This is a draft; any comments will be highly appreciated

“Woman” AND “Egypt”. The spatiality ofsoftware and Sexual Harassment

Introduction

This paper will address the case of Harassmap, anindependent organisation created in 2010 and whosefocus is to denounce and tackle cases of sexualharassment in Egypt. I will argue that Harassmaphides a complex reality by simultaneously being anorganization, a crowdsourced map and a set ofcoding practices that allow personal stories tofind visibility. Correspondingly, stories andreports combine, aggregate and emerge in parallelwith the technical and technological side ofcoding, algorithms and ASCII codes. Thiscontributes to a new understanding of a map and toa redefinition of our perception of space. Afterless than half a century since its development,code has become woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. Although usually hidden “behindstuff”1, or behind the grand discussions of

1 Fuller, Matthew. “Introduction: The stuff behind thestuff.” In Fuller, Matthew, (Ed.) Software Studies: A Reader.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, 3.

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digital media, code alters our perception of ourlives. and by consequence its political meaningmust be attended to.

The primary question that this paper addressesis how the pervasive impact of code in anyreflection on computational culture alters theconcept of space. Additionally, questions aboutthe way it also changes cartography and thesemiotics of the map will be explored. The goal isto acknowledge the fundamental role played bysoftware algorithms and code, most often than everforgotten in the many discussions pertaining towomen in a Middle Eastern context.

The issue of sexual harassment in Egypt is apainful one for both women and men, and as suchhas been at the centre of a constant battle formore awareness and response. Women’s organisationsand associations have tried to relentlessly catchthe attention of policy makers through statisticaldata and reports, the most important one being“Clouds in the Egyptian Sky”.2 Social Mediaplatforms, including blogs, have also offered aspace for the issue. Digital analysis of blogs,Facebook pages and groups and Twitter hashtags (#)has revealed an active audience that discusses

2 In 2008, this report was promoted by The EgyptianCentre for Women's Rights (ECWR), a women’sorganization based in Egypt, with a small contributionof the European Union. The document was published in2010 by the UNFPA. Available at:http://egypt.unfpa.org/english/publication/6eeeb05a-3040-42d2-9e1c-2bd2e1ac8cac.

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their own experiences of sexual harassment. In2013 a Reuters report deemed Egypt the “worstcountry where to be a woman”3 and the UnitedNations responded with a public serviceannouncement titled “Put Yourself in Her Shows”4

which circulated on TV and through Social Media.Although the problem of harassment in Egypt camelate to international attention, an attentive and“localised” analysis of Egyptian platforms andblogosphere reveals a long and debated problem.However, it was not until the Egyptian Revolutionin 2011, especially after US journalist Lara Loganwas sexually assaulted while covering theprotests, that many of the problematic came tolight.

Since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution groups ofmen have also started campaigning to protect womenagainst sexual harassment. Many such groups havemade use of Twitter, mainly through the hashtags(#), and have become popular and extremely active.It is worthwhile mentioning the cases of TahrirBodyguard (especially active after September2013), Operation Anti Sexual Harassment(OpAntiSH), Shoft Ta7arosh (I Saw Harassment) andNazra. All of these organsiations are linked oneway or another to Harassmap, and all of them havedone important work to tackle sexual harassment3 “Egypt ‘Worst for Women’ Out of 22 Countries in ArabWorld”. BBC News Middle East. 12 November 2013.Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jePvXFz4XDc.4 “Put Yourself in Her Shoes”, UN Women. Public ServiceAnnouncement published on YouTube. 2013. 1:16. Postedby UN Women. 9 December 2013.Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jePvXFz4XDc

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and end the acceptability of societal practicesthat dismiss it on the basis of religion orculture. In this case, Harassmap presents itselfas a prime example of how a digital artifact canvoice, represent and champion a social right, inthis case that of being free of harassment.

