Saturday, June 21, 2008
Satellitization
B efore touring the old Santa Ana Pueblo a week ago on Thursday morning, again and again we were reminded that no photography was allowed. Also, no sketches, no recording of sounds. The rationale for this goes directly to simulacrum and the sacred: the ground itself and all activities upon it remain contained, singular, rare. When reproduction and representation are banned, the site does not suffer from diffusion but instead remains intact. On the tour to the Zia Pueblo a few years ago, there was a similar admonition. There, a sign was posted in front of the church. Something like, "Any recording or reproduction at this site is punishable by a fine of $3,500."
While on the walking tour, I wondered whether Old Santa Ana can be seen from above in Google Maps. It's not far from Albuquerque, after all. At what resolution has satellite imagery in effect leached the site's sanctity? Later, when I checked, I found that indeed the spot is plainly visible from above; aerial topography, it turns out, has not honored the on-ground policies.
At breakfast the next day, however, I was surprised to find another replica, this one, a scale-diorama of sorts, in a display case near one of the restaurants in the Hyatt Tamaya--a resort on the edge of Santa Ana No. 2 (what is called New Santa Ana, as I understand it). Strangely enough, in this instance, nothing is posted about copies (or sketches) of the copy:
Posted by at Friday, May 23, 2008
Everywhere Drafting
E arlier this afternoon, during the A-session of the 13th biennial Rhetoric Society of America conference, I was involved with a panel called "Novice Topoi: A Special Session on the Amateur." I hope to have time to say more about it later. For now, I thought I'd mark the occasion by posting what I contributed--an experimental Flash map that uses movie clips as place-markers. There are a few things in the map I'd like to adjust, but all in all I accomplished what I set out for: 1.) square with something I didn't know how to do when I agreed back in September to be a part of the panel and 2.) push my thinking about what is possible (and what is pleasurably worthwhile) where mapping and distant reading intersect (this for Ch. Five of the diss., which I will be drafting throughout June; maybe I should say "everywhere drafting" given that June includes those trips to Albuquerque and Hershey, Pa.).
Here's the informal statement I handed out at the gallery/panel:
In this experimental Flash map, I have tried to create a simple, direct cartographic experience fashioned from twenty years of author-location metadata derived from College Composition and Communication. Sixteen frames are assigned to each issue of the journal (i.e., 64 frames per year; the file progresses at 12 frames per second); in the first frame for each issue, a series of short movie clips (or "blips") initiate, touching off at each of the institutional locations from which an article was published in the journal. For each subsequent publication from a given institutional location, the instance of the blip appears slightly larger (i.e., the diameter grows by two pixels). Thus, markers associated with programs such as Michigan Tech and Ohio State, appear larger and larger over the span of the two-minute piece. By factoring in a temporal dimension, the map is coded with what Denis Wood, in The Power of Maps, identifies as "thickness." From "Everywhere Drafting," perhaps we can apprehend patterns at a scale not commonly available to readers of individual articles within the journal.
But this is a gallery/panel on the amateur, right? And so I should acknowledge that I had no certain idea how this would work or whether it would work at all. I set out to see what would happen, taking another Flash-based mapping project as one I would try to approximate. And I know very little about Flash. I dabble with it, find myself confused, often uncertain of all that a knowing user could create. I do know that such a map can be generated automatically from a data-set (one day I will learn how), but I produced the map by hand from a twelve-page list of articles and institutions. Roughly half-way in, I realized that my method for "placing" the slowly growing increments was flawed. Because I was using constant X-Y coordinates for each institution, as the movie clips grew larger, they gradually became farther and farther displaced from the anchor point, which was, I learned (the hard way--by messing it up), not at the center of the clip but at the upper left-hand corner. Painstakingly, amateurishly, I managed to correct the problem.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Chamber of Absences
I haven't been taking great notes while reading Prairyerth, but I did dog-ear a page for this:
There are several ways not to walk in the prairie, and one of them is with your eye on a far goal, because then you begin to believe you're not closing the distance any more than you would with a mirage. My woodland sense of scale and time didn't fit this country, and I started wondering whether I could reach the summit before dark. On the prairie, distance and the miles of air turn movement to stasis and openness to a wall, a thing as difficult to penetrate as dense forest. I was hiking in a chamber of absences where the near was the same as the far, and it seemed every time I raised a step the earth rotated under me so that my foot feel just where it had lifted from. Limits and markers make travel possible for people: circumscribe our lines of sight and we can really get somewhere. Before me lay the Kansas of popular conception from Coronado on--that place you have to get through, that purgatory of mileage. (82)
"That purgatory of mileage"--the horizontal vista of Chase County draws Least Heat-Moon in. The expanse of long grasses is at times disorienting. He feels lost, but knows that no line can be walked for five miles without crossing a road. He is a journalist, a chronicler, a gatherer of stories. Sometimes he consults a map, such as when he stands in Cottonwood Falls with "an 1878 bird's-eye-view engraving of the town" (52), but he also--sector by county sector--sketches his own. This last point is important, I think. It is the practice where his methods live up to the "deep mapping"--an ethnographic presence in graceful suspense (not unlike North's ten years of "walking among"), part Geertzian "thick description," but also meta-, also interested in the up and out--the topography. This prairie topography can be experienced on foot.
