick out Nikolas Schiller at meetings about District oversight or voting rights: the dude in the tricorn hat.

But the artist/activist/blogger is questioning the future of his politically symbolic headgear options after Capitol Police rousted him out of a hearing Wednesday for wearing the hat.
Schiller, 29, a former co-chair of the D.C. Statehood/Green Party, took to wearing Colonial garb to hearings a few years ago to quietly protest the fact that, he said, “the status of D.C. residents has not changed since Colonial times.” At one meeting he was playfully greeted by Sen. Joe Lieberman as “one of the District’s oldest residents.”

On Wednesday, for a meeting of the congressional subcommittee that oversees the city, Schiller donned his usual purple overcoat, ruffled shirt and hat (but jeans instead of breeches: “It wasn’t as significant a hearing. … I didn’t want to go through the full lederhosen routine”). He said he was sitting in the room before it started when a staffer approached and told him to lose the hat, chairman’s rules. When Schiller protested that he’d worn the same hat in the same room for years, she called the police.

Outside the room, police asked for his ID and ran his name through the FBI database. He said they also asked for his Social Security number, but he refused. He was allowed back into the hearing, bareheaded.

A spokeswoman for the subcommittee disputed some of Schiller’s account, saying it “was all the Capitol Police’s doing.” Police did not get back to us by deadline with their side of the story. So Schiller wonders: Is this because the more raucous anti-tax “Tea Party” folks have adopted his Colonial look, too? “Are tricorn hats now illegal in hearing rooms? Are all hats illegal?”

By The Reliable Source | November 19, 2009; 1:03 AM ET

• YouTube Video Showing Where George Washington Grew Hemp at Mount Vernon
• 52 cents in change // 52 centavos en cambio
• 51 cents in change
• Photos from Emancipation Day 2010 by Elvert Barnes
• TO MAKE A STATE OF DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA - The New York Times, December 14, 1902
• Comments by Thomas Tredwell at the New York Ratifying Convention on July 2nd, 1788
• “Representation, Reforestation” Was Selected For The DC Urban Forest Project
• Second Class Citizen: A Shirt of Shame
• My Urban Forest Project Submission: "Representation, Reforestation"
• Justice Stafford Eloquent on Washington: Past, Present, and Future - The Washington Herald, May 9th, 1909
• Anxious To Come Back - The Washington Post, July 24, 1890
• Photograph of when an innocent card game made me feel sad
• The DC Colonist is now officially stock photo
• Pat Buchanan Prefers To Be A Colonist. I Do Not. [YouTube Video Clip of MSNBC's Morning Joe Show]
• My Response To Today's Washington Post Letter To The Editor By Ann Wass
• The D.C. Colonist Is The Subject Of A Letter To The Editor In Today's Washington Post
• The D.C. Colonist is featured today's The Reliable Source column in the Style Section of the Washington Post
• WAMU Coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia hearing titled "Greater Autonomy for the Nation's Capitol"
• TAFT STIRS CAPITAL BY SUFFRAGE SPEECH - The New York Times, May 10th, 1909
• The D.C. Statehood Vote - The Washington Post, November 20th, 1993
• Tax Fairness for D.C. - The New York Times, October 30th, 1993
• D.C. Statehood - The Washington Post, January 13th, 1993
• Statehood for the District of Columbia - The Boston Globe, December 2nd, 1992
• The State of Misgovernment - The New York Times, July 21st, 1992
• Grant D.C. Residents Full Rights - The Oregonian, April 15th, 1992
• The D.C. Plantation: Freedom Soon? - The New York Times, November 25th, 1991
• Free the Government's Plantation - The New York Times, October 6th, 1991
• Statehood for the District of Columbia - The Minneapolis Star and Tribune, June 27th, 1987
• Why Not Statehood for D.C. Citizens? - Seattle Times, May 11th, 1987
• [Washington Times] CITIZEN JOURNALISM: D.C. Voters Eye 51st-State Status By Ann Loikow
• The sign I posted outside of MTV's Real World DC house is transcribed in today's Washington Post
• A message to MTV's Real World DC cast members: IN THE REAL WORLD ALL AMERICANS DESERVE FULL REPRESENTATION IN CONGRESS
• Happy 4th of July, but remember...
• Obama can't criticize Chavez on at least one issue
• Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton & Senator Joe Lieberman introduce a D.C. Statehood Bill
• What! A Bicycle Rifle? Yes?
• Thomas Jefferson's Map of Washington from March 31st, 1791
• Text of H.R. 259 - An act to retrocede the county of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia, to the State of Virginia
• YouTube video of DC Colonists demonstrating at the first Nationals game at RFK Stadium
• "Let Us Now End American Colonialism" - A speech by Ernest Gruening delivered to the Delegates of the Alaska Constitutional Convention on November 9, 1955
• The 23rd Amendment - Time Magazine - March 31, 1961
• The D.C. Colonist receives a warm welcome from Senator Joe Lieberman at today's Business Meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
• Hey Google & YouTube, those are not my Senators! I have no Senators!
• Hey Google & YouTube, that is not my Representative or Delegate!
• Washington Post Video of last night's Statehood Forum
• Indirectly mentioned in today's Washington Post
• YouTube Video featuring the 6pm News Coverage Mashup of the 2009 DC House Voting Rights Act
• Interviewed on MSNBC this morning
• Welcome to DC, we have no vote, we have no voice.
• YouTube Video of Newschannel 8's coverage of the "YES WE CAN - DC STATEHOOD NOW" poster
• Plagiarizing the official Inaugural Map to include a political message
• Yes We Can - DC Statehood Now!
• [FOUND MAP] New York City: The 51st State
• The American Flag in a 51 Star Configuration with One Star Removed
• My DC license plate redesign was discussed today on the WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show
• DC.gov website confuses Statehood with Voting Rights & Representation
• What D.C. Statehood Would Mean To Black America - Ebony, October, 1990
• One Third Representation Flyer Posted Outside of Busboys & Poets
• The Organization For Security And Cooperation In Europe Continues To Press The US Goverment on Full Congressional Representation for D.C. Residents
• Quart Bag: A Community Art Show at the Civilian Art Projects
• The Dr. Bill Show!
• DC Residents say they want full democracy, like New Delhi.
• Experimenting with Facebook's advertisement system [part 3 - Twenty Phantom Women]
• ABSOLUT STATEHOOD
• The maps on Google Analytics suffer from Washington, DC's exclusion
• Google Charts API now includes small maps, but leaves out Washington, DC.
• Roll Call's Photo of the Week features the DC Colonist
• Voting Rights March Recap
• D.C. Voting Rights March...
• Fun with MyGoogleMaps...
• OSCE Finds US Government Violates Human Rights
• The U.S. Capitol is Off-Limits to the Public: An Exploration of Censorship's Perimeter
• Tom Davis Supports Statehood?
• THE GEOCOLONIAL SLOTS - Match 3 for Statehood!
• Interactive Inequality #3
• Interactive Inequality #2
• Interactive Inequality
• Lost in America's Last Colony
• Censored today in theMail...
• The New DC Flag...if HR 328 passes...
• Take 1/3 of a day off work for 1/3 Representation
• Third of representation a start, but not enough
• The New DC License Plate.. if H.R. 5388 passes
• Dennis Hastert's Office 3 Years ago... yesterday
• Is the DC Colonist a Netscape Celebrity?
• Salt Lake Tribune covers the D.C. Colonist
• ABC 7 Covers the D.C. Colonist...
• The DC Colonist is in a Scripts Howard wire report
• Taxation Without Representation Google Map
• I am featured in the Green Party's "Green Pages"
• I am mentioned in the Northwest Current
• International Body Backs Vote for D.C.
• OSCE Parliamentary Assembly adopts Washington Declaration
• Censorship on the 4th of July
• Examiner Coverage of our OSCE Maritime Lobbying Effort
• We've got the support-
• The first DC Democracy Naval Battle
• Out of Committee
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité - OSCE
• Sway with me
• pre-press
• OSCE Rally Friday!
• www.osceindc.com
• DC City Council Passes OSCE Resolution
• DC Colonists video clip
• The D.C. Colonist makes his baseball debut!
• DCist Covers the Colonist
• DC Colonists - Flyer & Press Release
• The D.C. Colonist in the Washington Post
• The Colonist in the Post
• Congress Passes District's Budget
• It's Official....
• a Great B.A.D. Day
• B.A.D. Day Schedule
• B.A.D. Day is tomorrow
• B.A.D. Day Call to Action!
• its starting to get B.A.D.

PRESIDENT OPPOSED TO SUFFRAGE IN DISTRICT

Mr. Taft, in Speech at Dinner,
Favors One-Man Rule.

With great vigor and with that clear insight into the ultimate meaning of the Constitution of the United States which has made him reckoned one of the foremost constitutional lawyers of the country, President Taft defended last night that provision of the Constitution which places the District of Columbia under the Federal government. He declared unequivocally that the whole people of the United States should have in its charge the government of the District, through its representatives in Congress, and that the people of the District must bow to the wisdom of the forefathers who declared in favor of this plan of government for the National Capital. The President stands, therefore, absolutely opposed to granting to the people of the District the right of suffrage.

President Taft made it equally clear that he is inclined to favor a single head for the District government as opposed to the triumvirate form of government which now exists here. He said, indeed, that he has not yet made up his mind just what changes in the form of government for the District he will recommend to Congress next fall. But he declared, in discussing the merits of the single head and the triumvirate, that he was convinced the single head was preferable where the functions of that head were merely executive. If legislative functions were attached to the head of a government, he said, the triumvirate was the better. Inasmuch as the head of the District government is merely executive, without legislative functions, the inference is clear that the President favors “one-man” rule for the District.

The President’s speech was delivered at the banquet tendered him in the New Willard ballroom by the business men of Washington. It was a dramatic finale of what resolved itself into a joint debate between the President of the United States and Justice Stafford, of the Supreme Court of the District. Justice Stafford, in an eloquent speech brought forth round after round of applause and made the blood tingle in the veins of every Washingtonian who heard him, pleaded for a voice in the national government for the people of the District. He pleaded that the 350,000 people of the District be not cut off forever from their birthright of freedom and no taxation without representation.

He asked the people be allowed to elect a senator and two representatives, who should have equal rights with other members of Congress. The people, he declared, are becoming slothful, unmindful of their duties, under the present system, but he predicted that there would come a day when, a million strong, the people of the District would not remain quiescent under the present scheme of government.

When President Taft arose to make the reply to Justice Stafford, who, as spokesman for the people, had voiced his idea of the greatest need of the District, there was the keenest interest evinced in his reply. The several hundred prominent men of affairs of the District were not kept in doubt long. The President, without a moment’s hesitation, launched into a vigorous defense of the Constitution, so far as it relates to the government of the District. He laughed at the argument of Justice Stafford, that the people of Washington were slaves, and declared that they were the envied of the peoples of all other cities of the Union.

