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Elena Sobrino

This is a great ethnographic artifact. The image reads as a highly techincal rendering of a toxic place, with some reference to geological and logistical features. Your caption adds credence to the sense one gets looking at the map that only a somewhat specialized audience can look at and appreciate the data in this map. "Who is doing whose job," you ask, and I wonder, who is actually reading this map, and the footnotes and glossary and appendices buried in the prohibitively long report you describe?

Elena Sobrino

I think your caption addresses very well the frustrations of the uptake of this type of map for citizen scientists. I would also love to know more about places where this map might be leveraged, or contested--are there public meetings where citizen scientists and experts can have some kind of dialogue, however limited? And I would love to know what strategies citizen scientists develop as alternatives to the kind of "data treadmill" it seems such maps are symptomatic of. 

PardoDiana VtP Annotation: Mapping to remediate?

The author uses a map found by citizens at the end of a two-hundred-page technical document to illustrate the difficult task of navigating the bureaucratic processes and technical archives undertaken by their interlocutors, who strive to collect information to claim reparations around the toxicity that afflicts their communities. The infrastructure of knowledge production on these toxic spaces is designed for experts.

PardoDiana VtP Annotation: Mapping to remediate?

The caption does a good job of providing information on citizens' autodidactic practices and the multiple bureaucratic, technical, and political barriers they have to overcome to make their case. However, I would like to know more about the map itself, about the document in which it was buried, what spatial and environmental conclusions can be drawn from this representation. I also think it would be pertinent to explore and perhaps forefront the idea of the  “language” of monitoring (I'm not sure if it is or ought to be the same language of reparation).