I'm mulling over the relationship between Least Heat-Moon's "chamber of absences"--the "distance" and "openness" of the prairie topography and (yet again) de Certeau's "wave of verticals," the "scopic drive" he chides after looking out onto NYC from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. What is strange--exciting, even--is that Least Heat-Moon cannot figure out how to organize his book until he appropriates a form from the grid of his hand-drawn maps. About maps, de Certeau says, "They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection.... These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice" (97). If I may put that last sentence through a tumbler, what if, "the trace left behind is the practice" or "the trace left behind invigorates the practice (of walking in the city/prairie)"? This windy adventure forks yet again at the distinction between the general-use map (with common place names, consensus, etc.) and that other, more self-selective attunement (an experiential, even egotistical sketch).
About my own chamber of absences: I am warming up to the idea that none of this belongs in Chapter Five. But I nevertheless find myself happily stuck (not stranded) on the problem of "What about maps as a (databasic, interested) writing practice?". I don't know. Yet there is a promising something (a fantastic thingamabob) at the theoretical fulcrum between de Certeau's high-up perch (fraught with verticality) and Least Heat-Moon's more moderate, walking-the-prairie sensibility (fraught with horizontality). I would be thrumming again on matters of scale, I suppose, to wonder whether that's all it amounts to when Least Heat-Moon breaks into his intimate portraits of people and places, interrupting with his private, deliberative excursions to the various plateaus or flint shelves for reorientations from time to time. Don't we all need (or at least desire) such reorientations?
Friday, May 9, 2008
Elmowhere You Look
L et's just say Is. is intensely fond of her red monster friend in his many instances. You'd think we (all) live on Sesame Street. Upon request, we improvisationally add his name into songs we sing (i.e., "Elmo goes marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah"). No lyrics are exempt from this practice. We must carry him along when we do London Bridge in the living room. Unrelenting elmogrification these days and learning much about the passional impulses of one delightful toddler.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Absolut Aztlán
A bout a month ago, Absolut Vodka ran an advertisement in selected publications in Mexico titled "In An Absolut World" and showing a modified pre-1845 political map of North America. Evidently the ad (produced by Mexico City-based Teran/TWBA) stirred up quite a bit of discussion ranging from hard-lined close-the-borders remakes to characterizations of Absolut as exceedingly leftist, from calls for boycotts of the vodka to more nuanced historical reflections on the Mexican-American War and reconquest movements. That's quite a bit to come from a localized print advertisement. Absolut apologized before retracting the ads just a few days later. And though many of the spin-offs reflect entrenched anti-Mexico perspectives, there are more takes on Flickr here and here. I've collected some of the links in this entry because I can imagine returning to this fracas as an example of the rhetoricity of maps--an extended foray into what Denis Wood might have been thinking when he suggested in The Power of Maps that maps are always, unavoidably interested. Yes, advertisements even more so--or more overtly so. By no means am I well read or well studied on reconquest movements, but glancing the few threads of conversation linked above does remind me of a line in Silko's Almanac of the Dead when she mentions the quiet celebrations each time a Spanish-speaking leader is elected to public office in the southwestern U.S.