Nevertheless, it appears that the President and Justice Stafford did not join issues directly in their debate. For Justice Stafford argued, not for suffrage in municipal government of the country and for a voice in those separate interests which directly concern the people here. The President, on the other hand argued that the framers of the Constitution had precluded all idea of the District of Columbia being governed directly by the people of the District.

Those who sat at the raised table at the west of the room were:

John Joy Edson, chairman of the joint committee; President Taft, Vice President Sherman, J.H. Small, president of the Board of Trade; W.F. Gude, president of the Chamber of Commerce; Speaker Cannon, Postmaster General Hitchcock, Theodore W. Noyes, Charles -J. Bell, Representative J. Van Vechten Olcott, Secretary of Commerce and Labor Nagel, Arthur C. Moses, Scott C. Bone, Representative Samuel W. Smith, Representative Vreeland, James F. Oyster, Allen D. Albert, j.r., Representative Philip Campbell, Commissioner Macfarland, Edward McLean, Representative George A. Pearre, Commissioner West, Charles C. Glover, Representative A. S. Burleson, Commissioner Judson, Clarence F. Norment, D.J. Callahan, Representative Edward L. Taylor, A. Lisner.

The Washington Post, July 10th, 1883

“Yes, I thoroughly believe in suffrage in the District,” said Professor James G. Gregory, of Howard university, to a Post reporter, in answer to the question if he favored the present agitation for giving the citizens votes. “Yes, I am in favor of it,” he repeated. “I think the people would be much more contented if they had suffrage. You can see how the people are anxious to have some part in their own government by the interest they take in the choice of the school trustees. Why, there are sometimes more than a half dozen candidates in a single district and any number of delegations going to the commissioners in favor of this or that man. This one matter serves as a sort of outlet for their political feelings.”

“What do you think is the reason for opposition to suffrage?”

“I think that one reason why many oppose giving the citizens suffrage is that they are afraid of the colored vote. They think the colored man is top ignorant to have anything to do with the District affairs. Now, this is a great mistake. Within the past seven or eight years a great change has taken place. The colored people have been greatly influenced by those of their race who have received an education. In some families, perhaps, where the parents have no had the opportunities of books, their children have, and the influence of those children on the home is very marked. Many have been admitted to the public schools and the night schools. Then many of the colored people have become educated by business. In many cases they have prospered and have become property owners. Oh, no, it is a mistake to say that there is any danger from their ignorance in giving them the franchise.”

“Do you believe in universal suffrage?”

“No, I do not say that suffrage should be without limit. Perhaps it would be well to have some property and educational qualification. That is a very broad question. I believe suffrage should be granted , because of the value it would prove the citizens as a political school. We send out children to school to be educated to become citizens, but there is another education– a political education– that the citizens should receive. As it is now very few of the citizens have much of an idea about the Government. They do not discuss the actions of the commissioners as they discuss in other cities municipal affairs. We pay our taxes and that is the end of it. We do not think. Everything is done by the commissioners merely making suggestions and asking for appropriations. This is not the way to become citizens. How do they do in other cities? Why, they meet, discuss affairs, and vote upon their intelligent and deliberate opinions. Suffrage would educate the people in government, in the finance ad in the duties of citizenship.”

“Do you think the District affairs would be managed as economically under popular government?” inquired the reporter. “Was not the opposite found to be the case when there was suffrage?”

“I think that the state of affairs was more the result of circumstances than the system. Before the war nothing had been done for the city. When I came to Washington it was a mudhole. After the war improvements were projected on a large scale, and what it required many years to do in other cities was done here in a short time. Perhaps Governor Shepherd went rather too fast, but you can see what has been accomplished. There are many who object to giving the poor man the ballot because they are afraid property-holders will suffer. Now, the poor man is interested in having property protected. If he has no property, he hope to acquire some, and this will keep him from making any laws injurious to property rights. I lived in Cleveland for some years, where some of the richest men in the country live, and I never saw anything to cause any alarm.”

“Do you think the citizens would take any more interest in the government, or feel any responsibility in its right management if they could vote?”

“Certainly, they would feel that they had something at stake. Then look at the injustice of the thing– to deprive a man of his highest right as a citizen. If we lived in a State of Territory we would have a vote. Why should we be refused it here?”

“Is not Congress given full control over the District?” the reporter asked.

“Certainly; but I do not believe that power implies a right to take away the citizen’s vote. There is not another city in the Union where the same thing is done.”

“What would be your plan for the government of the District?”

“Well, I believe in having three commissioners as now, and if Congress insisted on the right of representation in return for paying half the District expenses, would give to the President the appointment of the engineer commissioner. The other two should be chosen by the people. I believe something of the kind will soon come, too, for the people generally are favoring it.”

The Washington Post, January 24, 1880

We cannot understand how any man who believes in the fundamental principles of republican government can seriously contend for the continued denial of suffrage to the inhabitants of the District of Columbia.

If it be true that governments derive their just power only from the consent of the governed, what justice is there in ruling this great community– a population equal to that of the State of Nevada– by a system that does not ask consent, and which assumes the right to defy the wishes of the people?

If our fathers of the Revolution were justified in protesting, rebelling, and fighting against taxation without representation, if they were not criminals, rather than heroes, for going to war on such a question, if their memories should be revered and their example held up as worthy of imitation by their descendants, how can taxes be gathered, year after year, from the property-holders of this District, who have no more votes than the negro babies Central Africa, no representation than the mummies in the Smithsonian institution?

We can conceive of no circumstances under which a Democratic Congress can deny the right of suffrage and local self-government to a peaceful, law-abiding community without direct violation of the very essence of the Democratic creed. While it is true that the Constitution devolves on Congress the duty of providing a government for this District, while it is true that the people have no recourse but to accept such provision as Congress makes, it will not be contended by any sane man that Congress has a right to violate the spirit of the Constitution and set up the most detested features of despotic systems of government in the Capital of this Republic.

Here, if anywhere on the continent, we ought to be able to present to all the world a fair illustration of the practicability and advantages of Republican institutions. But we can’t do this in cities that are denied the ballot. And when we say that this great and intelligent community is incapable of self-government and not fit to be trusted with the ballot, we present a strong condemnation of the basis of our whole system; we direct encouragement to the opponents of free institutions.

It is said that suffrage has been abused here. Granted. There isn’t a doubt that it was shamefully abused. There is no question that great wrongs were perpetrated and that numerous evils prevailed under the system that was abolished in 1874. But where is the city, where is the State, in which suffrage has not been abused? Where is the community in which righteousness has always been voted up and iniquity always voted down? Where are the people who have made no mistakes in the selection of officers? Where, on this continent, shall we look for a town, city, county or State in which the ballot has always worked for the greatest good of the greatest number? If suffrage is to be denied to all who fail to use it always with wisdom and justice, let us call in a king and down with the ballot-box.

There is reason to believe that many of the evils of the past will not be repeated here when self-government is re-established. When corruption had its carnival here it was having an equally jolly time in many other places. That era is past. All over the country there has been great improvement in municipal management. Public plunderers have been brought to grief and better men have been put in authority. With the experience of the past as a warning and guide, the people of this District would avoid the reproaches and scandals which caused the last radical change in their government.

But because it is a right; because it is a republican, because it is democratic, because it is in accordance with the great principles on which this Republic stands because no Democrat can consistently deny it, we are compelled to favor the demand that the ballot be restored to this community.

The Washington Post, January 22, 1879

With the exception of the Indian tribes, the only community within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States unrepresented in Congress is the District of Columbia.

Territories whose few inhabitants are scattered over a broad expanse like the masts of ships on the ocean, and which neither commerce nor manufactures, send their delegates to Congress to represent their interests, and procure for them such legislation as shall tend to develop their resources and afford encouragement and protection to their people the embryo state advances toward maturity.

States with half the population of this District have their representatives in the House, and have an equal voice in the Senate with the oldest, largest, richest, and most populous members of the family states.

It is only here, at the capital of a country whose government is based on suffrage, that suffrage is unknown.

Holding to the theory that governments derive their just powers only from the consent of the governed, and that the ballot is the proper mode of expressing that consent, our Government denies the ballot to the inhabitants of its capital city.

Believing and teaching that is should be no taxation without representation, and that such taxation is tyranny, our Government levies taxes on the property of this people, and if those taxes are not paid it sells the property under the red flag and the hammer of a Government auctioneer. Thousands of homes have thus been sold here during the last few years.

We cannot see how any man, whatever may have been the result of his observation here in times past, can hold to the Democratic creed, to the great underlying principles of free government, and oppose the representation of this District in the law-making department of our governmental mechanism.

And because out faith in true Democracy is a vital reality, and not a sham, we approve the proposition to have the District of Columbia represented in the House. We see no reason why this community should be an exception to the general rule- why all should have a voice in the Capitol and we be mute.

It may be urged that the horde of negroes who swarm here will be used to elect a delegate who will misrepresent our people. We do not believe it. Intelligence and social influence, if rightly employed, will so direct public opinion that the election will be a fair expression of the wishes of our people.

As the delegate will not vote, and as his influence will depend on his being in accord with the dominant party in Congress, there will be no temptation to resort to any of those schemes and tricks that brought reproach upon popular suffrage here some years ago.

But whatever may be the fears of the timid and doubtful, we see no way in which an honest believer in Democracy can deny representation to this community. The taxpayer has a right to be heard. A delegate can speak for him. Consistency demands that this proposition should not fail for want of the support of Democrats in Congress.

On Sunday I was pleased to see that Washington Post staff writer Dan Zak had transcribed my poster in his article on MTV’s Real World filming in DC. So pleased in fact, that I spent about an hour writing and formatting a blog entry about the article.

Fast forward to this afternoon. I decided to go back to the article to see what kind of reaction Dan Zak’s article made on-line. The metrics for ascertaining this information is somewhat straightforward; the more comments the article generates, the larger the reaction. This, however, only gives the basic information of who decided to comment on the Washington Post website. The second metric that can be used to gauge the popularity of an article is to see who is blogging about it.

Since the Washington Post’s print edition does not make it’s way out of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia to other parts of the United States and the rest of the world, bloggers are an integral part of the Washington Post’s digital distribution model. As a way to track this digital diaspora of off-site responses to an article, the WashingtonPost.com has a link posted in each article that is supposed to show who is blogging about the article you are reading (see red arrow above). This link is managed, err, powered by a third party called Sphere, which is supposed to track instances of when bloggers use the URL of a specific article in their blog entry.

