Cybercartography Sunir Shah 993610990 CSC 2514 November 13

Cybercartography Sunir Shah (993610990) CSC 2514; November 13, 2003

Space vs. spatiality SPACE • Absolute; e. g. Aristotle, Euclid, Des Cartes, Newton • Objective, empirical, analytical • Directly represent underlying data structure. SPATIALITY • “Read”; socially constructed; post-modern • Represent or reflect user’s mental model • Designed, built, or enlivened. (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001 b)

Artistic maps • Metaphoric • Abstract • Non-interactive • Inaccurate • Yet reflects artist’s conceptual model • Spatiality • (Ugly? Artistic? ) (December, 1994 as qtd. in Dodge & Kitchin, 2001 b)

Artistic navigable maps • Artistic! personal homepage • Page structure fits metaphor • Fully conceptual spatiality • Hypertext; clickable. Shelly Jackson (1997) The body. http: //www. altx. com/thebody/body. html

Alpha. World http: //mapper. activeworlds. com; (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001 a)

Hand drawn • Kunark region • Ever. Quest • Accurate • Space http: //www. tapr. org/~Outriders. Karana/

“ 3 D” • Physical model! • Cubes rooms; rods links • Spheres teleports • Logical adjacency map • Logical? Of course… • Non-Euclidean data structure • …but close. (Vollaro, Sealer, & Anders, as qtd. in Dodge & Kitchin, 2001 a)

Automatically drawn • Automatically maps • Only what user has seen • No spidering! • No long downloads! • Change awareness. • Automatic! Also interactive • Click to autowalk http: //www. zuggsoft. com/zmud/screen. htm

Text chat • Identities are text • Multiple chat rooms, where? • Overlapping conversations • Invisible (non-manifest) • Scrolls rapidly • History context • Work around? • Ugly http: //web. media. mit. edu/~fviegas/circles/new/examples. html

Graphical chat • Identities are icons • No improvement on • Overlapping • Multiple chat rooms • No history; context! • No spatial relationship • Absurdist (? !) (The Palace as qtd. in Dodge & Kitcin, 2001 b)

Virtual reality • Embed social interaction in 3 D space • Avatars identities • Real world metaphor, really? • Again absurdist (? !!) • Nielson: Minimalism! (On. Line! Traveler. as qtd. in Dodge & Kitcin, 2001 b)

Chat Circles • Clustered • “Audible range” • “Shape” of conversation • Identities visually distinct • Lurker awareness • Crowd numbers seen • No history ( extra UI) (Viegas & Donath, 1999)

Design as art • Network topology • Accurately reflects source space • Very large data set! • Artistic representation • This space is fundamentally socially constructed • Space, yet spatiality? • Objective, social maps? Hyun, Y. (2000) http: //www. caida. org/tools/visualization/walrus

References cited Dodge, M. , and Kitchin, R. (2001) The Atlas of Cyberspace. Pearson Education: London. Dodge, M. , and Kitchin, R. (2001) Mapping Cyberspace. Pearson Education: London. Viegas, F. and Donath, J. (1999) Chat Circles. Proceedings of CHI 99 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Pittsburg, USA, p. 9 -16; available at http: //www. media. mit. edu/~fviegas/chat-circles_CHI. html