CategoryCartography

Click on the title to see all pages related to mapping space; i.e. cartography. Mostly this means "cybercartography."

In particular, please read the excellent AtlasOfCyberspace and MappingCyberspace by Martin Dodge and Robert Kitchin on which a bulk of the material here is based.

CategoryNavigation CategoryInformationVisualization CategoryCategory

Thesis

Cyberspace is not like the real world as there is no external frame of reference. We can construct one falsely, but that is only an illusion and itself is subvertible (e.g. teleports). Thus, while the Western perspective of mapping is one of rationalizing space and orienting ourselves against this rationalization (the grid), we lose this rationalization in cyberspace. This initially leaves us "lost in space", but we quickly relearn prior mapping skills based on semantic constructions. Now that the sign and signifier collapse, the semantic constructions can themselves become the space, just as the map becomes the territory. Finally, we can use social navigation to orient ourselves through this space as semantics defined as social constructions.

I'm doing a term paper on cybercartography, so hopefully I'll actually write interesting stuff here. -- SunirShah

I'll post my presentation at http://sunir.org/meatball/CategoryCartography/presentation.ppt It's 2MB, so don't download it a hundred times! I'll likely delete it or move it to another location in the future, so don't make links to this location without providing sufficient warnings. Later... I got an A; nice! -- SunirShah

SociallyTranslucentSystems

Wiki:TomErickson

Mark Smith's NetScan project: mapping UseNet.

References

Anders, P. (1999) Envisioning cyberspace: designing 3D electronic spaces. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Batty, M. (1997) Virtual geography. Futures, 29(4/5), 337-352.

Batty, M. and Barr, B. (1994) The electronic frontier: exploring and mapping cyberspace. Futures, 26(7), 699-712.

Benford, S., Brown, C., Reynard, G., and Greenhalgh, C. (1996) Shared spaces: transportation, artificiality, and spatiality. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Boston, MA, 77-86.

Börner, K. (2002) Twin Worlds: augmenting, evaluating, and studying three-dimensional digital cities and their evolving communities. in M. Tanabe, P. van den Besselaar, T. Ishida (Eds.): Digital Cities, LNCS 2362, pp. 257-269. Available from http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/562495.html

Börner, K., Hazlewood, W.R., and Sy-Miaw L. (2002) Visualizing the spatial and temporal distribution of user interaction data collected in three-dimensional virtual worlds. in Proceedings. Sixth International Conference on Information Visualization (IV'02). July 10-12, London, England. pp. 25-31. Available from http://vw.indiana.edu/cive02/004_borner_VisSpatialTemporal.pdf

Bowers, J., Pycock, J., and O'Brien, J. (1996) Talk and embodiment in collaborative virtual environments. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, April 13-18, Vancouver, British Columbia, 58-65.

Boyd, D., Lee, H-Y., Ramage, D., and Donath, J. (2002) Developing legible visualizations of online social spaces. in Proceedings of the Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences, January 7–10, Big Island, Hawaii. Available from http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/danah/HICSS2002.pdf [***]

Chen, C., L. Thomas, et al. (1999). Representing the Semantics of Virtual Spaces. IEEE Multimedia, April/June: 54-63.

Cockburn, A., and McKenzie, B. (2002) Evaluating the effectiveness of spatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments. in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves table of contents, April 20-25, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 203-210.

Couclelis, H. (1998). Worlds of information: the geographic metaphor in the visualization of complex information. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, vol. 25, no. 4: 209-20' Dodge, M., and Kitchin, R. (2001) The Atlas of Cyberspace. London: Pearson Education.

Dodge, M., and Kitchin, R. (2001) Mapping Cyberspace. London: Routledge.

Fitzpatrick, G., Kaplan, S., and Mansfield, T. (1996) Physical spaces, virtual places and social worlds- a study of work in the virtual. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Boston, MA, 334-343.

Harpold, T. (1999) Dark continents: a critique of Internet metageographies. Postmodern Culture 9(2). [dubious?]

Harrison, S., and Dourish, P. (1996) Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Boston, MA, 67-76.

Hillier, B. (1996) Space is the machine: a configurational theory of architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Jiang, B. and Ormeling, F. (1997) Cybermap: the map for cyberspace. Cartographic Journal, 24(2), 111-116. Available from http://www.hig.se/%7Ebjg/cj1.PDF

Jiang, B. and Ormeling, F. (2000) Mapping cyberspace: Visualizing, analysing and exploring virtual worlds. The Cartographic Journal, 37(20), 117-122. Available from http://www.hig.se/~bjg/cybermap2000.pdf

Kitchin, R. (1998). Cyberspace: The World in the Wires, Wiley, Chichester, U.K [Robarts, HM221 .K584 1998X (***)]

Kraak, M-J., and Brown, A. (eds.) (2001) Web cartography: developments and prospects. New York: Tayler & Francis. [GA 102.4 .E4W43]

MacEachren, A. M., 1994, Visualization in modern cartography: Setting the Agenda. In Visualization in Modern Cartography (A. M. MacEachren and D. R. F. Taylor, Oxford, UK: Pergamon), pp. 1-12. [often cited]

MacEachren, A. M. (1995). How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: Guilford Press. [GA105.3 .M32]

McBeath, G. B. and Webb, S. A. (1995) Cities, subjectivity and cyberspace. in Proceedings of Sociological Association Annual Conference, University of Leicester, April 10-13. Available from http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/social/papers/mcbeath.txt

Minar, N. and Donath, J. (1999) Visualizing the crowds at a web site. CHI 1999. Available from http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~nelson/research/crowdvis/socvis-final-color.ps.gz

Robinson, A. H. (1952) The look of maps. Madison: University of Wisconson Press.

