About
The São Tomé Map Project is one of four research initiatives established in the Summer of 2009 as part of the ongoing collaboration between the country of São Tomé and the Community Informatics Initiative (CII), a research and teaching center in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Its goal is to ensure the people of São Tomé have access to and ownership of relevant local spatial data so they can better make informed decisions about development of their land and resources. Through innovative use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and supporting tools as well as collaboration between key São Tomé locals and an interdisciplinary team of researchers, we intend to not only empower the community to solve problems, but develop a process and model for future applications in similar settings. The project has been expanded by the recent work of university students engaged in library and information science classes during the fall 2009 semester and will continue to progress throughout this spring.
Community-Driven Design
As a land grant institution the University of Illinois has an obligation to both local communities in Illinois as well as the communities their students come from. Jorge Coelho, an alumni of GSLIS, invited us to begin collaboration with São Tomé to help establish technology resources for education and empowerment purposes several years ago. As the University’s relationship with São Tomé has continued these efforts have expanded to include a variety of projects, including this one. Our research can be considered an implementation of Community Informatics.
Community Informatics (CI) is an emerging field of study, practice and activism that has grown in popularity and influence in recent years. As an academic discipline CI is typically situated within iSchools (LIS) and provides an important venue for their connection to community knowledge, educational practice, and social justice movements (Gurstein 2007). Generally it focuses on solving community problems with information technologies and related information processes. The term was originally brought into common use by Loader and Gurstein in response to business and organization focused social informatics, but as ICT’s and associated cultures embedded in our information society have evolved the lines between community, institutional, and individual ICT cultural practices have blurred. Our work as community informatics researchers is largely about involving the community in our process, either by giving them a voice or empowering them with knowledge, actively collaborating with them in practice, or by expanding on and aiding their preexisting efforts. The São Tomé Map Project has mostly been identified with these first two categories.
Introducing Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
With increasingly complex information organization and access needs in the information age new demands have been placed on technological solutions. One such technology-aided way of dealing with spatial information is through the use of GIS. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying the geographic concepts, applications and systems, taught in at many education institutions.
GIS finds many contemporary and emerging applications, from land and resource management to civic and social service planning to natural and social science research. The utility of GIS to solve real-world geographical problems and aid in long-term planning and prediction has helped to solidify its presence as an important tool for the production and interpretation of knowledge. Because of this powerful and political position it becomes imperative that community informatics researchers play a role in shaping the meanings and social practices surrounding the use of GIS in order to promote well being on a variety of scales.
A Short History of São Tomé
One of the interesting and unusual aspects of São Tomé’s past is that it has no native population, the pair of islands is volcanic in origin and not considered to be continental. They were first discovered and settled around the turn of the 15th century and quickly became a slave-driven cash-crop economy, starting with sugar and then later moving to variety of exports, including coffee and cocoa. The fertile volcanic soil enabled São Tomé to become the world’s largest producer of Cocao by 1908 (Chabal 2002) and was largely divided up into districts based on roças (plantations) run by Portuguese companies and power property owners. Though slavery was abolished slavery formally in 1876 the practice of forced paid labor continued well into 1900’s, culminating in riots and the 1953 Batepá Massacre, where several hundred workers were killed. The move for independence spurred the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Principe (MLSTP), which was established in Gabon and waited for the overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship in Portugal in April of 1974. By November the new regime had met with the MLSTP and transitioned the government, leaving São Tomé and Principe as sovereign nations on July 12 of 1975.
The Portuguese were not particularly concerned with creating a sustainability plan for São Tomé’s stability and well-being after their departure. A great deal of infrastructure was abandoned, from hospitals to railways. Other artifacts of the Portuguese occupation were disassembled or left to find new purposes, over the years plantations crumbled, street names were forgotten and old government buildings were given new purposes. The population was small enough that it did not require a complicated civic infrastructure planning, the government was generally preoccupied with dealing with keeping their nation afloat amidst accumulating debt. In 1990 they adopted a democratic government with oppositional political parties and transparent peaceful elections. Today São Tomé stands as one of the more developed and stable countries in Africa but still faces many very real challenges related to population growth, civic and economic development, migration and expansion, environmentalism, health and more.
GIS and São Tomé
São Tomé stands to benefit significantly from community-driven development through use of a powerful spatial data infrastructure. GIS and associated tools are one way to create this, and can specifically address several issues that are key to the nation…
References
Chabal, Patrick (ed.) 2002. A history of postcolonial Lusophone Africa. London: C. Hurst. Gurstein, Michael (2007)
What is Community Informatics (and Why Does It Matter)? POLIMETRICA, Milan.
