But with every story…there’s a back story, so kick back and get the context, because without you’re lost in space….
So I believe that I’ve mentioned before on the blog my efforts to secure a good accurate map of the 17 de Abril settlement. If you missed that entry, the purpose is to get an “accurate” base map of the settlement (which is pretty large, about 15 miles on a side, with 6000 people, so a little large for me to map on my own); this map will be an integral base (literally) upon which I anticipate overlaying all sorts of other data, additionally having a good basemap as part of an integrated geographic informations system (GIS) database will allow me to make “queries” of the map. For example, if I can obtain data on fire prevalence and forest cover, I can ask the GIS program to indicate which of the 1200+ land lots fit certain criteria, such as X number of fires, with Y % of forest cover….so that’s the background idea.
The background context is that I asked the settlement’s leader, and found out that they do have some maps. He first showed me the giant one which was in pretty significant disrepair (photo); thinking this would be my only copy and chance to see it I took about 70 high res photos that I anticipated laboriously stitching together. Later that day he came by the house with a much cleaner and manageable copy, of which I only took 15 pictures.
Now at this juncture, I thought I was pretty set. I have enough training (I thought) to do what’s called “georeferencing”; the objective of georeferencing is basically to take an image (such as a photo of a map) and place it correctly in geographical space (imagine taking a map of your street and pinning it to a very large map of your town, with the point being to have it match up exactly perfectly so that your house is right where it should be..if that makes sense). What is needed to do this is for one to take between 4-7 GPS points (or waypoints) at known locations on the map. In my case, I thought this would be fairly simple, because on the large map the goverenment showed that there were numbered markers between the land lots…easy…..
Or so I thought! First problem: getting out into the country without transportation (solution: take the school bus out to the roca and walk along the hot dirt roads); Second problem: those “markers” might have been there 13 years ago (or people might have known where they were), but they’re no longer (solution: assume that where the fences (that seperate the lots) intersect the road is where one of the land markers is…and yes, I know what “assume” stands for: something that makes an “ass out of u and me”; third problem: people are sure they know the number of their lot, but it according to the label on the map, they’re wrong (solution: think spatially about the extent of their land in relation to other plots and determine who is actually correct); problem four: the map was made in a hurry and just isn’t correct, i.e. roads do not cross rivers where they “should”, solution tough shit-deal with it. All of this is part of what we call in social science an “adaptive methodology”!
So that’s the fairly long context, to this morning’s doozy. I went to the “associao” (basically the town hall), to have a look at the official big map with the names, prior to trying to head out to the roca for the last time to get a few more GPS points. When I arrived at the associao, I told one of the women who works there that I wanted to see the big map (no big deal, I do this fairly frequently)…so we go in, and as I’m unrolling the map this guy walks in and says “GPS”….and I’m like huh? A) who are you?; B) how do you know what a GPS is?, C) what do you want from me, D) how drunk are you (considering there was a big party the night before and the individual not only smells, but still appears inebriated (aka bebo).
So, I assume at first (remember what that stands for) that it must be someone that’s heard I’m doing something with maps, and that involves something called a “GPS”, which he’s managed to remember and repeat in his inebriated state…and then he goes away…and comes back with his own GPS unit, and starts explaining that he is a free-lance cartographer, that made the maps, and has all of the data digitally!
So my head’s spinning….and it turns out he doesn’t have the data with him on this GPS device (i.e all of the coordinates for the land lots, rivers, roads, everything-which if I could get would save me at least two months of manual work) but on a pen drive about an hour away….so for those of you who know my scheming ways I went into overdrive, trying to figure out a way to rent a motorcycle to get him to his pen drive to my computer….but oh no, he had a better idea…..of course what that idea was I’m still trying to figure out….
So I think in retrospect is that he was trying to help me do what I was trying to do anyway, i.e. georefernce the basemap….and to do this he unearths a stack of several thousand maps of each individual land lot (that were in some random filing cabinet the whole time, of course no one mentioned this to me, which would have saved hours of walking the hot dusty roads), and we start combing through them, trying to find 19 or so known points on the map (the individual maps have coordinates). Needle in a haystack comes to mind…as does the words cluster fhjk!
Now, I’m going to spare you a lot of the other details, like when a political meeting starts in the room, and everyone becomes a cartographer and very interested in finding their lot, and then arguments ensue as the map is supposedly “not correct”, and then we get asked to leave “just for a minute, as it’s going to be a very fast meeting”, go to sit in the small anteroom and get locked in for the approximately 3 hour duration of the fast meeting (rappidigm my ass!).
However, when 4 hours later, when we had finally found our 19 needles, and the strange inebriated man had input “them” into my GPS device…I did a very silly thing. I checked it….
Now this might be another one of those culturally relative things, but in my mind sometimes there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. Not labelling GPS points would be the wrong way. Especially when the 19 sheets that have the numbers are now somewhere in the middle of that several thousand pages maelstrom of papers….so now I have 19 GPS points and no idea what they REALLY represent.
Of course, I have his email and phone number, and he “promises” to send me all the data…let’s just say I’m not not holding my breath just for the lack of an alcohol smell.
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