One of the more compelling responses I've seen comes from a commenter to the blog Conservative Dialysis who points to the hypocrisy in the great outrage over the "In An Absolut World" ad when postcards like the one below still circulate in the Lone Star State and beyond (also featured on Strange Maps). Of course, it's not as simple to establish the tie that connects the circulation of one to the circulation of the other. But, that both of them circulate (or rather that one is retracted while the other one is so mundane as to go unnoticed) makes their pairing (possibly) electric.
I'm intrigued by, as much as anything here, the small leap from (interested?) map to worldview. What are those interests? Whose are they? How are they coded in the map's symbology? Written into or inscribed in the layers of the map itself? These few examples, slowly aging among my "starred items" in Google Reader, seem to get at that leap fairly well (well enough for a future assignment on map writing practices or something?).
Monday, March 10, 2008
Certeau's Sieve-order
L ately I've been puzzling over de Certeau's theorization of maps and what they risk obfuscating (e.g., stories, minutiae, detritus, etc.) in The Practice of Everyday Life. His pedestrian rhetoric affirms the viewpoint of the "ground level" over the observation of the whole from the 110th story of the World Trade Center, from which he once experienced a curious pleasure while looking onto Manhattan--seeing it as a "wave of verticals" hovering distantly above the city's "paroxysmal places" (91). De Certeau wonders about the pleasure he felt and, as well, what this bird's-eye viewpoint, with its "scopic and gnostic drive," obscures: "When one goes up there, he leaves behind the the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators" (92).
From the observation deck, De Certeau says the mass is left behind, that it "carries off and mixes up." Reasonably true. Looking down on the ant-like taxis, the city appears different--further away. But in another sense, the urban observation deck is not less local than the sidewalk, is it? Also, marveling at the city does not make its streets more readily navigable (whatever compels you to go out and about).
Certeau goes on to critique maps, traces, place-names, and flattened projections, lumping them together as totalizing devices: "The surface of this ["suspended symbolic order"] is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order" (107). The sieve-order favors stories and localization, and these are thwarted by intervals of distance, from those viewpoints at which the "world's debris" disappears.
Later he admits an oscillation between the local stories and "rumors" (presumably reinforced by a desire for totalizing representations), he is concerned that the relationship between the two has become stratified: "Stories diversify, rumors totalize. If there is still a certain oscillation between them, it seems that today there is a stratification: stories are becoming private and sink into the secluded places in neighborhoods, families, or individuals, while the rumors propagated by the media cover everything and, gathered under the figures of the City, the masterword of an anonymous law, the substitute for all proper names, they wipe out or combat any superstitions guild of still resisting the figure" (108). The overwrought substitution of the one (i.e., totalizing view) for the other (i.e., everyday practices) is troubling: "The trace left behind [on, say, a map] is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten" (97).
Might the projection--and even the written account--also rejuvenate the action, renew its circulation, and cause it to be remembered again? Specifically, I am thinking about this in relationship to distant reading methods that translate large volumes of data (mined from texts or activities) into visual models--projections in which we can apprehend patterns not identifiable at other scales of contact (such as the "ground level").
Maybe there is a place for de Certeau in Chapter Five. I haven't decided yet. But I am discovering the faint separations between my dissertation and the walking rhetorics he advocates. Something tells me these can be bridged (or filled), but I am still reaching for ideas about how to do that (and also still thinking about whether it is even necessary).
Sunday, December 30, 2007
And Now Here
A week ago Thursday we stopped through the closing reception of a show at the Delavan Art Gallery here in Syracuse. Hadn't been to the gallery before, but several pieces produced by our friend (and former neighbor), Amy Bartell, were on display (some of it by such enigmatic and inventive techniques I can't get my mind off of it). I don't have a program with me now, and I couldn't find the exact title for her exhibit online, but I think it was called "Archeological Memoir." Basically, she works with various materials (impressions, overlays, exposure, stamping) to layer together what I would describe as 'geographic impressions.' They're not impressionist, in the sense of that tradition; rather they involve the plying (layering, doubling over, folding and folding) of found things (symbols and materials)--a sandwiching effect by which their pressed-ness amplifies the deep entanglement of place, object, and spatial imagination. I was struck by the collection because it resonated conceptually with some of the stuff you would find in Harmon's You Are Here and at Strange Maps. This it to say it hooked into the same way-finding attitude or manner I continue to find tremendously appealing. But the pieces were also detailed and varied--as pastiche: almost imaginary maps, almost documentary, almost autobiography. Digital versions of two of the pieces are online--Travelogue and Your Call Cannot Be Completed At This Time--but the entire exhibit is worth experiencing in its entirety, and because she does at least one show each year, there is a decent chance of catching it again in Central New York.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Poetics of Cartography
I finally got around to listening to "This American Life" on mapping. Seems like someone mentioned the program when it aired last month (I remember looking at the accompanying images in Flickr). The program, a replay of the broadcast from 1998, covers mapping across the five senses, beginning with Denis Woods on sight and his neighborhood maps that take into account things like how often addresses (or names of residents) occur in a neighborhood newsletter and how the geolocations of jack-o-lanterns (photographed and layered onto a black background) correspond to the places references in the newsletter. He describes this fascination as a "poetics of cartography" and proposes that there isn't anything that can't be mapped. Brief thought it is, Woods opening piece gave me a boost for thinking about chapter five in the diss, even if I'm still two or three months from drafting the chapter on mapping. Hearing him talk about his mapping practices made me want to drop everything I'm doing (right now, on tag clouds) and re-read The Power of Maps.
