Mapping North Korea: Google catches up

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Mapping North Korea: Google catches up
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Working as I do on Korea, mostly alone, it's nice when now and then you're asked to appear on radio or TV. Everyone enjoys the chance to pontificate a bit, I dare say. As a freelancer, it's better still when they pay, even a pittance. Plus the exposure has to be good for business.

For all these reasons I'm grateful and try to fit this in, even if it's at very short notice - as it nearly always is: hot news, after all - or the timing is awkward, I have a writing deadline or whatever. Writing, I should say, is my bread and butter: nice, steady, regular, predictable.

Broadcasting by contrast, at least for me, is far more hit-and-miss. Weeks can go by and no one calls. The neurotic freelancer starts to feel unloved and forgotten. Then all of a sudden something happens - almost always about North Korea, and rarely good news. It's odd - and scandalous - how by contrast Western media largely ignore South Korea, although the South is by far more important, fascinating and accessible. But that's another story, largely untold.

Then bzzzzz, it's hornet time. The phone rings non-stop; for a few manic hours, everybody wants a piece of you. Like a rabbit in headlights, I'm really bad at juggling all that. My wife, if she's in, is brilliant at fending and scheduling. With two more degrees than me and a busy career of her own, she's a bit over-qualified to be my PA - but kindly takes this in her stride.

- And then it all stops, as abruptly as it began. The hornet swarm whizzes off to buzz around some other place and different people. All is tranquility once more, much to my relief.

Better say bees rather than hornets, for this means honey. Work is work, and for a freelancer that's good, period. So the last thing you want to do is say no and turn it down, if possible.

Obviously, when the media come in swarms then it's a clear-cut major story; like a rocket launch, or Kim Jong-il's death - when my phone started ringing at 4am. I'm glad that isn't every day, though in death as in life the Dear Leader was good to me. Uncomfortable thought.

Otherwise, maybe on a quiet news day generally, it's just the odd broadcaster who calls. In that case, sometimes I'm puzzled by the particular topic that has piqued media interest. Quite often it comes out of left field: not something I'd have expected, or even reckon is important.

And then I wonder: Who decides what gets to count as a big North Korea story? Why this one but not that one? Where does all this originate? And, why do they all copy each other?

Enough generalities. Case in point: the Google maps story. Google and North Korea is about as unlikely a pairing as could be imagined. But with the first month of 2013 not over yet, this implausible juxtaposition has already this year hit the headlines not just once, but now twice.

The first time was understandable. I'm still not sure quite why Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt chose to visit Pyongyang, in the depths of the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea) winter. But the very fact that he did is clearly and unambiguously news. Why? Because he is by some way the most important Western business figure ever to grace the people's paradise with his presence.

Quite a few top politicians have made the trip, but from the private sector the A-list is short. CNN founder Ted Turner went in 2005, as did Daniel Vasella, CEO of the Swiss drug giant Novartis. The legendary Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, formerly of AIG insurance fame (or notoriety) and an old Asia hand par excellence, paid a low-key visit in 2009. That's about it.

Which is sad, yet unsurprising. Until and unless Kim Jong-eun does a Myanmar and opens up, there is no serious commerce to be had with North Korea. Why would a billionaire mover and shaker waste his valuable time there? So for Eric Schmidt - whose personal net worth is US$7.5 billion, according to Forbes; that's about one-third of North Korea's annual GDP - to choose to spend four days there is a news story, no question. (But still no real answer.)

And now the Google-DPRK combo has made headlines a second time. A radio station rang me about this before 8am this morning. Luckily my son, who works in consulting, had sent on to me an e-mail from a friend of his on the same topic the night before, so I was primed.

So what's the story this time? Let the headlines tell it. "Google adds detail to North Korea map" - The Guardian. "Google expands North Korea map coverage" - BBC News. "Google Fills In North Korea Map, From Subways to Gulags" - The Wall St Journal. I could go on, but you get the picture. If you follow North Korea you surely have already seen this by now.