In a way, Harassmap is a digital map very muchlike those widely used on common websites topinpoint a location for a business ororganisation. However, beneath the surface,Harassmap is re-writing the whole idea of the mapand, most importantly that of directionality.Therefore, some of the questions that this paperis going to investigate pertain to the waysHarassmap embeds the idea of the algorithmic turnof sexual harassment and how it reviews thecartography and semiotics of a map. The aim is tohighlight how an analysis of the digitalcontribution to feminist discourses and women’smovements and activities cannot neither ignore norneglect the pervasive impact of code in anyreflection on computational culture. I will arguethat Harassmap reviews the concept of agency andactants, and most importantly, helps a criticalanalysis of the concept of space as experiencedand altered through code.

Harassmap: The Organisation and theMap

Harassmap was born to respond to the social

acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt.

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Founded by Rebecca Chiao, it sought to create agrassroots movement to report cases of sexualharassment in the country. Originally created as awebsite and an organisation, Harassmap developedinto a map in 2010. In this embodiment, the mapwas based on an open source platform calledUshahidi, which allows real time reporting througha mash up of Google Maps, SMS text messages,mobile apps and an online public noticeboard.

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Fig. 1 Harassmap (All Catagories)

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Fig. 2 Harassmap (Rape Category)

Fig. 3 Harassmap (Rape Category), Date Filter 2011-2013

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Harassmap is built on Google Maps and works viaGoogle Maps API, a service entirely coded inJavaScript and XML. Through to the images, mapsare enriched by location coordinates and metadata,making them very flexible and highly customisableservices.5 The site, available in English and inArabic, has been defined as “an interactive tool”whose aim is to “crowdsource harassment”6, or toreport and share personal stories of sexualharassment and assault in Egypt. Women and men whohave been sexually harassed can report theirexperiences posting on the website, sending an SMSmessage or email and, with the advent of socialnetworking sites, information can now be added inreal time via Twitter and Facebook.7 Thesestories are then checked out by a group ofvolunteers who attest their veracity, and ensurethat the report is represented correctly on the

5 Madrigal, Alexis C. “How Google Builds its Maps andWhat it Means for the Future of Everything”. The Atlantis.6 September 2012. Available at:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/6 “Towards a Safer City – Sexual Harassment in GreaterCairo: The effectiveness of Crowdsourced Data”. ReportPublished by Harassmap.Available at: http://harassmap.org/en/towards-a-safer-city-sexual-harassment-in-greater-cairo-the-effectiveness-of-crowdsourced-data-executive-summary/7 In the cases of Twitter and Facebook, the story mustthen be reported on the website and it must be checkedout, as well as reported to the police, in order forthe incident to become a ‘red-dot’ on the map.

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map. Additionally, the victim – that remainsanonymous on the map and whose name is only sharedwith the police – is referred to organizationsthat offer legal support as well as psychologicaland medical assistance.

The story emerges through personal andanonymous reports; at eth same timeit becomes avisual market, or ‘red dot’ as it is referred towithin Harassmap, similar to those found on GoogleMaps to specify a geographical location. Intraditional mapping, the pointer represents astatic location and symbolises directionality(from A to B). The many layers that combinedcreate the map are specifically thought, andimplemented, to help a user find a place, getdirections, check route availability and in somecase get GPS navigation to their destination.

Harassmap redefines all this: the pointer is analgorithmic formulation and translation of apersonal story while the location is nothing morethat the spot where the event took place. Thisresults in an aggregate of ‘red dots’ that usuallybecome hot spots that women should avoid and whichthe police end up patrolling with more frequency.Harassmap is more than a map, it is a reportingsystem and a way of increasing awareness aboutsexual harassment. In this sense, it not onlydocuments incidents of harassment, but it alsoserves as a bulletin of hot spots that womenshould avoid.