The rest of the show is worth a listen, but I didn't find the later sections to be as impressive as Woods' bit. There's a piece on mapping soundscapes (not far off some of the things Jenny has discussed re: documentary, although this guy finds musical notes in the drone of his microwave and CPU cooling fan), and there are also short segments on mapping with smell and touch--both of which reminded me of conversations in the cybercartography seminar I took two years ago.
Monday, July 16, 2007
United Lakes of Atlantica
O ver the weekend Strange Maps posted an inverted map of the world. The imaginary map was designed by Vlad Gerasimov who made it as desktop wallpaper available at Vladlabs.
Aside from the Grand Inversion, the map symbols would suggest that the climate, landforms, coastlines, flora, and fauna are more or less in tact. In that case, I suppose I'd be most at home just north and east of Bermuda City. Or somewhere within a canoe ride of the Great Islands.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Michshapen
I received an email earlier this evening announcing a hot new version of Google Analytics. Since I'm putting off packing for C&W, I clicked around in it for a couple of minutes. Most of what I found was impressive, highly detailed, analytical, and so on. But when I zoomed in on the U.S., something was off. Michigan, the state where I was born and raised, the land of Vernors and Koegels (milk and honey, bah!), appeared malformed.
I zoomed in once again and found the same funky shape, only larger.
This can only mean one of the following:
- The designer at Google Analytics had one too many Old Milwaukees for lunch.
- The U.P. has, in fact, always been the shape of the stock of a shotgun.
- Four of the Great Lakes have been bulldozed after all of that precious fresh water was leeched by a Las Vegas irrigation swindle.
- Google Analytics is consulting with a cartographer from Monroe who mistakenly used his whole arm for a quick-map.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Web Bearings
T
he "Map of Online Communities"
posted
to XKCD (one of the few web comics I follow) is
traveling
through the
internets this morning. Don't miss it. 
It offers an impressive lot: playful
place-names, the loose association of geographic area with online activity, and
a directional orientation based on abstract magnetisms (practical/intellectual
and focuses on real life or the web). Very much the sort of
imaginary map you might expect to find in Harmon's You Are Here.
Even though the map includes a note discouraging navigational use, I tend
to think of it as appropriate for that purpose, especially for wanderers who sit
in their cozy homes in the Icy North, gazing sullenly at/through Windows
Live and Yahoo and wondering what's on the other side of the mountain range.
Note the TITLE text available on mouse-over of the map: I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Locative Metadata II
I mentioned the other day that I had more maps to share. I put together another batch built from program-level locative metadata rather than the field-wide or disciplinary locations shown in the maps of CCCC chairs' addresses/conventions since 1977 and the institutional membership of the rhet-comp doctoral consortium. Below I've worked from the CCR web site to come up with simple geographic representations of various features of the program where I'm doing graduate work: I. Where our faculty come from; II. Where our graduate students come from (MA institutions); and III. Where our alumni have gone. The fourth and final map in this batch rolls these three data-sets together, mashing them into a single map that shows multiple location-associations for the program. For now I'll hold off on making the argument that such slices of locative metadata are significant beyond the usual ways we have both for understanding a graduate program from the inside (who do we understand ourselves to be?) and from the outside (what image do we project?). Of course, these aren't the only questions for which the maps have relevance, and though they're a starting place, perhaps they seem too simple (or unanswerable given complex variables) to bother asking.