So why wasn’t my blog entry mentioned? Does this third party widget not work as well as it should? Are the 206,000 websites that Sphere.com says are using their product not really getting the best product they thought they were receiving? Or is there some form of censorship that is being employed at the Washington Post to scrub out blogs that the web editors don’t want their readers to see?

In my opinion, I think Sphere.com is not working to the best of it’s theoretical ability. I say this because I would rather not think there is some sort of censorship taking place– but I will not rule that prospect out. In my original blog entry I made sure that I hyperlinked to the article, used the entire name of the article, included the name of the author, and I even sent a trackback to the URL on the WashingtonPost.com. Combined together, all of these factors should have put my entry in the “Who’s Blogging” listing. But, alas, its not.

This has some important implications. First and foremost, the author of the article is not able to fully see the extent to which his article was covered on-line. His boss might incorrectly assume by reading the Sphere.com information that the article had minimal on-line reaction and possibly make future editorial decisions based on this partial & incomplete information. Secondly, WashingtonPost.com readers are unable to see other opinions about the article. Instead they are only offered the opinions written by other WashingtonPost.com readers (which I’ve griped about before) and not writers who have their own established blog and dedicated readership. Lastly, since I was not given credit for writing the sign transcribed in the article, I was further excluded from receiving any residual credit, and the WashingtonPost.com readers were never informed of why the sign was put up in the first place.

In conclusion, I hope the WashingtonPost.com and/or Sphere.com fix this widget or refrain from this type of subtle censorship. This exclusion of other viewpoints only hurts their readership and stifles subsequent information discovery. My opinions are just as valid as those expressed by the commenters on WashingtonPost.com and its disingenuous to present a link that appears to give accurate information about who is blogging about an article, when it’s clearly not showing all the bloggers who took the time to participate in the discussion.

Last month I posted the photograph above in my entry about adding some political commentary to the area around the Real World DC house in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC. This morning a friend of mine left a somewhat cryptic comment on my Facebook page telling me to check section E6 in today’s Washington Post. I ran downstairs, opened the paper up, and let out out a hearty laugh.

Transcribed near the end of Dan Zak’s article, Neighborhood Watch: MTV Is in the House, and Everyone Else Just Wants to Be, is the text of my sign:

Reality Bites

Sometime in July, a sign is posted on the base of the lamppost on the northeast corner of the intersection. In simple black lettering on a plain white background, it reads, one word per line:

IN
THE
REAL
WORLD
ALL
AMERICANS
DESERVE
FULL
REPRESENTATION
IN
CONGRESS.

In the next section of the article there is choice quote from some teenagers from Maryland:

“It’s been 23 years. . . . D.C. is a treasure. . . . They’ve been to New York, like, five times. . . . It’s the capital. . . . It’ll be a really good representation of the city. . . . I talked to the cast before and they’re really down to earth.”

(underline added for emphasis of the Congressional lack thereof)

While I was not identified as the creator of the sign, even though a simple Google Search would have brought the author to my website, and the author only mentioned that there was one sign (there are 8 still up last time I counted), I’m very pleased that my sign was mentioned in today’s article. In that respect, the ten dollars spent making those signs & purchasing the wheatpaste was completely validated— my message made it into the Washington Post. But the real question is if the message will make the cut and be mentioned in any of the episodes set to air on MTV in 2010?

What’s interesting about the text on-line versus the text in the printed article is that there is extra space between lines of the poster in the on-line version captured above. These extra line breaks actually make the point of the poster appear more important on-line than it does in the print edition, which does not feature extra line breaks. But since the print edition of the Washington Post is not delivered outside of the Washington, DC area, this typographical difference carries significantly more weight on-line than in print. In that respect, I must thank the web editor at the Washington Post for giving the text of my sign a little bit more emphasis than it would otherwise have received if it were identical to the print edition.

I know this a bit late, but I was looking over the coverage of the DC Metro train collision last month on the websites of the Washington Post (below) and the New York Times (above) and noticed one glaring error in the New York Times map. The Red Line does not start and end at the borders of the District of Columbia, rather it extends far into the state of Maryland. Maybe the New York Times can issue a cartographic correction?

I guess you could say this is a good example of when the local newspaper gets it right…

Related Found Maps:

• A T-Rex Google Map On My Neighborhood Via Twitter
• [Found Map] The 3rd District Police Station in Washington, DC
• What the Stars Tell of The Times - The Washington Times, February 9, 1896
• Found Propaganda Map From The Oromo Liberation Front
• A Projected Relief Park Map of the United States - The Washington Times, March 28, 1897
• My Accidental Geography Submission "Gingerbread DC" Was Featured Today on StrangeMaps
• whereyouare / whereiam@ - A Satircal Election Map of Maine's Vote on Same-Sex Marriage
• A Diagrammatic Photograph Showing The American Warship, The Delaware, Blowing Up New York City
• [FOUND MAP] The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein, The Younger (1533)
• Randle Highlands VS Fort Dupont [Antique Overlay of an Anacostia Alternative Future]
• [FOUND MAP] The Masthead Map of the San Mateo Item Newspaper
• Map of Teacher Starting Salary vs. Annual Amount Spent on Inmates
• Map Tattoo: The State of Maryland
• "NO" - Found Cartographic Typography
• Map of the Indigenous Languages of North America
• Groupon.com is illegally using my map "DC Stencil" for a Facebook advertisement
• [Found Maps] License Plate Maps of DC & Maryland at Artomatic 2009
• Before & After Aerial Photographs of Ground Zero in Nagasaki, Japan
• [FOUND MAP] Dear WMATA, is it called the Hirshhorn Gallery or Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden?
• Note to the cartographers at the New York Times: the Red Line goes into Maryland
• [FOUND MAP] Isola d'Elba aka the Island of Elba
• [Found Map] Topographic window sign at Current Lounge & Sushi Restaurant
• Unique Maps of Iraq in the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, DC
• The aerial photography of the area around the Metro crash site contains a Metro train
• The Craig Retroazimuthal Projection aka the Mecca Projection
• World Wildlife Fund's Zoomorphic Fantasy Maps
• Nixon Sends GIs Into Cambodia And An Inverted 1970 Map of Communist Controlled Laos and Cambodia
• Thomas Jefferson's Map of Washington from March 31st, 1791
• The Peters Projection advocated on the West Wing television show
• The 11 Mile Canyon Dam
• [FOUND MAP] New York City: The 51st State
• The American Flag in a 51 Star Configuration with One Star Removed
• Geospatial art created by exploiting search engine aggregation algorithms
• Found in the Grand Juxtaposition: I am not a terrorist in Tucson
• She's got the sole of the city with SWIMS galoshes
• You're A Nation!
• Kiss My Art, Just Kiss It
• The Geography of Personality Interactive Map
• Federico Aubele's Anthropomorphic Map of Panamericana
• The Adidas World Map and the Adidas Map of the Western Hemisphere
• Wasilla, Alaska is literally off the map, the Google Map that is
• A New & Somewhat Accurate Map of the Tropic of Gemini and the Tropic of Sagittarius
• Democratic National Convention 2008 - Photos from Day Two
• My Weekend in Photos [8/22-8/24]
• A World Map Sign @ the A N M Market & Deli in the Atlas District
• Photos from last night's "Quart Bag" exhibition @ the Civilian Art Projects
• Lost in a hairy bush? Use a map! - Or just a razor instead...
• My first jury duty experience; Courthouse needs more art
• The National Gruntledness Index
• Map of the Languages of Europe
• A new change in Washington, DC's imagery on Google's servers
• Map of American Casualties
• geographic dimensions of spam

Related Washington Post Entries:

• Armillary Sphere Donated to 'Federal City' by Author; Ancient Astronomical Device Links Early Chinese to Modern Americans - The Washington Post, November 10, 1936
• Vote Victory Result Of Luck, Hard Work, Some Sweat, Tears - The Washington Post, March 30, 1961
• VOTE PLEA TO CONGRESS - Americanize 400,000, Urges D.C. Joint Citizens' Committee - The Washington Post, February 13, 1918
• Arkansas Is First To Reject District Voting Amendment - The Washington Post, January 25, 1961
• Anxious To Come Back - The Washington Post, July 24, 1890
• My Response To Today's Washington Post Letter To The Editor By Ann Wass
• The D.C. Colonist Is The Subject Of A Letter To The Editor In Today's Washington Post
• The D.C. Colonist is featured today's The Reliable Source column in the Style Section of the Washington Post
• WANT 20,000 SIGNERS - The Washington Post, November 16th, 1894
• The D.C. Statehood Vote - The Washington Post, November 20th, 1993
• D.C. Statehood - The Washington Post, January 13th, 1993
• PRESIDENT OPPOSED TO SUFFRAGE IN DISTRICT - The Washington Post, May 9th, 1909
• Prof. Gregory Favors It - The Washington Post, July 10th, 1883
• Suffrage in the District - The Washington Post, January 24, 1880
• District Representation - The Washington Post, January 22, 1879
• Photographs of the Taxpayers March on Washington [PART ONE]
• Google Reader's Featured Reading Lists: Where are the rest of the newspaper journalists?
• Dear WashingtonPost.com: Either You Are Censoring Bloggers Or Your 3rd Party Widget Isn't Working Properly
• The Medicare Constitution - American Healthcare Reform Parodied from the UK's NHS Constitution
• The sign I posted outside of MTV's Real World DC house is transcribed in today's Washington Post
• Note to the cartographers at the New York Times: the Red Line goes into Maryland
• Dreaming of being on the Metro then one hour & seventeen minutes later a Metro train crashes
• I am mentioned in today's Washington Post article "Artomatic '09: Survival Tips From an Expert"
• A Response to Doug Feaver's "Listening to the Dot-Commenters"
• Nixon Sends GIs Into Cambodia And An Inverted 1970 Map of Communist Controlled Laos and Cambodia
• Washington Post Video of last night's Statehood Forum
• Indirectly mentioned in today's Washington Post
• A coded message in the last article from the Washington Post's Linton Weeks
• Comparative Front Pages: Washington Post / Philadelphia Inquirer
• Terra Fermi
• Google's View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy - Washington Post
• A new change in Washington, DC's imagery on Google's servers
• Here Be Dragons by David Montgomery
• Answering a question from September
• Still a sorry state of the union....
• Sensors Spatial Analysis of Tularemia on the National Mall
• International Body Backs Vote for D.C.
• The D.C. Colonist in the Washington Post
• Washington Post: Red, White and Golden Arches: The Star-Spangled Banner Ad

Related New York Times Entries:

• A Shower of Proclamations: Arlington Heights - The New York Times, May 9, 1861
• Washington, D.C., Approves Medical Use of Marijuana By Ashley Southall – The New York Times, May 5, 2010
• RETROCESSION OF ALEXANDRIA – The New York Times, August 17, 1873
• CRIME WAVE SWEEPS BONE-DRY CAPITAL - The New York Times, April 20, 1919
• SENATES VOTES, 55-32 FOR DRY WASHINGTON - The New York Times, January 10, 1917
• SENATE TIE ON PROHIBITION - The New York Times, December 20, 1916
• TO MAKE A STATE OF DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA - The New York Times, December 14, 1902
• TAFT STIRS CAPITAL BY SUFFRAGE SPEECH - The New York Times, May 10th, 1909
• Tax Fairness for D.C. - The New York Times, October 30th, 1993
• The State of Misgovernment - The New York Times, July 21st, 1992
• The D.C. Plantation: Freedom Soon? - The New York Times, November 25th, 1991
• Free the Government's Plantation - The New York Times, October 6th, 1991
• YouTube Video From Rethink Afghanistan: What Does the Easter Bunny Know About Rethinking Afghanistan?
• Google Reader's Featured Reading Lists: Where are the rest of the newspaper journalists?
• Note to the cartographers at the New York Times: the Red Line goes into Maryland
• The Singapore 18
• Bicycle Freedom! [Vélib' in DC]
• U Street: The Corridor Is Cool Again
• Are they really helping the poor?