Harassmap also puts sexual harassment in thespotlight by promoting community engagement

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activities to fight a practice that wouldotherwise be a taboo. It also reviews andregenerates the idea of crowdsourcing and thepublics that form a grassroots movement becausethe map brings us to ask the question: who is thepublic? Is it made by people or by the stories?Following either case, the question then becomeswhat does crowdsourced mean and how is Harassmap agrassroots movement? Thirdly, carto-semiotics andany traditional idea associated to directionality,location and symbolic meaning of a map pointer isaltered and challenged altogether. Can Harassmapbe considered a map of avoidance?

As it can be seen, the questions that Harassmapraises are multiple and pertain to three differentdimensions: the social dimension of the socialacceptability of sexual harassment and women’sblaming; crowdsourcing and grass root movements;and questions to the world of cartosemiotics, orthe semiotics of the map. In the followingsections these three dimensions, and thecorresponding questions, will be addressed.

The socio-technological dimension ofsexual harassment

Over the course of the years Harassmap hasreceived much praise, including being seen as a‘crowdsourced peace-builder’.8 In great part this

8 Larrauri, Ouig Helena. “How technology can shape thefuture of peacebuilding at the local level”. Insight onConflict. 6 June 2014.

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success is due to its founder, Rebecca Chiao, anda dedicated team of volunteers that perform alarge number of duties ranging from maintainingthe map to supporting fundraising activities.Because of these efforts, the popularity of themap has spread. For example, very similarapplication has appeared in India. This version ofthe map, also called Harassmap, has a mobileapplication that allows reports of incidents to beupdated (and uploaded) instantly.

Noora Flinkman, Harassmap PR and CommunicationCoordinator, highlights how “Harassmap helps incoaching and share(ing) knowledge so that everybodycan have their own map.”9 Therefore, Harassmaprepresents what Noortje Marres has named public-isation of the issue10, or in this case of sexualharassment as a social plague that affects allwomen regardless of religious background.Harassmap is described as a way of doingsomething: “we did realise that to do somethingand do it well, we needed to focus on Egypt alsobecause it (sexual harassment) is very peculiar toEgypt. We need to understand the context […]”.11

Although the context is often wrongly linked to

Available at:http://www.insightonconflict.org/2014/06/technology-future-peacebuilding-local-level/9 Bernardi, Chiara. Interview with Noora Flinkman,Harassmap Media Projects Coordinator. 31 July 2013.10 Marres, Noortje. No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits afterthe Displacement of Politics. PhD Dissertation, UniversitaatVan Amsterdam Press, 2005.11 Bernardi, Chiara. Interview with Noora Flinkman,Media Projects Coordinator, Harassmap. 31 July 2013.

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Islamic extremism, Flinkman stresses how the issueper se is not as simple as one could imagine,hinting to the macho-mentality common to manycultures and not necessarily particular to Egyptor other Muslim contexts. The map in itselfresponds to the problem of sexual harassment,which research has shown does not discriminatebetween social class or level of education. Inrecent times, it has become an unbearable problemthat has reached unprecedented proportions.

Harassmap sits at the intersection of digitaltechnologies and the social context of harassment.Google Map APIs along with the intensive work ofthe open source platform Ushahidi, allow for an upto date reporting system that can be visuallyrepresented and easily understood. The issue ofsexual harassment doesn’t find in the map and theplatform a new tool. Rather on the contrary, it ismade public and emerges through technology,questioning the concept of agency asmetaphysically allocated in the subject.

Harassmap has in fact further embedded the ideaof cross-communication and cross-interactivity andhas become a prime example of how a technologicalartefact can raise questions of agency, emergenceand space. On one level, Harassmap is both awebsite and an organisation that relentlesslytackles the social acceptability of sexualharassment. At another, it is also a place whereindividual reports transform into data, that isaggregated to become red dots on the map and, by

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consequence, redefine the urban space for women inEgypt. As such, code and software algorithms needto be understood as critical agents in the makingof sexual harassment in the country with strongspatial consequences that touch upon the field ofsemiotics and that of geography.