It runs the risk of junking up the display, but I've added arcs between SU and the respective institutions. I haven't decided whether the arc feature adds much to the map. I'm still experimenting with features and seeing what comes of it. The fourth and final map, then, appears below. It combines all of the points shown in the first three. And I've dropped the arcs because they make for a tangle of untraceable ties between points.
All of the locative data is available on our web site, so I'm not working with information that was difficult to gather. The locations of alumni reflects only current institutions, not programs where graduates worked previously (although such a thing would be interesting to consider, too). Also, the locative data at the program level, like the field-wide maps I posted a few days ago, corresponds exclusively to the grid coordinates of other institutions. From this, whether or not we can resolve it to anyone's lasting satisfaction, we can begin to ask about how such formations constitute networks of some sort, even if we know only tacitly that they do.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Locative Metadata
O ver the past few days I've been tinkering with alternatives for representing locative metadata. I stumbled across John Emerson's DIY Map, which layers together a Flash movie with XML, and I've been encouraged with the results. Emerson's project has been around for over two years; the release history tells that it came about just before the release of the Google maps API in Feb. of 2005.
One nice thing about DIY Map is that it cooperates with basic XML, so the 78kb Flash map can match with multiple sets of data to create various maps. The XML files are small and easy to customize or edit as data-sets change. Consider, for comparison, the map of the RC Consortium I put together using Frappr a year ago. Frappr is adequate for locating the 73 members on the list, but it wants to frame them as people rather than institutions or programs. While Frappr puts the Google maps API to good use, its design inhibits the simpler plotting of points that I'm after. I also liked that Frappr made it possible to embed the map in another site, but Emerson's project manages this, too. Frappr's admin tools left a lot to be desired in that the data couldn't easily be exported or edited in batches (to switch from people to groups, for instance).
For the most part, the points should link to the web site for each respective program; however, as I copied and pasted the data from the consortium site, I found a few broken links. Those can be resolved easily enough later on. In the XML file, I have set the data point size to 2. All of the colors are established with hex codes, and I've applied a different shade in zones (states) where the data is zero, or, in other words, where there aren't any members of the consortium. Emerson's approach here is smart, too, because the color scheme for all data points is controlled from one set of lines in the XML file. Navigating the map may take a few minutes to get used to. You can drag a box over regions of the map you would like to enlarge. Clicking in a particular state will enlarge the state and center it in the frame.
I'm aware of the inherent limitation of the U.S.-centrism. DIY Map has other countries and regions available. This isn't a problem in the map of the consortium because there aren't yet any members beyond the U.S. (as far as I know; granted, this list doesn't account for changes in membership over the past year or so). But should the consortium add members in other parts of the world, the default frame would need to be reconsidered. Of course, because the data points make use of grid coordinates, transferring them over to a global view would be fairly manageable.
Because it was relatively easy to do, I threw together XML files for a few other data sets. This map shows the locations of the chairs' addresses and CCCC conferences since 1977.
Here I've used alternating marker sizes to show, for example, that the conference has been in Chicago four times since 1977. The markers indicating addresses that have also been published in CCC Online Archive are linked to the corresponding page on that site (click on San Antonio to see what I mean).
There's much more to say about this, and I'll try to share some of the other maps later this week (after my computer is back from repair). Finally, here is the chunk of code for embedding one of these maps in another site, should anyone have an interest in doing such a thing:
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="500" height="297" id="zoom_map" align="top">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.earthwidemoth.com/side/flashmap/us.swf?data_file=http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/flashmap/addresses.xml" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />
<embed src="http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/flashmap/us.swf?data_file=http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/flashmap/addresses.xml" quality="high" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="500" height="297" name="Clickable U.S. Map" align="top"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
This bit of code applies to the map of the chairs' addresses (addresses.xml). For the RC Consortium, swith the file name to rhetcomp.xml.
Saturday, September 2, 2006
Photos and Locative Tagging
F lickr launched a new geotagging feature this week (via). It's tied in with Yahoo's mapping API; via Flickr, you can assign locative data to your photos simply by drag-and-drop methods. The Flickr blog reports an impressive surge in the geotagging of photographs with some 1.2 million geotagged in the first 24 hours after the feature's rollout.