Near the end of the article Michael O’Sullivan writes:

Okay, spill it: So who does the collector like? Barlow wouldn’t give a Top 10 list or even a favorite floor. But he did express interest in — or lingered longingly in front of — the work of several artists. Here’s a partial list of his favorites:

Floor 9: Jessica Van Brakle.

Floor 8: Jared Davis, Nikolas R. Schiller.

Floor 7: Jeremy Arn.

Floor 6: Jen Dixon.

Floor 5: Mark Jude, Meinir Wyn Jones, Stephen Reveley, Michael Enn Sirvet, Steve Strawn.

Floor 2: Drew Graham, Kate McGovern.

Still, Barlow cautions against using his taste alone as a guide, adding that the secret to Artomatic’s success is volume, volume, volume. “There’s just so much stuff here that I can practically guarantee that something’s going to be new or interesting,” he says. “To someone.”

Read the entire article here. I plan on stopping by Artomatic this evening around 7pm. Maybe I will see you there?

• [Found Maps] License Plate Maps of DC & Maryland at Artomatic 2009
• My Brash poem from Artomatic 2009
• YouTube Video: "A Fly on the Wall at Artomatic"
• I am mentioned in today's Washington Post article "Artomatic '09: Survival Tips From an Expert"
• My Artomatic 2009 Opening Night Exhibit Dissected on Flickr
• A Navy Yard Perspective
• My maps on display at Artomatic 2009
• Quart Bag: A Community Art Show at the Civilian Art Projects
• My Brash Poem from Artomatic 2008
• My Artomatic 2008 Opening Night Exhibit Dissected on Flickr
• My Artomatic 2008 Top 100 by Floor
• 24 on 14th - One Long Day on 14th by Graeme King
• A sampling of Artomatic 2008 YouTube Videos
• Tag Galaxy [featuring Artomatic 2008 photos]
• Swampoodle Quilt #3
• Swampoodle Quilt #2
• Exhibit Fly-Through in Reverse Slow-Motion @ Artomatic 2008
• Artomatic 2008 Opening Night
• SloMo the Statehood Snail visits Swampoodle
• the Artomatic Artist Catalog [PWND] - with updates
• Swampoodle Quilt
• What the Artomatic 2008 venue looked like in March of 2005
• The Base Map Installation @ Artomatic
• The first Artomatic prints have arrived
• ARTOMATIC - 2008 is here and I will be participating for the first time

Related In The News Entries:

• Four artists at Gershman Y – Philadelphia Inquirer
• Charted Territory: Robin Rice on “Mapping: Outside/Inside” at Gershman Y – Philadelphia City Paper
• Washington, D.C., Approves Medical Use of Marijuana By Ashley Southall – The New York Times, May 5, 2010
• Drug War Chronicle Issue #629 – Feature: Mixed Reactions to DC City Council’s Medical Marijuana Regulations
• The DC Colonist is now officially stock photo
• The D.C. Colonist Is The Subject Of A Letter To The Editor In Today's Washington Post
• The D.C. Colonist is featured today's The Reliable Source column in the Style Section of the Washington Post
• WAMU Coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia hearing titled "Greater Autonomy for the Nation's Capitol"
• My Record Cover Was Featured On Current TV Last Night
• The sign I posted outside of MTV's Real World DC house is transcribed in today's Washington Post
• I was on today's 5pm newscast of WJLA ABC 7 concerning the 80 recent car break-ins & burglaries in my neighborhood
• I am mentioned in today's Washington Post article "Artomatic '09: Survival Tips From an Expert"
• Indirectly mentioned in today's Washington Post
• Interviewed on MSNBC this morning
• My DC license plate redesign was discussed today on the WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show
• In the December issue of QST Magazine
• Tonight: Quart Bag & a selection of screen grabs featuring my bag
• In today's Washington Jewish Weekly newspaper
• Audio from Teresa Mendez's article in the Christian Science Monitor
• syndicated in Taiwan, San Francisco, Saint Louis, Austin, Little Rock, and Lincoln, Nebraska
• Curbed LA - Downtown Derricks
• Syndicated in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution & ABC News
• Comparative Front Pages: Washington Post / Philadelphia Inquirer
• The art of Map Fest by Teresa Mendez - The Christian Science Monitor
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He writes:

But the bigger problem with The Post’s comment policy, many in the newsroom have told me, is that the comments are anonymous. Anonymity is what gives cover to racists, sexists and others to say inappropriate things without having to say who they are.

He goes on to defend the commenters because they add dynamic content to an article, can be entertaining, act as a non-scientific survey on the topic de jour, and oftentimes show that the readers do not necessarily agree with the journalist who wrote the article. While these are all factual points, Feaver misses the larger issue. Comments are not completely anonymous.

Of the 330 comments that were generated by the article at the time of this posting, only one commenter addresses the larger point that I am attempting to make.

dlpetersdc wrote: Posts here are only anonymous to readers of these posts, not the WaPo’s staff. When you post, likely your IP address is recorded with the entry…[snip]… But anyone who thinks that you can remain anonymous on the Internet is fooling themselves.

Lets take this commenter’s summarized point one step further. Since all traffic on all websites leave a digital footprint that can be tracked back, in real time, to a unique IP address or Internet Service Provider, why does the Washington Post continue to shield it’s readers from one of the most important & least invasive aspects of this harvested data: the commenter’s geographic location??

Unlike the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, as a newspaper of record that does not have nationwide circulation, the Washington Post’s existence and continued success is contingent upon a large local subscriber base and those living outside of the current distribution area reading articles on-line. Each month I pay to have the paper delivered to my house, but am essentially given no extra privileges when reading or commenting on an on-line article. Alternatively, each on-line article that non-subscribers read also helps the Washington Post’s bottom line through on-line advertising. Yet all commenters, paying subscribers and non-paying readers, are given the exact same treatment in the comments section of the Washington Post website. I feel this is unfair, unwise, and only perpetuates ignorant, racist, and bigoted remarks.

The incorporation of the geographic location of commenters might not seem significant, but the implications are quite important to the general discourse. When I read an article about the unconstitutional D.C. voting rights bill (aka the 1/3 Compromise), I sometimes like to see what comments are being left on-line or if someone expresses a legal opinion that I have not read yet. However after I have read what the different commenters have written, I am generally saddened that local opinions are sometimes lost in the clutter of non-local opinions. While the Washington Post knows the approximate location of each “anonymous” commenter, this information is not disclosed to other commenters, and it creates & perpetuates a vacuum of ignorance.

Moreover, sometimes the Washington Post will have a poll about an issue and many times I’ve found that the results are unbelievably skewed by those who do not live in the region. Why not add some basic geoscience to the poll by disclosing the difference between how readers from the Washington metropolitan region voted versus those who live in the rest of the world? This geographic data is already there waiting to be used, but sadly it is not.

But its not just an issue of liking or disliking comments; I can always choose not to read them. The root of the issue is that the Washington Post is perpetuating this type of ignorance by shielding their on-line readers from where a comment is originating. This data is collected the moment a user begins loading content from the website and it does not personally identify any readers. While an IP address can be spoofed, most people are not going to take the time to put forth the extra effort just so they can prevent their approximate location from being revealed.

Commenters can still be anonymous and have a geographic location attached to them. For example, my current IP address only shows that I am a Comcast subscriber based in Washington, DC. With thousands of other Comcast subscribers, I still retain a level of anonymity by creating an “anonymous” account using a different e-mail address and creating a screen name that only I know of.

Imagine for a moment that immediately after the commenters screen name there was the text “from [LOCATION]” or as it would read on the screen: ANONYMOUS COMMENTER from Memphis, Tennessee or Nik Schiller from Washington, DC. Who would you be more likely to read if the article was about something in Washington, DC? Or Memphis, Tennessee? Esssentially, what comments have more credibility? Those comments originating from the geographic location of the subject of the article? Or those that do not?

Well, of course, it depends on the context of their comments. If they were bashing the residents of Washington, DC and do not live here, I would most likely ignore them. But as it is now, even though the Washington Post knows where the commenter is from, all other commenters are denied this basic level of geographic understanding and it alienates readers who actually pay for the newspaper.

In conclusion, I believe a more civilized level of discourse can be established if the level of anonymity is slightly altered by providing the geographic location of all commenters. Its not so much about WHO the commenter is, but WHERE the commenter is from that is at the core my logic. Locals commenting about local affairs will be treated with more respect, while people who don’t pay for the paper, leave absurd, racist, or sexist comments, can & will be ignored more easily. As a paying subscriber, I feel it’s the least the Washington Post can do to encourage my on-line participation. The current model is a free for all that can be more civil, if, and only if, the Washington Post chooses to bring more sunshine to their paying & non-paying readers through the visible disclosure of the geographic information that each on-line reader already provides.

THE WASHINGTON POST – Friday, May 1, 1970

Nixon Sends GIs Into Cambodia

NIXON DECLARES ALL-OUT WAR ON SOUTHEAST ASIA

THE PEOPLE MUST ACT NOW

MASS MEETING at the WHITE HOUSE at noon on saturday, may 9

In another attempt to stifle dissent, the Nixon administration has handed down regulations prohibiting demonstrations on federal park land without a 15 day advance notice. Public outrage at the invasion of Cambodia is so great we will go to the White House in spite of these regulations. We will assert our right to peacefully assemble. The police may block us. If they also decide to arrest us, we will maintain a militant non-violent discipline, and options will be provided for those not prepared for arrest. Meet us at the White House!

