Cybercartography

Sunir Shah (993610990)

CSC2514; November 13, 2003

Space vs. spatiality

(Dodge & Kitchin, 2001b)

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.

Artistic maps

• Metaphoric

• Abstract

• Non-interactive

• Inaccurate

• Yet reflects artist’s conceptual model

• Spatiality

• (Ugly? Artistic?)

(December, 1994 as qtd. in Dodge & Kitchin, 2001b)

Artistic navigable maps

Shelly Jackson (1997) The body. http://www.altx.com/thebody/body.html

• Artistic! personal homepage

• Page structure fits metaphor

• Fully conceptual spatiality

• Hypertext; clickable.

AlphaWorld

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

Hand drawn

• Kunark region

• EverQuest

• Accurate

• Space

http://www.tapr.org/~OutridersKarana/

“3D”

(Vollaro, Sealer, & Anders, as qtd. in Dodge & Kitchin, 2001a)

• Physical model!

• Cubes rooms; rods links

• Spheres teleports

Logical adjacency map

• Logical? Of course…

• Non-Euclidean data structure

• …but close.

Automatically drawn

http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/screen.htm

• Automatically maps

• Only what user has seen

• No spidering!

• No long downloads!

• Change awareness.

• Automatic!

Also interactive

• Click to autowalk

Text chat

http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/circles/new/examples.html

• Identities are text

• Multiple chat rooms, where?

• Overlapping conversations

• Invisible (non-manifest)

• Scrolls rapidly

• History context

• Work around?

• Ugly

Graphical chat

(The Palace as qtd. in Dodge & Kitcin, 2001b)

• Identities are icons

• No improvement on

• Overlapping

• Multiple chat rooms

• No history; context!

• No spatial relationship

• Absurdist (?!)

Virtual reality

• Embed social interaction in 3D space

• Avatars identities

• Real world metaphor, really?

• Again absurdist (?!!)

• Nielson: Minimalism!

(OnLine! Traveler. as qtd. in Dodge & Kitcin, 2001b)

Chat Circles

(Viegas & Donath, 1999)

• Clustered

• “Audible range”

• “Shape” of conversation

• Identities visually distinct

• Lurker awareness

• Crowd numbers seen

• No history ( extra UI)

Design as art

Hyun, Y. (2000) http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus

• Network topology

• Accurately reflects source space

• Very large data set!

• Artistic representation

• This space is fundamentally socially constructed

• Space, yet spatiality?

• Objective, social maps?

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

References cited