Adrian Mackenzie maintains that agency is notallocated but, rather, we assist to “permutabledistributions of agency between people, machinesand contemporary symbolic environments”.12 Thisdistribution is therefore possible through thecode. The growing role of code is generating asituation where almost everything is code-written,code-readable, code-structured and code-based. AsMartin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Matthew Zook haveargued, “code […] makes decisions automaticallyincluding socially significant ones, in terms ofaccess control and anticipatory governance”.13 Asa result, algorithms, codes and the “hiddenstuff”14 of software cannot be excluded in ananalysis that takes into consideration concepts ofparticipation, identity, crowdsourcing andproduction of computed cultural practices. Nigel12 Mackenzie, Adrian. “Internationalization” in Fuller,Matthew, (Ed.) Software Studies: A Reader. Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2008, 19.13 Dodge Martin, Kitchin Rob and Zook Matthew. “How DoesSoftware Make Space? Exploring Some GeographicalDimensions of Pervasive Computing and SoftwareStudies”. In Environment and Planning. Vol. 41, 2009, 1283-1293.14 Fuller, Matthew. “Introduction: the Stuff ofSoftware” in Fuller, Matthew (Ed.). Software Studies: ALexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2008, 1-14.

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Thrift stresses the socio-spatiality of videogameswhere recreational practices are “rapidly becomingsomething else: something between a lumpen objectonto which all manner of fantasies and all kindsof play could be projected and a kind ofalternative life form, participating in the worldon at least some terms in its own choosing”. 15

Harassmap is perhaps the best example of ahybrid agent (here intended in Latour’s meaning of“anything that can perform”)16 where personalstories emerge, merge and through the agency ofcode become sets of machine-readable data and re-emerge in the form of a human- understandable setof visual elements that can tell a story, showplaces, reports and statistics. At the same time,such crowdsourced revolution made by technologicalartifacts such as Facebook posts, instantmessages, pictures and videos find space on, aninteractive and continuously updated online mapthat depends on the performativity of code. It isa complex network where technology and especiallycode does gain agency: without it, suchcrowdsourced phenomenon would not reach suchimportant dimension.

Cartography and cartographic semiotics have thecommon denominator of representing space and

15 Thrift, Nigel. “Closer to The Machine? IntelligentEnvironments, New Forms of Possession and the Rise ofthe Supertoy”. Cultural Geographies. Issue 10, 389-407.16 Latour, Bruno. “How to Better Register Agency”. YaleTanner Lecture. 26 March 2014. Available at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/562

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geographies “by means of a model space”.17 Mapsare crucially important in cartographic analysis.As it can be seen, a key element of a map is thepossibility to represent a position, and render alocation on the map, thus projecting the space(and the shape) of what is being mapped in orderto make it understandable. With Google Maps usersare now accustomed in having street views,satellite views, pictures of places as well asdirections and routes. However, despite thesimplicity of the interface – the map as itappears online or on mobile devices is made up ofunits and relations. Units represent thecharacteristics of a specific location (i.e. ariver or lake). These units are then organisedinto a system through relations (i.e. ‘closer to’,‘above’ etc.). In order to be understood, any mapnecessitates shared norms based on simplification(i.e. usually addressed as legend or key) andinclusion (i.e. vineyard on a map tacitly relatesto an area where vineyards are present).

The process of coding complex geographicinformation usually emerges in the “marginalnotes, especially in the legend”.18 The way a mapmakes sense of geographic locations and uses (orcreates) a code is also interesting. According tothe Encyclopedia of Semiotics, the smallest unitof a map is a topeme, or “the smallest self-17 Sclichtman, Hansgeorg, “Overview of the Semiotics ofMaps. In E.J. Pratt Library. Semiotics Encyclopedia Online,Victoria University, 2009.Availabe at:http://www.semioticon.com/seo/C/cartosemiotics.html 18 Ibid.