DEMAND IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL U.S. TROOPS & SUPPLIES FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA

The New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam — 1029 Vermont Av. N.W. Wash. D.C. 20005

---

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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• Kiss My Art, Just Kiss It
• The Geography of Personality Interactive Map
• Federico Aubele's Anthropomorphic Map of Panamericana
• The Adidas World Map and the Adidas Map of the Western Hemisphere
• Wasilla, Alaska is literally off the map, the Google Map that is
• A New & Somewhat Accurate Map of the Tropic of Gemini and the Tropic of Sagittarius
• Democratic National Convention 2008 - Photos from Day Two
• My Weekend in Photos [8/22-8/24]
• A World Map Sign @ the A N M Market & Deli in the Atlas District
• Photos from last night's "Quart Bag" exhibition @ the Civilian Art Projects
• Lost in a hairy bush? Use a map! - Or just a razor instead...
• My first jury duty experience; Courthouse needs more art
• The National Gruntledness Index
• Map of the Languages of Europe
• A new change in Washington, DC's imagery on Google's servers
• Map of American Casualties
• geographic dimensions of spam

Hoyer Says He Will Soon Bring Bill to House Floor

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 28, 2009; Page B03

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer vowed yesterday to hold a vote “in the very near future” on legislation that would give the District a full voting seat in Congress.

“As majority leader, I tell you I intend to bring that bill to the floor,” Hoyer (D-Md.) told the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He criticized Washington’s status, saying the city is “the only capital in the free world whose citizens do not have a voting member of their parliament.”

The hearing marked the first step in the bill’s path through Congress. It drew an overflow crowd to the wood-paneled room, including the measure’s sponsor, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and numerous activists — one in a purple colonial-style coat and a tricorn hat.

These photos were taken in 2006 in the same room where representatives were discussing the same unconstitutional bill.

Its sad that while times have changed, my colonial status has not…

Related Colonist Entries:

• YouTube Video Showing Where George Washington Grew Hemp at Mount Vernon
• 52 cents in change // 52 centavos en cambio
• 51 cents in change
• Photos from Emancipation Day 2010 by Elvert Barnes
• TO MAKE A STATE OF DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA - The New York Times, December 14, 1902
• Comments by Thomas Tredwell at the New York Ratifying Convention on July 2nd, 1788
• “Representation, Reforestation” Was Selected For The DC Urban Forest Project
• Second Class Citizen: A Shirt of Shame
• My Urban Forest Project Submission: "Representation, Reforestation"
• Justice Stafford Eloquent on Washington: Past, Present, and Future - The Washington Herald, May 9th, 1909
• Anxious To Come Back - The Washington Post, July 24, 1890
• Photograph of when an innocent card game made me feel sad
• The DC Colonist is now officially stock photo
• Pat Buchanan Prefers To Be A Colonist. I Do Not. [YouTube Video Clip of MSNBC's Morning Joe Show]
• My Response To Today's Washington Post Letter To The Editor By Ann Wass
• The D.C. Colonist Is The Subject Of A Letter To The Editor In Today's Washington Post
• The D.C. Colonist is featured today's The Reliable Source column in the Style Section of the Washington Post
• WAMU Coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia hearing titled "Greater Autonomy for the Nation's Capitol"
• TAFT STIRS CAPITAL BY SUFFRAGE SPEECH - The New York Times, May 10th, 1909
• The D.C. Statehood Vote - The Washington Post, November 20th, 1993
• Tax Fairness for D.C. - The New York Times, October 30th, 1993
• D.C. Statehood - The Washington Post, January 13th, 1993
• Statehood for the District of Columbia - The Boston Globe, December 2nd, 1992
• The State of Misgovernment - The New York Times, July 21st, 1992
• Grant D.C. Residents Full Rights - The Oregonian, April 15th, 1992
• The D.C. Plantation: Freedom Soon? - The New York Times, November 25th, 1991
• Free the Government's Plantation - The New York Times, October 6th, 1991
• Statehood for the District of Columbia - The Minneapolis Star and Tribune, June 27th, 1987
• Why Not Statehood for D.C. Citizens? - Seattle Times, May 11th, 1987
• [Washington Times] CITIZEN JOURNALISM: D.C. Voters Eye 51st-State Status By Ann Loikow
• The sign I posted outside of MTV's Real World DC house is transcribed in today's Washington Post
• A message to MTV's Real World DC cast members: IN THE REAL WORLD ALL AMERICANS DESERVE FULL REPRESENTATION IN CONGRESS
• Happy 4th of July, but remember...
• Obama can't criticize Chavez on at least one issue
• Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton & Senator Joe Lieberman introduce a D.C. Statehood Bill
• What! A Bicycle Rifle? Yes?
• Thomas Jefferson's Map of Washington from March 31st, 1791
• Text of H.R. 259 - An act to retrocede the county of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia, to the State of Virginia
• YouTube video of DC Colonists demonstrating at the first Nationals game at RFK Stadium
• "Let Us Now End American Colonialism" - A speech by Ernest Gruening delivered to the Delegates of the Alaska Constitutional Convention on November 9, 1955
• The 23rd Amendment - Time Magazine - March 31, 1961
• The D.C. Colonist receives a warm welcome from Senator Joe Lieberman at today's Business Meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
• Hey Google & YouTube, those are not my Senators! I have no Senators!
• Hey Google & YouTube, that is not my Representative or Delegate!
• Washington Post Video of last night's Statehood Forum
• Indirectly mentioned in today's Washington Post
• YouTube Video featuring the 6pm News Coverage Mashup of the 2009 DC House Voting Rights Act
• Interviewed on MSNBC this morning
• Welcome to DC, we have no vote, we have no voice.
• YouTube Video of Newschannel 8's coverage of the "YES WE CAN - DC STATEHOOD NOW" poster
• Plagiarizing the official Inaugural Map to include a political message
• Yes We Can - DC Statehood Now!
• [FOUND MAP] New York City: The 51st State
• The American Flag in a 51 Star Configuration with One Star Removed
• My DC license plate redesign was discussed today on the WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show
• DC.gov website confuses Statehood with Voting Rights & Representation
• What D.C. Statehood Would Mean To Black America - Ebony, October, 1990
• One Third Representation Flyer Posted Outside of Busboys & Poets
• The Organization For Security And Cooperation In Europe Continues To Press The US Goverment on Full Congressional Representation for D.C. Residents
• Quart Bag: A Community Art Show at the Civilian Art Projects
• The Dr. Bill Show!
• DC Residents say they want full democracy, like New Delhi.
• Experimenting with Facebook's advertisement system [part 3 - Twenty Phantom Women]
• ABSOLUT STATEHOOD
• The maps on Google Analytics suffer from Washington, DC's exclusion
• Google Charts API now includes small maps, but leaves out Washington, DC.
• Roll Call's Photo of the Week features the DC Colonist
• Voting Rights March Recap
• D.C. Voting Rights March...
• Fun with MyGoogleMaps...
• OSCE Finds US Government Violates Human Rights
• The U.S. Capitol is Off-Limits to the Public: An Exploration of Censorship's Perimeter
• Tom Davis Supports Statehood?
• THE GEOCOLONIAL SLOTS - Match 3 for Statehood!
• Interactive Inequality #3
• Interactive Inequality #2
• Interactive Inequality
• Lost in America's Last Colony
• Censored today in theMail...
• The New DC Flag...if HR 328 passes...
• Take 1/3 of a day off work for 1/3 Representation
• Third of representation a start, but not enough
• The New DC License Plate.. if H.R. 5388 passes
• Dennis Hastert's Office 3 Years ago... yesterday
• Is the DC Colonist a Netscape Celebrity?
• Salt Lake Tribune covers the D.C. Colonist
• ABC 7 Covers the D.C. Colonist...
• The DC Colonist is in a Scripts Howard wire report
• Taxation Without Representation Google Map
• I am featured in the Green Party's "Green Pages"
• I am mentioned in the Northwest Current
• International Body Backs Vote for D.C.
• OSCE Parliamentary Assembly adopts Washington Declaration
• Censorship on the 4th of July
• Examiner Coverage of our OSCE Maritime Lobbying Effort
• We've got the support-
• The first DC Democracy Naval Battle
• Out of Committee
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité - OSCE
• Sway with me
• pre-press
• OSCE Rally Friday!
• www.osceindc.com
• DC City Council Passes OSCE Resolution
• DC Colonists video clip
• The D.C. Colonist makes his baseball debut!
• DCist Covers the Colonist
• DC Colonists - Flyer & Press Release
• The D.C. Colonist in the Washington Post
• The Colonist in the Post
• Congress Passes District's Budget
• It's Official....
• a Great B.A.D. Day
• B.A.D. Day Schedule
• B.A.D. Day is tomorrow
• B.A.D. Day Call to Action!
• its starting to get B.A.D.

One of the little plugins I installed on this WordPress blog was a link at the bottom of each post which shows what I had posted the year before. The other day I noticed that my research related to censorship of Washington, DC on Google Maps, which culminated into the lead article in the Metro section of the Washington Post had appeared. I decided to check out Google Maps to see if there had been any updates and to my non-surprise, there hadn’t been. All I can say is: “what gives?” DC residents are still looking at downtown Washington, DC from 6 years ago. People visiting the MSM of the American Indian are still seeing it under construction, the newly built dorms on GWU‘s campus are still not being shown, and the list goes on….. So when will the imagery be updated? When will DC residents get to enjoy the benefits of Street View? Google has office in DC to lobby elected officials, but they’ve chosen to keep imagery of their own office outdated. This doesn’t make sense to me.

