Drawing Your Own Maps / Making Public Data Settings

Drawing Your Own Maps / Making Public Data Settings

So, you want to draw your own maps? First, ask yourself, what does it mean to make a map yours?

Join us for a free hands-on workshop to explore how your maps can:

• incorporate personal experiences, as well as established sources.
• reveal different perspectives, as well as common ground.

We will explore the use of Map Spot, an open-source framework that supports the creation of large-scale collaborative maps that are digitally guided but drawn by hand using pens, markers, and paint on paper. Map Spot is a research project at the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts at Georgia Tech that explores the potential of "public data settings" — spaces that support participants in deciding:

• what counts as data.
• who can use data.
• what claims data can support.

No technical background or prior mapping experience is required.

With Yanni Alexander Loukissas, Kat Macdonald, Jonathan W. Y. Gray and Georgia Panagiotidou. 

Bio

Yanni Alexander Loukissas explores how data shape and are shaped by their settings through the development of critical methods and theory that challenge the myth of digital universalism. With an interdisciplinary background in social research, computing, and architecture, he brings a spatial perspective to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on data and AI infrastructures. Loukissas is the author of All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), which explains how to analyze "data settings" rather than data sets, and the forthcoming book, Data as Experience (MIT Press, 2027), examining data as points of orientation in the world, rather than simply representations of it. Loukissas holds a BArch from Cornell University, as well as an MS and PhD in Design and Computation from MIT. He is currently an Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and Executive Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts at Georgia Tech.

This event is co-organised by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for Digital Culture at King's College London. It follows Yanni's talk "Data as Experience: From Representation to Orientation" on Wednesday 2nd December 2026, 5-7pm.