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contained entry in a map”.19 The topeme is crucialto an understanding of map symbolism because thechoice of a topeme constructs the geographicrelevance of a specific part of a space, whilepotentially disregarding other aspects orfractions (addressed as minimal signs) of thatspecific space.

Harassmap encompasses all of these principlesin its quest to report, in real time, cases ofsexual harassment. Through the personalexperiences of women reporting incidents, itgenerates ‘hot spots’, or places in Cairo (andEgypt) that women should avoid. The reports aresometimes so detailed that the map can registernames of streets, numbers and even names ofestablishments including shops. As a result,Harassmap is re-writing the meaning of the map andeffectively altering the idea of directionalityand cartography altogether.

Harassmap is a repository of an extraordinarynumber of personal stories, images, pictures andvideos as well as testimonial of people who havebeen attacked on the street, thus redefining thepurposes of a map. As Google Maps users we arenowadays used to the ‘red-dots’ as signifiers ofdirectionality (whether a place on a map of or astarting point and a destination point).Harassmap’s ‘red dots’ are not just a case ofcrowdsourcing of harassment; these hot spotsbecome what I call places of avoidance and

19 Ibid.

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represent the algorithmic turn of sexualharassment.

My definition of algorithmic turn of sexualharassment refers to the complex set ofnegotiations and transformations that take placeat the code level and intersect and interminglewith social acceptability, taboos, and the sharingof personal stories on publicly accessibleplatforms. In 2010, The Guardian defined Harassmap“a hi-tech weapon [...] unveiled in the battleagainst sexual harassment […]”. Harassmap, theGuardian continued, “[…] allows women to instantlyreport incidents of sexual harassment by sending atext message to a centralised computer”.20

In itself, Harassmap doesn’t bring aboutchange, as the map itself is only one part of adedicated group of people that work everyday tobattle sexual harassment. At the same time,Harassmap does not fall into any of theestablished ideas of public sphere or democraticdiscourses. The visual impact of Harassmap is notsomething that can only (or exclusively) fall intopredefined theoretical frameworks. Rather,Harassmap should be looked at as a criticaltransformer of an issue - that emerges through theinteraction, negotiation and transformation ofpersonal stories into data, and from data intohuman-readable ‘red dots’. 20 Shenger, Jack “Women in Egypt get HighTech to beatSexual Harassment”. The Guardian. 19 September 2010.Available at:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/19/women-egypt-sexual-harassment-harassmap

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Painful stories of harassment, and sometimes ofrape (which has increased dramatically since2011), are translated into binary code, ASCIIreadable, and where longitude and latitudeencoding establish more than just the location.Therefore, it quantifies stories and cases ofabuses (or violence) that increase the size of thepointer (or the ‘red-dot’) in relation to andfunction of the number of reports filed ofaccidents happened in a specific location. So,whereas the pointers are usually associated to adestination or a desired location, with Harassmapthe idea of the minimal sign and topeme (the dotand the street) becomes that of avoidance, a ‘hot-spot’ that women should avoid or be vigilant. Butsuch an accrued value of the pointer, itsincreased numerical value in relation to andfunction of the filed reports, has not justtechnological consequences inasmuch as social andnavigational consequences. This very simpleelement in fact reinforces the performativity ofsoftware and its contribution to how the ‘hotspot’ on the map –emerging from a merge betweenpersonal stories and APIs- redefines the ways thecity if navigated, lived and perceived.

The algorithmic turn doesn’t only stop at thetechnological level. In fact, it is not just aboutcrowdsourcing information because what follows isa hard set of negotiations between many differentperformative parties (or actants). These rangefrom Harassmap responses to the pointers (in termsof activities as an organization) and extend tothe relationship legal and psychological

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assistance, relation with hashtags (#EndSH and#OpSexual Harassment) and organisations behindTwitter activism, public awareness campaigns,lobbying and public relations strategies that areoften undertaken in conjunction with the generalpublic, government institutions, internationalorganisations and NGOs.