• Washington Monument Quilt #2
• Dear WashingtonPost.com: Either You Are Censoring Bloggers Or Your 3rd Party Widget Isn't Working Properly
• Where did Google's video rankings go?
• Google FINALLY updates the imagery of Washington, DC and now you can kinda see the message on my rooftop
• An Odd DC Indymedia Edit
• Google Street View of Washington, DC suffers from out-dated imagery
• View of a House Party Censored By Colored Dots
• Interviews with Alex Jones at the DNC in Denver and other videos
• One year later and Google Maps has still not updated DC
• First Amendment Violation in Lafayette Park yesterday; ACLU contacted
• Experimenting with Facebook's advertisement system [part 4 - Fvck Censorship]
• What the Artomatic 2008 venue looked like in March of 2005
• Geovisual QR Code
• The first Artomatic prints have arrived
• White House Peace
• Indirectly referenced in the Sydney Morning News?
• MyGoogleMaps : Google's Censorship Perimeter
• 3D Buildings at the expense of newer imagery?
• Google's View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy - Washington Post
• A new change in Washington, DC's imagery on Google's servers
• Comparative Meta-Data of the USGS Orthoimagery of Washington, DC - 2002 / 2005
• The White House is Off-Limits to the Public: An Exploration of Censorship's Perimeter
• The U.S. Capitol is Off-Limits to the Public: An Exploration of Censorship's Perimeter
• Censored today in theMail...
• Baghdad Imagery change in Google Earth
• I'm off google
• Redacted Flag
• Censorship on the 4th of July
• U.S. Naval Observatory Lenz #2
• U.S. Naval Observatory Lenz
• The Inaugural Map & January 6th

Related Google Maps Entries:

• A T-Rex Google Map On My Neighborhood Via Twitter
• Washington Monument Quilt #2
• Google Maps: Add the Contour Interval to the Legend of your Terrain maps
• Before & After Aerial Photographs of Ground Zero in Nagasaki, Japan
• Dear Yahoo! & Navteq, it's not the National Msm of the American Indian!
• The aerial photography of the area around the Metro crash site contains a Metro train
• Google Map Mashup: The Qibla Locator
• Thomas Jefferson's Map of Washington from March 31st, 1791
• Hey Google & YouTube, those are not my Senators! I have no Senators!
• Hey Google & YouTube, that is not my Representative or Delegate!
• Google FINALLY updates the imagery of Washington, DC and now you can kinda see the message on my rooftop
• Google Street View of Washington, DC suffers from out-dated imagery
• My New York Map Society Presentation at the New York Public Library
• Wasilla, Alaska is literally off the map, the Google Map that is
• Democratic National Convention 2008 - Photos from Day One
• Streetfilms comes to Washington, DC and checks out SmartBikeDC
• One year later and Google Maps has still not updated DC
• What the Artomatic 2008 venue looked like in March of 2005
• Visual Trace Route - I'm 42 hops from Google
• The first Artomatic prints have arrived
• National MSM of the American Indian on Google Maps; Why truncate the word Museum?
• Washington, DC Foreclosure Google Map Mashup
• The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming - A story told through Google Maps
• Pentagon Bans Google Map-Makers
• From Here to There in Google Maps
• Popular GIS Slideshow by Chris Hammond-Thrasher [March 07]
• Concentric Development Dissected
• How to design a better user interface for geographic information?
• 1880 Street Railway Map of the City of Washington
• Embedded Google Maps
• MyGoogleMaps : Google's Censorship Perimeter
• 3D Buildings at the expense of newer imagery?
• Google's View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy - Washington Post
• A new change in Washington, DC's imagery on Google's servers
• Google StreetView I.E.D. - Blowing Up The Spot
• new project with Google's Street View
• Fun with MyGoogleMaps...
• Worst march route ever...
• Gimmicky Green Party Google Maps
• Taxation Without Representation Google Map
• Google Map Blog Entry Mashups - DC & America
• Change in DC imagery in Google's servers
• Baghdad Imagery change in Google Earth
• Google's Gone "Hybrid"
• Google Maps!

Random geospatial art from somewhere on this website

This week marks the fourth year anniversary of when I started to publish my geographic designs on a this website. In the time since, which feels like only yesterday, I’ve published over 750 different creations on this website, which amounts to nearly 2,500 different image details. At first I started creating them partly as a quest for self-discovery and partly as a reaction to the fact that I was not able to graduate from college due financial circumstances. I wanted to document what I had learned, produced, researched, and published while on permanent sabbatical. After witnessing how my old housemate had to deal with on-line strangers on her now-defunct blog, I decided to do something that no other blogger had ever done before, I chose to keep the contents of my website hidden from web crawlers and subsequently, most strangers. This kept this website off the map of the internet for nearly 4 years. Only recently in March of this year, exactly one year after an internationally syndicated article was published about this website, did I open my website up to the dreaded robots. I don’t know where this year will lead me, but I’m glad I’ve made enough maps to point me in the right direction.

Check the aggregate listings: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.

Updike Reads The Lines in American Art
Jefferson Lecturer Tackles Nation’s Quest for Identity
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 24, 2008; Page C07

Give novelist and sometime art critic John Updike credit. The 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer tried to answer the thorny question: “What is American about American art?”

Onstage at the Warner Theatre Thursday night, in front of 1,900 culture lovers, the angular, silver-haired Updike used more than 60 images, ranging from formal mid-18th-century portraits by Bostonian John Singleton Copley to the hyper-realistic late-20th-century renderings of Richard Estes, to make his point: “The American artist . . . born into a continent without museums and art schools, took nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study.”

One of the salient traits of this country, he told the gathering, is an urge to define what is American. To delineate the romantic wildness of our nature. To search for a national self-image. That desire to map the New World is reflected in the tight classicist tradition of American art.

Drawing rules in this country’s artwork, Updike said. He quoted a European-trained artist who criticized Copley — the first American to exhibit a painting in Europe — for being too “liney.” That is, too reliant on the drawing in his paintings and not free enough with color and light.

By tracing that harsh “lineyness” in American painting, and juxtaposing it against a freer, more colorful romantic “painterliness” in other work, Updike laid out a convincing answer to his overarching what-is-American question.

Yet he did it subtly. Flashing slides of well-knowns, such as Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell, Updike pointed out the distinctions.

European-influenced artists, such as Homer and John Singer Sargent, tended toward the painterly; more purely American artists, such as Copley and Thomas Hart Benton, toward the liney.

Reading from a text, Updike, 76, spoke in a raspy voice. The presentation moved quickly. An invitation to deliver the Jefferson Lecture is the loftiest award given by the federal government for “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities,” and there was a patriotic air to the affair.

Even the U.S. Marine Band showed up to play before the ceremony.

At no point during the speech did Updike, or the slideshow technology, falter. The address was based on “Picturing America,” an NEH initiative to distribute reproductions of American paintings to schools and libraries.

Diversity was nearly absent in Updike’s presentation. The painters he referred to were mostly males of European descent, a cohort he referred to as “that least hip of demographic groups.” He did not, for instance, mention the extraordinary American painter Mary Cassatt, who became an expatriate.

Either ignored or overlooked, as well, was any reference to a 19th-century European debate — similar to the liney-painterly dichotomy — between classicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and romanticist Eugène Delacroix.

Regardless, Updike’s lecture was high-minded and provocative — like most of his work.

Soon after the talk ended, the patrons repaired to the Willard Hotel for a wine-and-sweets reception. So did Updike.

All I can say is: well done and I hope the next job is even better!

On March 26, 2007, the Philadelphia Inquirer published David Montgomery’s Here Be Dragons article. That morning I received a phone call from one of my best friends who happened to be in Philadelphia on business. He excitedly informed me that one of my maps was on the cover of a section in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I asked him to purchase as many copies as possible and about a month later I picked up the six copies from his house. My housemate let me borrow his camera to take an overhead photograph of the two newspaper articles side by side. When the housemate moved out a few months ago he gave me all of his photographs that he had on his computer and I found this photograph that I had forgotten about. What I found to be the most interesting aspect is the size of the map that was used in Philadelphia, the change of the article’s name, the movement from “Style” to “Health & Science.” I’ve tried to track down other syndications, but so far only the Philadelphia Inquirer has been obtained. The article itself has already been deaccessioned from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website.

Related In The News Entries:

• Four artists at Gershman Y – Philadelphia Inquirer
• Charted Territory: Robin Rice on “Mapping: Outside/Inside” at Gershman Y – Philadelphia City Paper
• Washington, D.C., Approves Medical Use of Marijuana By Ashley Southall – The New York Times, May 5, 2010
• Drug War Chronicle Issue #629 – Feature: Mixed Reactions to DC City Council’s Medical Marijuana Regulations
• The DC Colonist is now officially stock photo
• The D.C. Colonist Is The Subject Of A Letter To The Editor In Today's Washington Post
• The D.C. Colonist is featured today's The Reliable Source column in the Style Section of the Washington Post
• WAMU Coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia hearing titled "Greater Autonomy for the Nation's Capitol"
• My Record Cover Was Featured On Current TV Last Night
• The sign I posted outside of MTV's Real World DC house is transcribed in today's Washington Post
• I was on today's 5pm newscast of WJLA ABC 7 concerning the 80 recent car break-ins & burglaries in my neighborhood
• I am mentioned in today's Washington Post article "Artomatic '09: Survival Tips From an Expert"
• Indirectly mentioned in today's Washington Post
• Interviewed on MSNBC this morning
• My DC license plate redesign was discussed today on the WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show
• In the December issue of QST Magazine
• Tonight: Quart Bag & a selection of screen grabs featuring my bag
• In today's Washington Jewish Weekly newspaper
• Audio from Teresa Mendez's article in the Christian Science Monitor
• syndicated in Taiwan, San Francisco, Saint Louis, Austin, Little Rock, and Lincoln, Nebraska
• Curbed LA - Downtown Derricks
• Syndicated in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution & ABC News
• Comparative Front Pages: Washington Post / Philadelphia Inquirer
• The art of Map Fest by Teresa Mendez - The Christian Science Monitor
• Google's View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy - Washington Post
• TV Kultura mentions the last 4 years of my cartographic activities
• profiled by Iconoculture
• Roll Call's Photo of the Week features the DC Colonist
• Featured today in Directions Magazine's Newsletter
• The Masked Mapmaker
• Changing the World
• On the map, off the wall
• "Here Be Dragons" syndicated
• Here Be Dragons by David Montgomery
• Indiana GIS Newsletter - December 2006
• Third of representation a start, but not enough
• On Page Two of the Washington Examiner
• New Directions
• Is the DC Colonist a Netscape Celebrity?
• Salt Lake Tribune covers the D.C. Colonist
• ABC 7 Covers the D.C. Colonist...
• The DC Colonist is in a Scripts Howard wire report
• Tucson Arizona recap
• Green Jews campaign against party’s Israel divestment resolution
• Union Newswire
• Wal - Monster
• America Supports You, "Freedom Walk"
• I am featured in the Green Party's "Green Pages"
• I am mentioned in the Northwest Current
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité - OSCE
• DC Colonists video clip
• On Adbusters Magazine's Website
• Washington Post: Red, White and Golden Arches: The Star-Spangled Banner Ad
• I am in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch!

Here are two snippets from the article by Jenna Johnson titled, “Google’s View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy”

The older images frustrate cartographer Nikolas Schiller, 26, who takes an artistic approach to mapmaking and is working on an atlas. Schiller, who lives in the U Street area, said that too much of the District is represented using the older photos, diminishing the amount of information — and thrill — that aerial photos can provide.

“Maps are about power,” he said. “Maps decide what gets developed, who lives where, how people get around.”