Granted, if a photo already had geotags assigned, the new system automatically recognized them, so a fair portion of the 1.2 million were probably auto-assigned rather than initiated by Flickr users.
Several months ago I made use of some of the earlier geotagging efforts, which established grid coordinates as tags unto themselves.
The new scheme, however, keeps the locative data under the hood and instead offers a simple link to a map alongside a label indicating "Taken in/near <placename>."
After months of thinking they were defunct, it turns out that all of the old geotags haven't gone to waste.
They're working to post the photos assigned geographic data in the tags to sites like loc.alize.us.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Zillow
I 'm not thinking of buying a house, but if was, I'd refer to Zillow.com, a site layered with maps, orthophoto aerial images, residential housing data and tax-assessed valuations. I delivered my final "mini-briefing" of the semester in GEO781 yesterday, touted Zillow's finer points. I find it interesting because it aspires to aggregate the cadastre data from multiple municipalities in a single database while tying into Navteq maps (like Google) and GlobeXplorer aerials and the impressive bird's-eye views from pictometry.com. Most of the description and assessment data is available for specific cities and counties, but it's often listed in a table without dynamic mapping interfaces to make reading across multiple properties efficient or easy. We should expect Zillow to expand, too, because it's growing the information side of the real estate market; the bird's-eye stuff was added just two weeks ago. And ultimately, for me, therein lies the treat of the site. The cadastre data is fine (even if it's not searchable by the owner's name like it is at many city/county web sites), but the twin-view of the maps/photos/hybrids and the bird's-eye views of properties are nice to look at. And the two frames are synched; click-n-drag action in one frame has the same effect in the adjacent frame. The same applies to directional rotation. Bird's-eye from the east? Select it and the same turn happens in the map view. The compass-dial in the upper left is smooth, too. It's not limited to four or eight directions like so many others.
Market comparisons for recent home sales aren't yet available in CNY, and when I checked them out for our former house in KC, the comps were negligible. I suspect it to be a condition of a project in its infancy. Someone in class yesterday said Zillow will spell the end of the real estate agent. Maybe. What good is an agent when you have agency? Or zagency. That's the other thing. Zillow.com runs the risk of going wild with the reasoning that goes "people remember z-words" (they say their favorite letter is z). Where market-data supports it (tracking county-wide trends in sales), Zillow.com offers what they've coined as a "zestimate." A happy collision of zest+estimate? There's also a trade-marked "Zestimator." Here's hoping there's not too much more of ZatTM. Still, the interface design and mapping uses are cool.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Ground-Truthing
T he upcoming issue of The New Yorker includes an article first released yesterday to the magazine's web site. "Getting There: The science of driving directions," offers a sharp-right overview of evolving navigational technologies, running from Rand McNally paper maps to their updated on-dash equivalents. A brief history of automobile navigation gets a few column inches, too; both the "Jones Live-Map" and the "Photo-Auto Guide" were early twentieth century contrivances for first-person (um, first-vehicle?) navigating. Though it's only briefly mentioned and mixed in with a bunch of other fun, interesting details, one proposition is that we're seeing a resurgence in egocentric navigational devices with various mobile gadgets.
Ground-truthing comes up in the mid-section of the piece. I'm sure this is common parlance for geographers, but ground-truthing is basically a validation process--driving the map to confirm its correspondence to the real (locating attributes, checking them off, tracking the new, etc.). It gets at the correspondence between places and their abstractions, whether digitally coded or paper based. And so ground-truthers, working for geographic outfits such as Navtek, free-drive the urbanscapes noting signs of discord.
Seeing the road through the eyes of a ground-truther made it seem a thicket of signage�commands and designations vying for attention, like a nightmare you might have after a day of studying for a driving exam. Once you start looking for attributes, you spot them everywhere.
And there are also a few sweet moments of meta-:
A map is a piece of art. It is also a form of language�a rendering of information. A good map can occupy the eye and the mind longer than almost any other single page of data, including Scripture, poetry, sheet music, and baseball box scores. A map contains multitudes.