But I repeat: What is the story? From those headlines, you'd imagine the news is that thanks to Google we can now fill in what used to be blanks on the map. The DPRK is a famously secretive state, often dubbed the "Hermit Kingdom" after a late-19th century predecessor in the dying decades of the Yi or Choson dynasty: the Taewongun, regent from 1864-1873, who strove mightily but in vain to keep Korea closed and all the foreign devils at bay. Sound familiar?

Yet the Taewongun's best efforts couldn't stop Korea becoming a plaything of great powers: fought over by China and Russia, then conquered by Japan. Nuclear weapons will save the Kim regime from that fate. Meanwhile the DPRK does manage to keep quite a lot hidden.

But maps, that's another story - and by no means a new one. In this age of prying satellites, nowadays we can all peek over the DPRK's walls and get a bird's-eye view. And we do. In fact we've been able to do this for years, long before Google as such got in on the action.

As anyone who follows North Korea knows, the pioneer here is Curtis Melvin, online begetter of the website NKEconwatch. A vital resource on the DPRK generally, its crowning glory is the mapping Curtis has been doing for years now, mostly for love - he has rarely had funding for this - assisted by anyone else out there with data to add. (The trendy term for this, I learn from Google which also practices it, is "crowdsourcing".)

Recently Curtis teamed up with 38North, another key DPRK resource - disclosure: I write there sometimes - put out by the US Korea Institute (USKI) in Washington DC, to produce a digital atlas of North Korea. This recently went live.

This too is a Google story, kind of. The mighty G being ubiquitous, the main tool Curtis uses is one of their apps: only not Google Maps, but Google Earth.

None of this is exactly news. As Curtis notes on NKEconwatch:

"Since launching in April 2007, this project has been downloaded over 250,000 times and has been featured in numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Times of London, Telegraph, Independent, Der Spiegel, Choson Ilbo, NPR, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Washington Post, BBC, Yonhap, China People's Daily, China CCTV, Joong Ang Daily, and the Rachel Maddow Show."

So to anyone (reader or media outlet) who'd been paying attention, all the oohing and aahing over Google Maps - wow, Pyongyang streets! And oh, there are the gulag camps - is nothing new. On the contrary, in Yogi Berra's immortal phrase, it's just deja vu all over again.

Are memories really so short? To be fair, some of these latest reports did also mention that NKEconwatch had got there first. Evan Ramstad in the WSJ quoted Curtis Melvin as saying he was "surprised to learn of the separate work for Google Maps: 'It's not even a fraction of what I've already published'". [1] Graciously, Curtis then told the New York Times that Google "provided the umph to get more eyes focused on the issue. North Korea is a serious policy, humanitarian and security challenge, and the more information we have, the better." [2]

True, when Google does something it gets attention, as we've just seen - twice over. They insist, by the way, that Schmidt's visit - he wasn't wearing his Google hat as such, although Pyongyang with predictable mendacity called it a Google delegation - had no connection with these new maps of the DPRK, despite the timing. The maps had been in the works for some years, and they finally now had enough data to go public. Purely coincidental. Yeah, right.

Maybe I should be gracious like Curtis. Google is a mighty ally, and a formidable foe. This helps me appreciate how many South Koreans feel about the chaebol: mighty conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai, which run pretty much everything. Similarly, as the Economist showed in a fine recent article, IT's Big Four - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - are gradually taking over the planet while fighting each other. There doesn't seem much that we or anyone can do to keep them in check.

Even so, it's a bit rich for a behemoth like Google to pose as a pioneer shedding new light, when in fact the darkness and blanks on the map of North Korea were only its own. Here, the big G is a follower not a leader: A guy in DC got there first, and kudos to him. Truth matters, so it's no less dismaying that many media seemed content to act as Google's PR department and just parrot what they were told, without bothering to check out the story and its context.

Finally, back to my broadcast. Later in the day a different producer on the same station (no names) came back to me, with a different idea. For whatever reason they had lost interest in the Google maps story. Instead, could I please comment on the North Korean rocket launch?