Schiller said he thinks Google should just use the 2002 map for the small spots the government has censored rather than the whole downtown area.

And he said he’s puzzled that any level of blurriness is needed by anyone — even the government — especially because he recently took a detailed tour of a nuclear reactor south of Detroit via Google Earth.

“Where is the concept of national security in this?” he asked.

By random chance, tomorrow’s map is the nuclear reactor mentioned in the article.

Read the entire article:

Personally, I am not happy with how the story was written, I wish there had been more fact checking. But ultimately the story was heard by a larger audience, which I am happy about. I guess I am most disappointed that the story does not link to my website. The author had asked for my permission to, and I had given it, but it looks like there might have been a ‘digital cover-up’ – a link denial to my maps. Had the link been included the internet readership would have been directed to the maps that had inspired me to write the press release in the first place. Maps that show a 12 mile perimeter of temporal redaction around Washington, DC.

Google’s View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy

By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; Page C01

As you take a bird’s-eye tour of downtown Washington, compliments of Google Maps’ updated satellite feature, you hit a haze over the Mall.

Suddenly, instead of crisp, yellow taxis, white buses and red pickup trucks, the vehicles look like little blobs. Foggy Bottom gets really, well, foggy. People casting distinct shadows walk out of the Lincoln Memorial and into a blur of fuzzy steps.

Rub your eyes and look again. Maybe your computer is slow. Perhaps on the day these images were taken, it was really smoggy in that part of town.

Wait. This wouldn’t have anything to do with national security, would it?

Well, kind of.

When Google updated its satellite maps of Washington in June, it had two options: Use the newest, most detailed aerial photos from a government agency that blocks such top-security spots as the White House and the U.S. Capitol, or continue to use older, less-detailed images from a private company that doesn’t block out anything.

The compromise? Google chose the new maps for most of the city but spliced in the older, fuzzier ones for about one-sixth of the District to include an unblocked view of the president’s home and the Capitol.

But the area in the older images also includes most of Ward 2: the Mall, the State Department, George Washington University, Union Station and several neighborhoods, including Dupont Circle, Shaw and Chinatown. That means the convention center that was demolished in 2004 appears intact and the National World War II Memorial that was completed in 2004 appears under construction.

The older images frustrate cartographer Nikolas Schiller, 26, who takes an artistic approach to mapmaking and is working on an atlas. Schiller, who lives in the U Street area, said that too much of the District is represented using the older photos, diminishing the amount of information — and thrill — that aerial photos can provide.

“Maps are about power,” he said. “Maps decide what gets developed, who lives where, how people get around.”

The newer photos on Google’s map of Washington are from 2005 Geological Survey satellite images released in March. Those photos were updated from images released in 2002 and are much more detailed. Vehicles have structure. People have shadows. Buildings have shingles. Trees have branches.

But in the 2005 Geological Survey images, the White House is blocked out by a white rectangle, and when you zoom in on the Capitol and the Washington Monument, they become a flurry of dots. Rather than use those photos, Google used uncensored images of the area, including the White House and Capitol, from a commercial vendor.

To obtain permission to fly over the District and take photos, the Geological Survey promised the Secret Service that as soon as the plane landed, images that could “jeopardize national security” would be deleted or edited, Geological Survey spokesman Doug Spencer said.

“When you think about it from a military perspective or a terrorist perspective,” he said, “you don’t want to put that information out there.”

Soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the agency took aerial photos of 133 urban areas across the country; it repeated the process in 2005 for many of the cities. Each city could determine which sites needed protection and, therefore, less clarity on the map — some picked water treatment plants, military bases, power plants or government buildings, but there was no consistency.

“It was really at their discretion,” Spencer said.

In June, Google Maps http://(maps.google.com) and Google Earth http://(earth.google.com/) updated their satellite images of Washington and several other cities using the 2005 Geological Survey images, and Schiller began to explore. He selected the District, changed the setting to satellite, zoomed in as tightly as he could and began touring the city.

He soon realized that some parts were much clearer than others. He checked the source of the images, noted on the bottom of the map window, and concluded that the District was made up of images from different sources and years.

Google receives its photos from government agencies and commercial imaging companies. Imagery managers decide which sources offer the best resolution and most up-to-date information. For the map of Washington, Google opted for the highest-quality photos available rather than the newest information.

Schiller said he thinks Google should just use the 2002 map for the small spots the government has censored rather than the whole downtown area.

And he said he’s puzzled that any level of blurriness is needed by anyone — even the government — especially because he recently took a detailed tour of a nuclear reactor south of Detroit via Google Earth.

“Where is the concept of national security in this?” he asked.

source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/21/AR2007072101296.html

Related:

• Washington Monument Quilt #2
• Dear WashingtonPost.com: Either You Are Censoring Bloggers Or Your 3rd Party Widget Isn't Working Properly
• Where did Google's video rankings go?
• Google FINALLY updates the imagery of Washington, DC and now you can kinda see the message on my rooftop
• An Odd DC Indymedia Edit
• Google Street View of Washington, DC suffers from out-dated imagery
• View of a House Party Censored By Colored Dots
• Interviews with Alex Jones at the DNC in Denver and other videos
• One year later and Google Maps has still not updated DC
• First Amendment Violation in Lafayette Park yesterday; ACLU contacted
• Experimenting with Facebook's advertisement system [part 4 - Fvck Censorship]
• What the Artomatic 2008 venue looked like in March of 2005
• Geovisual QR Code
• The first Artomatic prints have arrived
• White House Peace
• Indirectly referenced in the Sydney Morning News?
• MyGoogleMaps : Google's Censorship Perimeter
• 3D Buildings at the expense of newer imagery?
• Google's View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy - Washington Post
• A new change in Washington, DC's imagery on Google's servers
• Comparative Meta-Data of the USGS Orthoimagery of Washington, DC - 2002 / 2005
• The White House is Off-Limits to the Public: An Exploration of Censorship's Perimeter
• The U.S. Capitol is Off-Limits to the Public: An Exploration of Censorship's Perimeter
• Censored today in theMail...
• Baghdad Imagery change in Google Earth
• I'm off google
• Redacted Flag
• Censorship on the 4th of July
• U.S. Naval Observatory Lenz #2
• U.S. Naval Observatory Lenz
• The Inaugural Map & January 6th

Last week I discovered the extent to which Google has updated their servers with the 2005 USGS aerial photography. My findings suggest that Google has censored much of downtown Washington, DC by not using a substanial amount of newer imagery.

Continue reading:

When Google Maps was first released, Washington, DC was displayed using USGS aerial photography taken in April of 2002. This is the same aerial photography that I’ve used for most of my DC maps. I am under the impression that public input requesting the White House be redaction-free forced Google to change the imagery for Washington, DC.

This resulted in slightly new imagery of Washington, DC from Sanborn. When I state “slightly newer” I mean, only a couple months at most. The construction of the World War Two Memorial and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel show that the two were taken only months apart. Google kept both sets of imagery on their servers, which explains the nature of the two toned diamond of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The brown edge was 2002 imagery and the central diamond was 2002 imagery from Sanborn.

Screenshot from 8/17/2005

: Imagery Analysis :

It was like this until June 2nd, 2007 when Google added the USGS 2005 imagery. I had been beating google to the map since March of 2007 when the imagery was first released to the public. I made a total of 8 maps in before Google got around to updating their servers.

Screenshot from 7/2/07

: Imagery Analysis :

There were four known areas of redaction by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
• the White House
• the U.S. Capitol
• the Washington Monument
• the U.S. Naval Observatory

But now you can see below much of DC’s central business district has been purposely outdated by Google. This method of keeping the old imagery and surrounding it by new imagery Google is actually censoring MORE than the NGIA! This is a de-facto form of censorship being done by Google.

Close-Up of 2007 imagery

The three areas below in yellow are already redacted in the 2005 aerial photography dataset by the NGIA. The area in red is the outline of the area which Google is censoring, which, as you can see, is larger.

The perimeter of censorship is roughly 12 miles around:

….How I discovered the censorship….
On June 28th DCist had a feature on someone who was caught joyriding in a field on Google Maps. I had a pretty decent idea of when the imagery was taken and wrote a comment that I never posted. Later that evening the blog entry was covered by the Fox News affiliate in Washington, DC. It wasn’t until last week when I was about to start to publishing the new Adams Morgan maps did I discover that Google had updated their servers. As I was zooming into Adams Morgan for the blog link I noticed that the imagery was now the same for Adams Morgan, but not for the entire DC area…..

I had read before that Google Maps had an easter egg that allowed users to zoom-in even further than what the built-in zoom feature allows. This is done by adjusting the zoom level in the link to the google map (below).

Example at the line of redaction at 16th & S Street, NW, Washington, DC:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=washington,+dc
&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=38.914083,-77.036259&spn=0.001029,0.002489&z=19&iwloc=addr

By adjusting the “z=19″ to “z=20″ one can see the line of redaction because the old imagery becomes blurry:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=washington,+dc
&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=38.914083,-77.036259&spn=0.001029,0.002489&z=20&iwloc=addr

What I discovered was that Google has kept the original .16 meters per pixel imagery on their servers! The difference between the USGS 2002 & 2005 imagery is of spatial resolution at .3 meters per pixel and .16 meters per pixel, respectively (roughly 1 foot vs 6 inches per pixel, a 4X increase).

I believe this change in spatial resolution is why Google has chosen to censor parts of Washington, DC, but I don’t understand the extent. The censorship is more than what should be required for national security- like the White House, U.S. Capitol, Washington Monument, or the U.S. Naval Observatory.

The 2005 USGS aerial photography is available for anyone in the world to download, which Google had to do to in order populate their servers. Yet a large portion central Washington, DC is being withheld by Google. Thus Google is placing priority over old proprietary imagery instead of public domain government sponsored imagery.

Questions:
1) Is it okay for Google to censor Washington, DC?
2) If National Security is the reason for the censorship, why are some areas still available to be viewed in .16m resolution?
3) Will the central business district of Washington, DC be updated soon?
4) Could Google have redacted Washington, DC to highlight the historical nature of DC’s maps by moving the line up censorship north to the area historical defined as the Federal City? (this is the area south of Florida Ave, once known as Boundary St. This area contains most of the historic homes of Washington, DC.)
5) Since I can obtain the imagery that Google has withheld from the general public, will the maps I make in the hidden area be more valuable?

