I am very excited to host a JOSM workshop at the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, where I am currently a faculty fellow.This is the first OSM workshop I am running, so I would really appreciate the OSM community’s suggestions.

The plan is (a) to run a 2-hour workshop to familiarise the CBTA community (of ~30 students) with OSM and its editing options and (b) host a mapathon (OSM tasking manager)

The CBTA is a highly diverse, intellectually involved and socially active community of students. I look forward to teaching and learning from them.

Workshop countdown: 56 days :)

A couple of weeks ago I participated for the very first time in the SOTM conference, which this year was held in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan. Since I joined OSM in 2011 I have been an extremely quiet and private user. Therefore, I was surprised to find out that I was selected for the SOTM2017 scholarship! I was even more surprised when I met the other scholars, the work of whom has had a real impact on their communities. Their projects ranged from mapping informal settlements and improving their accessibility to services, organising intensive and extensive workshops, creating new communities, exploring gender biases in geography. To be honest, I was a bit perplexed as to why my project New Opportunities for Understanding the Ancient Coastline was selected.

My presentation was an extension of previous projects I directed and co-directed, such as the Cyprus Ancient Shoreline Project and the Coastal Erosion Management in Archaeology Project. In this case, however, I incorporated the knowledge of local communities with the use of fieldpapers. In short, I provided local fishermen with fieldpapers and asked them to draw the locations they have seen pottery and/or anchors either on the coastline or underwater. I also asked them to map areas where the water was murky, which is an indication of recent erosion. The idea was that local knowledge can replace the time-consuming and expensive reconnaissance survey, by pinpointing more precise areas for future archaeological investigation.

I am extremely grateful I had the opportunity to attend and present at SOTM2017. The scholarship gave me the chance not only to raise awareness on the impact of natural processes on cultural heritage, but also to understand through an array of examples the truly empowering capacity of mapping. As such, I left the conference with a long list of ideas for future mapping. I will only share a few:

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