Harassmap can be seen as the multi-layered mapwhere sexual harassment meets with geographicallocation; the concentration of ‘red-dots’ becomesthe ‘hot spots’ that women should avoid. At thesame time, the map is a conglomerate wherepersonal stories are collected, locations arehighlighted with varied degrees of precision; somereports contain exact locations includingbusinesses and pictures; others just include thenames of the street. In both cases, the accruedvalue of the ‘red dots’ brings along with it acompletely new way of living urban spaces, so muchso that shops are avoided, certain streets are notchosen at certain times of the day and so on andso forth.

The final aspect that Harassmap introduces isthat of crowdsourcing information and onlinecollaboration. The issue that Harassmap address issexual harassment but the ‘publics’ seem to benon-existent, or so pervasively and painfullypresent that it is difficult to attest if theyhave ever existed. There is no community becausethe anonymity of the reports as collected on themap makes these stories part of a non-public thatHarassmap serves via its activities, advocacy,networking and community engagement projects.

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The stories women and men share on the map –thus bringing the map into being- are in essenceever-present dots that create the map. The accruedvalues that are shown on the map are the indeliblesigns of stories, and the information that isretrievable, readable, can be aggregated,investigated and compared through the years.

Can these stories be considered publics? Arethe people that shared their stories data? Thesetwo questions, along with the relevance of codeand software in the making of sexual harassment,and its participation in the redefinition of asemiotics of the map and the influence of code onspatiality – deserve more attention.

Adding to this, another question that emergesis that of how does the definition of publicchange when code assumes such spatio-relevantpositions? How can a personal story become atopeme or a minimal sign in a map?

Red Dots and the complex network ofHarassmap

Harassmap is perhaps the best example of howtechnology and social interactions have gonebeyond simple relationships, and have been movingtowards mutual endorsement where one is necessaryto the other. This necessity stems to the pointwhere human action depends and exists throughtechnological artefacts, however ephemeral these

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may be as is the case with mash-ups and APIintegrations. Personal stories entangle and aretranslated into machine-readable data to then re-emerge as human-readable and understandable ‘reddots’. The relevance of Harassmap touches upon apurely technological sphere too. As previouslystated, Harassmap is based on mapping principlesof Google Maps and the technologies that enable itfunction.

Google Maps is based on the polyline algorithmand on various encoding process are responsiblefor the two fundamental metrics of mapping(longitude and latitude) to be encoded in eachpoint on the map, as well as for the ability toenable interactive elements of the map.21 Asexplained on the Google developers’ page, theencoding process of the polyline algorithm“converts the binary value into a series ofcharacter codes for ASCII characters using thefamiliar base64 encoding scheme”. Google offers anexample of how an initial signed value forlongitude becomes an encoded binary code, andconsequently contributes to the creation of themap.

21 https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/utilities/polylinealgorithm).

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The algorithm allows the transcription (ortranslation) of an existing longitude and latitudepoint into a binary code that is then

transferrable into an ASCII equivalent.

The overall translation allows for the creationof geolocation points on the map. Google LocationAPIs, alongside many other APIs Google offers,permit binary code to become user readable andusable, allowing communication between differentapplications. Although the development of APIshave a long history and to a great extend dependon Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), they alsoare increasingly using a representational statetransfer (REST) architecture that offers a moredirect connection to other platforms andapplications. Google Maps can be personalised andenriched with content, tailored for specific uses,

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Fig. 4 Longitude Encoding Process

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and new features can be added and integrated (likethe example of the BlogItalia or FourSquare).22

At the same time, there is an important elementthat cannot be neglected, which is that of theorganisation beyond the map, the stories and thecrowdsourcing phenomenon. The map itself can beconsidered only a part of a complex socio-technical network that is made up of manydifferent nodes. Harassmap is a complex casestudy. Beyond and through the map, Harassmapemerges and moves a network that expands andextends to legislation, the application of

existing penal codes and articles, self-defencecourses and events, psychological support,volunteering and art performances among otheractivities the include volunteers andinstitutions.

