  The paper reports on a participatory map-making workshop with middle school
students in Savannah, Georgia. The workshop, which took place over a seven week
period as part of Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters (YARD) program,
students worked together to make maps that examine local natural disasters and
their consequences. We developed a map-making platform that enabled the youth
to leverage spatial data on local environmental, economic and social issues, as
a means of interrogating their existing stories about disasters and their
impacts. This allowed the students to share their specific experiences of the
city, while also inquiring about the validity of such experiences. Through the
use of our platform, we illustrate the potential of maps as representations
that bridge two worlds, that of data and experience. We argue that Map Spot
leverages existing data to help youth surface and communicate what they already
know, but were otherwise unable to articulate