Skupin, A. (2000). From Metaphor to Method: Cartographic Perspectives on Information Visualization, Proceedings, IEEE Symposium on Information Vizualization (InfoVis) 2000, Oct. 9-10. Available from http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/teaching/geo234_00/papers/skupin.pdf

Slocum, T. A., Blok, C., Jiang, B., Koussoulakou, A., Montello, D. R., Fuhrmann, S., and Hedley, N. (2001). Cognitive and Usability Issues in Geovisualization. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Vol. 28, No.1: 61-75.

Smith, M. A., Farnham, S. D., and Drucker, S. M. (2000) The social life of small graphical chat spaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 1-6, The Hague, The Netherlands, 462-469. Available from http://research.microsoft.com/scg/papers/vchatchi2000.pdf

Taylor, J. (1997) The emerging geographics of virtual worlds. Geographical Review, 87(2), 172-192.

Tilton, D. W. and S. K. Andrews (1994). Space, Place and Interface. Cartographica, 30(4): 61-72.

Turnbull, D. (1994) MapsAreTerritories: Science is an atlas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wexelblat, A., and Maes, P. (1999) Footprints: History-rich tools for information foraging. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, May 15-20, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 270-277. Available from http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/7250/ftp:zSzzSzftp.media.mit.eduzSzwexzSzCHI-99-Footprints.mak.pdf/wexelblat99footprints.pdf

Uncooked

http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/ ==

We all love JudithDonath and her Sociable Media Group. ;)

Social network analysis

TODO

TOCHI
CHI
CSCW
IEEE Multimedia
Citeseer

Use of maps on the Web, chapter 3, Web Cartography, Corné PJ.M. van Elzakker p.21-36

web index or category maps

website designers may use a clickable map as interface to the information resiging on the site, be it geospatial or not
maps are also applied as means of organization of the wwealth of infromation on the WWW as a whole, or part of it, in cases where geospatial componenet does not exists
or is not immediately obvious or of prime importance
function in one way or another insitautions where surfers are browsing the web for no specific reasons (Chen et al., 1998

Motivations

often MUds begin as a verbal diagram of a neighborhood (Jay's Hosue, an existing town (The Chatting Zone) or even the Eart (MeridianMOO).
A MUD administrator will determine themes, rule sof play and often designs and preliminary spaces. Once in place, citizens of the MUD are often invted to build their own rooms, objects and buildings.
Eventually evolve to where not even its operators know its current shape

Construction/subversion of space (Anders, 1998)

organization of each mud vairs according to its themes and histoyr.
spaces can be modeled by simply nothing directions used to get from point to point
larger MUds like LmabdaMOO can contain thousadns of rooms.
changes constantly: entire sections may disappear or appear overnight
may logically contrdict itself; e.g. symmetric relations violated; going west than east may not return me to same place. Most MUDs are symmetric, but DreamMOO is not necessarily
Spaces may be contained inside other spaces; e.g. Tree, The Chatting Room (inside may be larger than outside)
HoloMUCK imposes rigid rules so that distance relationships are maintained --> lots of useless rooms just to connect interesting spaces
LambdaMOO has an avatar called Tree that is actually a MUD in itself. Visitors can enter the avatar-as-MUD and explore it like its own domain.

More democratic domains harder to navigate because no overarching order.
8 sometimes orienting spaces spontaneously created by users
- Flux, predecessor to HoloMUCK: originally minimal restrictions on new construction. As it evovled, its configuration became incrasisngly complex. Navigation in theMUD depened more and more on teleportation as the order of a larger MUD structure dissipated.
  - reaction was overcontrol. forced geometrical structure, forces users to navigated repeatedly to go somewhere they want.
alternatives are the sewer system of The Chatting Zone which provids shortcuts below the rigorous mapping of IPswich, Ireland.
blackholes: places you can get into but cannot leave without a teleport or leaving and returning to the system

Teleportation hack; prevents socialization by random encounters on the street.

Logical Adjacency Maps (Anders, 1998)

actual pysical 3D model.
cubes are rooms, rods are connectors
spheres are teleports
necessarily icomplete because of the size adn ephemeral nature of the MUDs.
mapping such a MUD in it sentirety is almost impossible since the number of rooms change by the minute
does not support nested spaces
LAMs of more tightly controlled MUDs are rigorously geometrical when compared with more democratic domains.

Visual MUDs

most orient user with ground planes, sky, horizon, light sources, 3d objects
--> imply orientation; frontality and vertical posture
programmers of 3D Muds keep the polygon count own by simplifying the construction of objectcs and using bit-mapped surfaces which show details as two-deimsional graophics
consequently the worlds created have a schematic, cartoonsish quality that belies their realism.
nonetheless, teleportation still popular.
Worlds Away, The Palace are effectively two-dimsional, showing a flattend backdrop in elevation and avatars in front. like desktop wallpaper with icons floating on top
conversely, places like WorldChat and AlphaWorld committed to rendering a 3d enviornment
- space in these worlds is transparent; possible to see many objects and spaces at once (vs. roombased metaphor earlier)
- whlie outside just another room in a text-based MUD, it is an all-embracing volume in these spaces
often provide flying as navigation metaphor
AlphaWorld grows out in eight compass directions
- can only travel through "open" space.
- space harder to find as city grows
- teleport along eight directions until something found
- alleviatable by point-and-click?

[Quotations on the use of Place]