22 It was the first collective project of automatedaggregation of Italian blogs per town, city and region(excluding the Vatican and San Marino). This projectwas launched in 2008 by Tony Siino, a PhD student fromthe University of Palermo. Available at:http://www.blogitalia.it/mappa/

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Fig. 5 Encoding Polyline

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The legal aspect behind Harassmap and itsactivities is important because Egypt hasprovisions for the arrest and prosecutionregarding sexual harassment offenses, andrecognizes harassment as a crime in articles 306,267 and 269 of the Penal Code. However, despite anexistent legal framework, few offenders have beencharged, and sentences for such offenses havenever been fully applied.23 However, sexual

23 Article 306: “Any person who exposes another toindecent assault publicly via words, actions o gesturesshall be punished by imprisonment for not less than 6months and not exceeding 2 years, and with a fine ofnot less that LE 500 and not more than LE 2,000. Thepunishment in the preceding paragraph also applies ifthe indecent assault took place via telephone or by anyother means of telecommunication.”;

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Fig. 6 Encoding Polyline (Script Code)

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harassment is not solely a legal problem, andHarassmap team continuously remarks how the socialacceptability of harassment is the real issue atstake. Bystanders that pretend not to see, or evenjustify, acts of sexual harassment. As a result,one of the main activities of Harassmap communityinvolves the physical act of going around askingquestions about cases of harassment, questions onhow women are perceived and why no action shouldbe taken when unwanted attention is directedtowards a woman.

Therefore, what happens with Harassmap is whata very complex set of relations that gives raiseto what I address as the algorithmic turn ofsexual harassment. As this analysis has shown,Harassmap is a complex digital artifact whoseexistence is primarily digital but whose influenceextends far beyond the limits of the digitalsphere. This other side of the map blurs theonline/offline differences because sets of

Article 269: “Any person who incites others to acts ofindecency in the public way shall be punished byimprisonment for not less than 3 months. If theoffender commits a similar act within 1 year from thedate of final sentence for the first crime, thepunishment shall be imprisonment for not less than 2years and with a fine of not less than LE 500 and notmore than LE 3,000.”; Article 267: “Any person who copulates with a femalewithout her consent is punished by penal servitude forlife or is given the death sentence. If the offender isrelated to the child, is responsible for the child’supbringing, has authority over the child, or isfinancially serving her against salary […] penalty ofpenal servitude for life is inflicted.”

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relations are established continuously between theonline and the offline world. The reporting systemserves as a source of information and also as ahistorical database. It helps to build thenarrative of sexual harassment in Egypt and alsoacts as a repository that can be retrieved andanalysed.

The fact that personal stories are not justshared but are collected and anonymity isguaranteed makes the map more than a simple crowd-sourcing tool; it makes it a meeting point ofpersonal stories that are seldom told. Therefore,far from being an example of public sphere the mapin itself represent a geo-local experiment ofwomen’s issues that rewrites the narrative ofnavigation, signification and directionality.

Conclusion

This paper has highlighted the important caseof Harassmap, a map, an organization, acrowdsourcing phenomenon of a public that nevermeets but helps make the issue of sexualharassment emerge. I have underlined the importantrole of code and software algorithms in therewriting of navigational symbolism of the mapthrough which cartography works and we, as usersof maps, are accustomed to.

Harassmap offers an opportunity to look at thesignificance of the spatial impact of code andrepresents, I would argue, a challenge to bothdigital media studies as well as feminist studies.

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This challenge should be embraced in order toproduce new and compelling academic research onthe interesting and ever-changing world of womenand activism in the Middle East and South EastAsia.

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