Read the rest of it if any of this sounds good. I stole a few minutes this morning to do just that, and I was glad for it. Next, in GEO781 we looked at Moretti's chapter on maps. I wasn't sure what to expect, but everyone was really taken by his project (even the physical geographers in the group!). We tangled with wide range of issues related to place-name stability, databases and automation of mapping textual data, transmedia and fictional maps (re Lord of the Rings, mainly), and Moretti's distinction between geography (locative logics) and geometry (relational/directional logics). One question got at whether Graphs, Maps, Trees is being thought over by folks beyond the humanities. And one of the most salient suggestions was for the book to be reviewed for a geography journal toward broader and cross-disciplinary conversations/projects emerging from his work.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Chairs Enough
S trangely enough, I've been writing in the Florida room lately. I'd never heard of a Fla. room until my brother and his family threw down a mortgage on a place in East Detroit ten years ago. The house had a glass-enclosed room on the south end of the house. High sun exposure. A soft urban breeze. They called it a Florida room. And that was that. I stayed in that room when I visited on the weekends away from Saginaw.
Now, in the place we've called home since November, we have a comparable room. Lately it has been warm enough to set up a makeshift workspace in t/here, and over the last few days, it's been not-too-hard-not-too-soft writing environ of goodly inspiration. I've never before been conscious of an oversensitivity to writing spaces. Thought I was above it, immune, able to write here, there, anywhere, in other words, no matter the circumstances. But whereas the official office and living room (both adequate for working, with decent furniture, lighting, etc.) have been fine for reading lately, they're traps for writing. Snares! I don't want to overemphasize the consequences of space for what I perceived to be a brief and now-passing writing rut--a moment of dread at the immanence of semester's end. Might've been the full moon for all I know. But a change of scene has done something; I've vacated the stifling writing sites, replacing them with this one: an over-sunshined porch with a card table and enough folding chairs to host a small party. Headphones leveled up with entrancing techno loops from AfterhoursDJs.org. I hope not to jinx myself by saying it, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the difference brought on by simply changing scenes.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Scent of Maps
A gain and again we've read articles by D.R. Fraser Taylor this semester on the coming revolution of cybercartography (even if that rev. arrived a year ago with Google Maps and its API). Taylor takes credit for coining "cybercartography" in his 1997 keynote address, "Maps and Mapping in the Information Era" at the ICC conference in Sweden. Conceptually, cybercartography relaxes cartography from the constraints of paper; the map-maker and the map-user blend together; their products--often dynamic and unconventional--play a range from physical maps to imaginaries and abstraction (idio-data), often at the computer interface. The "false objectivity" of physical maps is loosened to the enigmas and wonder. Consequently we have a disturbance of traditional cartography (i.e. the map-maker, his instruments, and ink).
We've read three articles by Taylor and in each of them he has mentioned multisensory maps. Beyond sight, sound and touch, these maps incorporate taste and scent. The article we read for Tuesday mentioned Olfacom, a company working to devise olfactory devices that "diffuse odors from a changeable cartridge" (Cybercartography: Theory and Practice 555). Each time we read about multisensory maps, we wish for stronger examples. Skepticism piles on, and we're left with questions about mapping scent using artificial devices that would--as I sit here in our home office--fill up the room with a squirt of odor corresponding to whatever it was I was observing on the monitor. Taylor reminds us of marketing motivations backing much of the experimental research on olfactory technologies--from popcorn breezes at Disney to some kind of museum funk (check dusty, petrified relics and their rankness).
I want to give this idea a chance, far-fetched as it at first seems. Multi-sensory maps--including taste and smell; would we reject them before they've materialized? My first objection is that I don't particularly care for the artificial scents. Perfume stores, wretched; incense the same. But we also read an essay this week on public map displays which got me thinking about shared map interfaces. Granted, the examples in the article were retrograde: lobbies filled up with aging monitors used to display variously scaled weather data for passers-by. But let's adapt the logic of the carpet in the Sacramento Airport (via) to this problem. Someone correct me if the rug is more of an aerial or orthophoto rather than a map; it's carpet. Now suppose we have a foyer--the entryspace to a hundred-acre flower garden carpeted in kind, showing a map of the grounds, paths, and foliage. The room still smells like new carpet, right? What if we add fresh cuttings from each of the zones of the garden and, well, we have something that approximates an olfactory map only with natural rather than artificial scent. Representative of the grounds, a legend of odors. But has it lost its "cyber"? Well, not necessarily, considering that Taylor ties cybercartography definitionally to cybernetics as much as to the computer. I like it much better than having an Olfacom gizmo next to my desktop peripherals hitting me with a shot of fabricated scent.
