Bridging Data and Experiences: Engaging Youth in Digital Civics through Participatory Mapmaking for Resilience

TL;DR

This paper presents a participatory map-making platform used in a workshop with middle school students to explore local disasters, demonstrating how maps can bridge data and personal experiences to foster resilience and civic engagement.

Contribution

The paper introduces Map Spot, a novel platform enabling youth to visualize and interrogate local data, connecting personal stories with spatial information for civic empowerment.

Findings

Students effectively used the platform to express local disaster experiences.

Maps facilitated dialogue between data and personal narratives.

The approach enhanced youth engagement in civic resilience.

Abstract

The paper reports on a participatory map-making workshop with middle school students in Savannah, Georgia. The workshop, which took place over a seven week period as part of Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters (YARD) program, students worked together to make maps that examine local natural disasters and their consequences. We developed a map-making platform that enabled the youth to leverage spatial data on local environmental, economic and social issues, as a means of interrogating their existing stories about disasters and their impacts. This allowed the students to share their specific experiences of the city, while also inquiring about the validity of such experiences. Through the use of our platform, we illustrate the potential of maps as representations that bridge two worlds, that of data and experience. We argue that Map Spot leverages existing data to help youth surface and communicate what they already know, but were otherwise unable to articulate