Cybercartography Sunir Shah ( ) 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. Artistic! personal homepage Page structure fits metaphor Fully conceptual spatiality Hypertext; clickable.
AlphaWorld (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001a)
Hand drawn Kunark region EverQuest Accurate Space
“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 Automatically maps Only what user has seen No spidering! No long downloads! Change awareness. Automatic! Also interactive Click to autowalk
Text chat 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) 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 References cited