The what? You mean their threat of a nuclear test, surely? They fired their big rocket seven weeks ago. Ah - Might you possibly mean today's satellite launch by, er, South Korea?

They did, and I did it. Gotta be versatile in this game. North Korea, South Korea: all in a day's work, all grist to the mill. But it does help if you know which one is which.

Notes:
1. Google Fills In North Korea Map, From Subways to Gulags, Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2013
2. A New Target for Google Maps: The Streets of North Korea, January 29, 2013

A New Target for Google Maps: The Streets of North Korea

By CHOE SANG-HUN and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: January 29, 2013

Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs. A regular visitor to the peninsula, he has followed North Korea for over 40 years.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/OB02Dg01.html

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea may be the world’s most shrouded country, but on Tuesday Google Maps lifted the veil just a little, uploading a map of the police state complete with street names in the capital.

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The new map, built with the help of what Google called “a community of citizen cartographers,” provides people who normally visit the site for driving directions with a peek at places they previously may only have read about, probably in news articles about the North’s nuclear program or its devastating food shortages. The map of Pyongyang, the capital, shows all sorts of landmarks — the tower that celebrates the country’s self-reliance doctrine of Juche and Kim Il-sung Square, where military parades are held — as well as hotels, schools and hospitals.

Users can zoom in and post comments and photos; the map also includes what the site suggests are four gulags, marked as gray splotches. The map is still empty in most areas of the country, but is much more detailed than the one that was on the site until Tuesday, which was mostly blank.

In a sign of just how hermetic the country is, Google said North Korea was the last country in the world to get a relatively detailed map.

While North Korea experts point out that other more sophisticated maps exist and that Google Earth provides a satellite image that includes major cities and sites, some suggest that the easily accessible Google Maps will draw more casual viewers.

Even Curtis Melvin, who has created what many consider the most definitive public online map (on a Johns Hopkins University site), said Google Maps had “provided the umph to get more eyes focused on the issue. North Korea is a serious policy, humanitarian and security challenge, and the more information we have, the better.” The posting of the Google map — and the company’s call for still more mapping information on the North from users — focused new attention on the North when the country is locked in a tense standoff with the United States and its allies over tightened sanctions and has threatened a third nuclear test.

Google’s initiative also came three weeks after its executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang in a highly publicized yet controversial trip organized by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico. Mr. Schmidt, who likes to describe the Web as the enemy of despots, said he had urged North Korean officials he met in Pyongyang to let more North Koreans use the Internet.

Google said Tuesday that the posting of the map project was unrelated to Mr. Schmidt’s visit, which the company says was a personal trip.

“In the case of Google Maps for North Korea, there was little public information, and the crowdsourcing is from people from North Korea who are elsewhere,” Mr. Schmidt said in an e-mail. “It sheds a bit more light on what is happening in this remote country.”

There was no immediate North Korean reaction to Google’s announcement on Tuesday.

Citing privacy concerns, Google would not say how many contributors there were to the new map or who they were, but it said some had used publicly available satellite imagery.

The “citizen cartographers” were able to contribute using Map Maker, a crowdsourcing tool in the style of Wikipedia that allows users to edit or add to Google Maps. The company said the North Korea contributions had been coming in for several years, but Google held back the changes until it had enough to build a credible map and had time to vet the information as best it could, given how closed the North is.

Mr. Melvin, who created the map on the Johns Hopkins site, said he collected data from a variety of sources, including atlases published in North Korea, publicly accessible satellite images and dozens of interviews with defectors, tourists and nonprofit workers who have visited the country.

Google Maps is unlikely to provide important new information to policy makers who already have satellite maps from years of surveillance, nor will it get much of a following in the North itself, where the secretive leaders allow Internet access to only a small portion of the elite, who are closely watched.

But the crowdsourcing project provides a tool for Internet users anywhere in the world to help identify at least some features in the isolated country that the government in Pyongyang does not want the world to know. (The government cherishes secrecy to such an extent that its propagandists liked to boast: “When our enemies try to peek into our republic, they only see a fog.”)