Related Maps:
• The U.S. Capitol is Off-Limits To the Public
• The White House is Off-Limits To the Public

Related Analysis:
– Comparitive Meta-Data of the USGS Orthoimagery of Washington, DC

This blog entry has made it’s way to the Washington Post:
“Google’s View of D.C. Melds New and Sharp, Old and Fuzzy”

####UPDATE – 7/29/07 #####

– The area that was not updated is also the exact same area that shows the 3D buildings:

– I made a MyGoogleMap of the 12 mile perimeter that shows the 2002 imagery:

Related

Front page of today’s Washington Post Style Section:

Here Be Dragons
Through Nikolas Schiller’s Eye, Aerial Maps of Familiar Places Become Terra Incognita
By David Montgomery

He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps — you can probably find your house in these maps — if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.

Nikolas Schiller, 26, is the god of this alternative reality. Making maps at a frenzied pace of one every two days for the past 1,000 days, he has done everything he could to keep himself off the map of the World Wide Web.

After conducting roughly 15 hours of interviews on 4 different occasions, I am very pleased with the second article about me gracing the cover of the Washington Post’s Style Section. It’s an excellent article and I feel David Montgomery did a wonderful job writing it. I will have more comments later….and the code is screwed up….

Here Be Dragons
Through Nikolas Schiller’s Eye, Aerial Maps of Familiar Places Become Terra Incognita

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 14, 2007; Page C01
source (WP)

He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps — you can probably find your house in these maps — if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.

Nikolas Schiller, 26, is the god of this alternative reality. Making maps at a frenzied pace of one every two days for the past 1,000 days, he has done everything he could to keep himself off the map of the World Wide Web.

This is brazen defiance of the Hear Me! ethos of the blogger age, for which he probably will be punished and sentenced to fame. He’s a shadow blogger who didn’t want you to read his, thank you very much. He pulled the electronic blinds on his Web site: He blocked Google and the other search engines. When one of his creations made it onto the Drudge Report — 42,000 hits in no time, baby! — nobody could figure out who was this masked mapmaker.

So here the cyber cipher is now, on the roof of his group rowhouse off U Street NW, conducting another experiment in extreme geography. He recently used discarded chimney bricks to write a message: “No war.”

Nothing like making a bold statement that no one will receive except the pigeons and the spy satellites.

For now.

Catlike, he hops down a shaky ladder to a third-story balcony on the way to his bedroom. In the hall he passes another one of his statements, this one more artistic, framed on the wall. It’s an aerial photographic view of Schiller’s neighborhood — and sure enough, there, roughly the size of a fingernail, is the roof of his rowhouse. But something strange has been done to the geography.

Schiller barely pauses on the way to his computer, which he fires up to reveal hundreds of his map creations. They are places you know — the Mall, Adams Morgan, Georgetown, plus other U.S. cities and war-torn ones abroad. But the streetscapes — photographed from above at a resolution fine enough to just make out cars and people — have been warped and woven into kaleidoscopic mosaics, arabesques, spheres.

So Big Brother really is watching — and Schiller remixes this surveilled reality to render geography as politically pointed art. The results have stunned his former geography professors and amazed the federal cartographers who commissioned the original aerial pictures for more mundane purposes, such as aiding developers who are gentrifying neighborhoods, such as, um — U Street!

“To change the world, start with the maps,” says Schiller, who is co-chairman of the Statehood Green Party in Washington. “As insignificant as my art may be, it’s still an extension of my feeling that each of us has the capacity to change things.”

His map quest is for more than just art, let alone directions from here to there. In a way, it’s a pixelated riff that hyperlinks to ancient times, when maps implied a worldview — flat or round? — and cartography was existential.

Since Google Earth appeared a few years ago — and countless office hours were wasted as people mouse-clicked to their own back yards (“Lookee, there’s the deck!”) — the starting point of Schiller’s creations has been familiar. But he doesn’t use Google. He goes to the source, the bird’s-eye rendering of America placed in the public domain by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Then it gets complicated. On his computer he will take a swatch of a neighborhood, then he will tessellate it by creating mirrored repetitions, then he may impose radial geometry on the repetitions. The result is elaborate abstraction assembled from realistic detail, ready for framing at 5 by 3 1/2 feet.

“It’s just a cool idea,” says Dave Roberts, a USGS cartographer. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

USGS employs contractors flying airplanes to get the pictures. Some cities were shot in 2005, but the D.C. imagery is circa 2002. Schiller will have to wait for the next flyover in a few years to make a map revealing his rooftop declaration of “No war.”

“He’s at the cutting edge between cartography, art, visualization . . . helping people look at the Earth in new ways,” says Joseph Kerski, a former USGS cartographer.

“If you come into the geography department, we all have some of his posters hanging in offices,” says Lisa Benton-Short, an associate professor at George Washington University, where Schiller was a student. Benton-Short commissioned Schiller’s “Central Park Quilt — North” map for the cover of a forthcoming book she is co-authoring, “Nature and the City.”

“I think it’s kind of an eight-sided snowflake,” she says. “If you look carefully, you can see streets and buildings, but you can see a big swath of green. . . . You get people just staring at his posters, saying, ‘Look at that building, I know that building!’ “There’s a lot of latitude and longitude in the identity of this modern geographer. He is thin and wiry, with long black sideburns. He has a T-shirt that says, “The world is you,” in French. On a shelf in his bedroom is a tricorn hat. He wears it as part of his “colonist” costume when he demonstrates for D.C. statehood. He has waited tables and organized seminars for a geographers’ association; now he’s a Web developer and public-relations consultant. He hopes to publish an atlas. His chief means of transportation, a battered Jamis bicycle, was recently stolen.

To find this mapmaker, you have to know his name, and you have to know where you’re going. You can’t stumble across his work with a generic keyword search because he coded his Web site, www.nikolasschiller.com, so that Google and other search engines wouldn’t automatically index it. Google would turn up his site only if you already knew of his existence and typed in his name.

You can also type into Google “Redacted Name.” Click “I’m Feeling Lucky.” That will take you to his Web site. Nikolas Schiller is Redacted Name. Statehood, secrecy, online stunts, counter-surveillance: coordinates to explore in the mapmaker’s biographical geography. Let’s start with the maps. He’s made 119 different renderings of D.C. alone.

“Ball of Destruction” shows the Mall and Capitol Hill in the figure of a woman. For security reasons, the feds have obscured photos of the roofs of the White House complex. On Schiller’s map, the White House appears to be dangling from the woman’s nose like something in need of a tissue. The woman holds a sphere made from satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina. On the ground before her is a fractured map of the Superdome on the second day of flooding.

Some are meditations on themes such as religion, as in “Cathedral Quilt — Signed,” which shows the Washington National Cathedral neighborhood, upon which Schiller has signed his name repeatedly in Arabic. Many exploit the spacey, soothing rhythm of repeated forms, and imply a dialogue between the real and the imagined, with titles like “DC Lenz #2,” “Jefferson Mandala” and “RFK Quilt.” “The world is severely out of balance,” Schiller says. “These maps I make are an implied reflection of a world more or less at balance.”

His maps resist the idea of geography as destiny, but geography was his destiny. His formative map experiences came as a boy from outside St. Louis navigating family vacations with TripTiks. Each summer his mother would rent a car and take Schiller and his two older sisters to a different national park, where the boy would study topographical hiking maps. Growing up in a three-bedroom apartment near neighborhoods of big houses, his family relying on welfare for a period, he tuned into the paradoxes of geographic proximity and social inequity. GWU offered him the most scholarship money.

Like so many transplants, he became outraged by D.C.’s disenfranchisement. “Nikolas looks better in a Colonial outfit and a tricorner hat than practically anyone I know,” says Timothy Cooper, a statehood activist. Schiller is also the movement’s cartographer, sitting in Freedom Plaza with a laptop displaying aerial maps to plot protest locations.

His most famous map was for another cause. He posted an interactive map of the parade route for President Bush’s second inauguration. Designed to help people “coordinate your plans,” with a nod and a wink to protesters, it presented everything from access points to webcams showing live pictures of downtown Washington. The Drudge Report caught wind and posted a link. Schiller got 42,155 unique visitors in 28 days — some of whom posted comments accusing the anonymous creator of “treason.”

He had made a separate, anonymous Web site to host the inaugural map. Yet he could tell who his visitors were, or at least where they came from, by studying site statistics compiled from the Internet Protocol addresses of computers that called up the map, a trail that is automatically logged by most Web servers. He got nearly 200 hits from computers with .mil addresses — the military; about 120 from Treas.gov, where the Secret Service resides; 27 from The Washington Post and 23 from the New York Times. In other words, he found himself watching the watchers. So began a new cartographic exploration, a study of the virtual landscape of the Internet. He posted maps and blog entries on his main Web site, yet he blocked access by the search engines and leaked his address only to friends on MySpace and people he met along the way. He had 1,000 business cards printed 1,000 days ago, and handed them out with his e-mail address to see who would follow the electronic trail back to him.

Neat, but — why?

“It’s about how information flows from A to B,” Schiller says. “You can float out balloons and see if someone pops them or picks them up.”

By selectively granting access and watching the results, Schiller created a virtual country within the borderless Internet, populated by friends, fans, activists and map freaks. He averages about 140 unique visits a month.

Every so often he makes discreet forays into the public — posts a link on a local blog or e-mail list; enters an art contest. Then he will track the subsequent increased traffic to his site, watching what pages and what maps people open, observing the routes they take to find him.

One recent morning, he sits at his computer to check the previous day’s traffic. The first visitor arrived via his MySpace page at 12:21 a.m. At 9:46 a.m., someone from a Pfizer Pharmaceutical address reached his site through the Statehood Green Party Web page. At 5:59 p.m., someone from Istanbul checked in.

On a recent evening, venturing from his third-floor lair to visit the corner of 14th and T streets, he mulls his next move.

Fourteenth and T is one of the few places outside the GWU Geography Department where you can see Schiller’s work without a computer. Here, fixed to a broken signpost, is a rectangular scrap of wood. On the wood is a faded map. It’s an aerial view of the neighborhood. An arrow calls your attention to an intersection. There’s a caption:

“You are here.”

He’s thinking about removing the “robots exclusion protocol” that blocks Google and the others. Going public would add a new phase to the experiment, he says. He’d see how the geography of his controlled community is changed by the chaos of publicity. Or maybe not. Imagine coming out of hiding and no one notices. “The null hypothesis is the Web site remains obscure,” he says, in the streetlight gloom of 14th and T.

More hopefully, he says, “Most likely, I will change and the nature of this Web site will change.” The usually understated Schiller can’t conceal his pride when he speaks of his “body of work,” the 500 maps created in obscurity. He’d like people to see them. He’d also like to sell some maps.

“I’m interested in seeing other people’s opinions,” he says. “Will people blog about it? Will I be made fun of?”

For a minute, in the dark on the way back to the rowhouse, it’s as if he’s the one on the verge of being found by explorers with maps. Mr. Schiller, we presume?

He is there.

Then he returns to his computer.