Thursday, March 2, 2006

Nodes from Class

Here's a Cmap draft of the development of modern composition studies, roughly reproduced from notes on the board during Tuesday's 712. I went back and snapped a digital photo of the chalkboard yesterday (preserved from the day before with a "Please do not erase"). Then, to develop the Cmap, I inserted the photograph as a temporary background to approximate the spatial arrangement of links and nodes. After that, I quick-shopped a periodization backdrop to emphasize the past few decades as phases of disciplinary development (fluctuation, upheaval, etc.). And finally, I shifted around a few of the nodes, repositioned other stuff, tinkered with color schemes and sent off a draft for future--ongoing--revisions. The map of complandia? Certainly not; not in any perfected, exhaustive or territory-analog kind of way. But one map of complandia. Next I need to figure out how to set up Cmaps on a server for collaborative map-making. I'll argue that this model holds promise for 1.) mapping complex histories; 2.) exploring incongruous accounts of disciplinary formation, extradisciplinary developments running through those formations, and sub-disciplinary peaks and valleys (rising and falling, trends, etc.); and 3.) charting disciplinary mythologies and imaginaries through the idiosyncrasies of individual and group percept-cartography (granted, I don't know that there is such a thing as "percept-cartography"; I'm making that part up on the fly). Although this map came together during a single class session, it could be updated, for pretty much any course, let's say, over several weeks, possibly accounting for emerging ties and emerging locative criteria/rationale as the course unfolds.