Today my analysis concerning Google’s censorship of downtown Washington, DC made it into a story on the front page of the Metro section of the Washington Post.
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.
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