Experts expect some of the more than 24,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries, to contribute to the map in the future. But their contributions are likely to be limited: most of them come from the northern part of the country, near the border with China, which they cross to escape. Given the tight control on people’s movements in North Korea, most have little knowledge of anything other than their hometowns and the areas nearby.

Already, critics of the North’s authoritarian government and the backward economic policies that keep its people starving were posting sardonic comments by clicking on the “review” link often reserved for rating mapped businesses, restaurants and tourist sites.

One reviewer wrote, regarding bronze statues in Pyongyang of Mr. Kim, the country’s founder, and his son: “Wow, the Korean people must really have loved it under Kim Il Sung, to think they raised this gigantic statue voluntarily on their spare time while they was gloriously lacking food and metal for basic agricultural equipment.”

Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco. Shreeya Sinha contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 30, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: A New Target for Google Maps: The Streets of North Korea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/asia/google-maps-new-target-secretive-north-korea.html?_r=0

4 must-sees on Google's new map of North Korea

Google Maps releases a crowdsourced view of the Hermit Kingdom that fills in what used to be a nation of white space

By Harold Maass | January 29, 2013

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A satellite view of the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, Pyongyang, North Korea.

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orth Korea was long a big blank space on Google Maps. No roads were visible. No train lines. In fact, Pyongyang, the secretive communist nation's capital, was the only identified landmark. Google changed that on Tuesday, unveiling a detailed view of North Korea that points out spots as small as stores or subway stops, and as large as North Korea's gulags, some of which are the size of cities. Google says the pinpoint-specific maps were created through years of crowdsourcing. Volunteer "citizen cartographers" — working outside the Hermit Kingdom and using publicly available materials for the most part — contributed details to a system called Google Map Maker. What are some points of interest curious onlookers might like to view while safely sitting outside the country's unfriendly borders? Here are four:

1. Hwasong Gulag
In northeastern North Korea sits Penal Labor Colony No. 16, also known as Hwasong Gulag. The 212-square-mile concentration camp is believed to house 10,000 people, many of them political prisoners. Reportedly, no one has ever escaped. On Google Maps, the camp looks like a city on the Hwasong River. "One street, called Gulag 16 Road, cuts through it," says Chico Harlan at The Washington Post. "And at the end of Gulag 16 Road is a train station. Beyond that, little else around the gulag is marked." Like many of the revealed landmarks, Hwasong Gulag hints at the country's innumerable atrocities. The image of Camp 22, the Hoeryong Gulag, shows the clear outline of the camp, where almost 30,000 people reportedly died of starvation in 2012. 

2. Kim Jong Il's tomb
"Google Maps users can peruse the North Korean landscape to see the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, which houses the bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il," says Cavan Sieczkowski at The Huffington Post. In addition to spotting these sites, curiosity seekers can also enjoy a "snarkfest" going on among commenters, according to Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer at Foreign Policy. One, who identified himself as Richie Heimbrock, said about the Pyongyang memorial building: "I found the fish tacos to be really underwhelming."

3. Yongbyon nuclear facility
One of North Korea's most controversial sites, the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, is also located on the map, "though it offers few additional details," says Akiko Fujita at ABC News. Yongbyon is North Korea's main nuclear facility. It houses the country's first nuclear reactors, and produced the fuel used in the country's nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009. Google says further detail might be made available as the crowdsourcing continues. "We know this map is not perfect," Google senior product manager Jayanth Mysore said in a statement posted online. "One of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place."

4. A non-existent golf course?
Indeed, the map is already in the process of being revised. It shows, for example, a golf course on Yanggak Island, located in a river that runs through Pyongyang. Curtis Melvin, who runs the North Korea Economy Watch blog, spent years putting together his own map, and says the Yanggak Island golf course probably isn't there any more. "So far, Google's efforts are largely symbolic," says Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. "It won't be easy to make a Google map of North Korea of the kind you see of other countries."

Sources: ABC News, Al Jazeera, CNN, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post

http://theweek.com/article/index/239390/4-must-sees-on-googles-new-map-of-north-korea