Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Rrove

R rove is one of the latest site-tagging apps making use of Google Maps API (via & credit). I signed up for an account this morning and tested it with a link to the Palmer House in Chicago, site of the '06 CCCC late next month. Rrove also has a community setting, so it might be useful for conference hosting, collaborative markups of an area, and so on. My first impression is that it's a kind of geospatial del.icio.us, and although the site still lacks a few features (such as RSS) common to the web 2.0 lineup, I'm holding out hope that those features will roll out any day now. I have other motives for seeing a web2.0-rich version of Rrove, not the least of which is my GEO781 project, which, from my perspective several weeks removed from its completion, will deal with some of the ways we might begin to recognize cybercartography as writing. Still fuzzy (not discouragingly so), but I think I'll be dealing with Wayfaring, Frappr and Rrove, developing some of my earlier thinking on the photographemic map and memorial froms, while sorting through theoretical/pedagogical rationale for (hyper)imagetext integration of geospatial writing. I just received my copy of Google Maps Hacks yesterday, too, and after leafing through it for a few minutes, I would guess it's going to be manageable to begin working up customized maps very soon.

On a related note, one of my colleagues in class (who studies and teaches physical geography) raised several really interesting questions about the discord between the textual/encyclopedic side of Wikipedia and its stalled counterpart, WikiAtlas. It set us off into some fairly provocative exchange about atlas authorship, and also got me thinking again about what Manovich does with paradigmatic and syntagmatic. From my perspective, the energy surrounding cybercartography is in the multitude of overlays more than the landforms in the background. The excitement centers on the syntagmatic possibilities for the map; its writability.

Posted by dmueller at February 1, 2006 1:45 PM to (Di)stances