I'm tempted to run ahead with this, wrapping it back to taste--even suggesting a showcase of the Syracuse Hunger Project (a local human geography program at SU) where, in addition to mapping hunger in Onondaga Country, the showcase would promise a "taste of Syracuse" (as promoted, on fliers) only to serve nada to the attendees. To what effect? I suppose this is somewhat unruly, but it gets at the merger of multisensory experience and map displays--particularly public map displays.
Here are a few of the other catches in class--productive though they were:
- Interactivity as a truism. Is not! Is so! The interaction can be cognitive. It needn't rely on touching (so I say...thinking of Manovich and also Lanham's at/through). Along these lines, the interactive map display on KLM airlines, for example, shows airline passengers a view of the plane in flight and also on approach. Here's the catch: on approach to landing, the display--a dynamic map display--changes scale without any effort by the passenger. The map "interacts" with the whole vehicle, the collective of passengers, whether they're watching the map, reading, napping, sipping diet soda, etc.
- All maps are narrative. I have doubts. But this idea gets a lot of play in the cybercartography stuff we've read. I'm unconvinced that maps are inherently narrative or that they require the sequential logics commonly deployed in narrative. I prefer to think of them as paradigmatic; users perform the narrative. Heavily qualified, we let it rest as something more complex than narrative or database: cartonarrative.
- Ubiquity in geocasting. Geocasting is to space and place as clocks, watches and public-display time systems are to, well, time. With GIS we now have devices that can compare a body's coordinates proximate to a location, like an ice cream shop. Reading the proximities comparatively, the device processes your approach and transmits a geocast--an ad, perhaps, specific to the place you are nearing: fudge sundaes, $2.00. Geocasting labels a wide array of locative controls and devices, from Digital Angel (for kids, pets and livestock) to criminal collaring.
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Local.Live
O n another recommendation from the geography course, I just checked out local.live.com. The aerial photos on Local.Live aren't as high in resolution as the ones used by Google, but the map view (using Navtech) is quite detailed (better shading, mild arrows for traffic direction, a different place-name scheme), I'd say, and the bird's eye perspective is especially worth a look. Here's the bird's eye view of SU's Quad----facing south; the middle-most building is Huntington Beard Crouse, the place I pass the time many days.
And another view, facing westward this time, at a full zoom. I'd include a view of our house, but you'd be able to see how unkempt the lawn was before winter.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Making a Map?
I f a person uses Google Maps (or Google Local...) to mark all of the breweries in Chicago, let's say, has s.he created a map?
I asked this question today in GEO781, and I learned that just as all comprhetors don't agree on what writing is, all geographers don't agree on what mapping is. I don't want to exaggerate the gape between physical geography and social or human geography, but as these sub-disciplinary orientations go, so goes the willingness/reluctance to regard maps as representational and also rhetorical rather than as empirical or somehow data-rigid.
To the question above, one response (generally) goes: Yes, of course. The map is a symbolic system often consisting of various graphical and linguistic elements, some of which are substantiated by hard data more than others. The beer map combines sign systems: to-scale physical forms (roadways, shoreline), iconic markers (to indicate brewery and pub locations), and toponyms or place-names. Although Google Maps mash-ups involve a common cartographic back-drop or base (the tile images don't change often), the overlays define the maps thematically. In the case of the breweries map, it might be helpful to introduce a scheme for differentiating map types. A thematic map is not merely interpretive, nor is the physical (material) map tidy in its permanence. We can find many examples of their felicitous combination--blended maps that work together to present multiple data-sets.
The negative responses to the question--if I can merge them, fell swoop--identify the factual nature of the physical forms with a kind of primacy. The real places, their demonstrable physicality, offer us proof. The data are reliable, can be validated, and are more likely to be accurate than user-placed markers indicating brew pubs. The physical forms, as represented, are authoritative, in this sense, despite our knowledge that landforms shift over long periods of time, shorelines and other unstable grounds are subject to accretion and avulsion, and the planet itself is fluid-like, taking into account the oceans and the magma.
This is only a teaser, and I know that my vocabulary for engaging the question is lacking much of the nuance it would have if I spent more time studying geography. Still I'm intrigued by some of the tensions I pick up on, particularly as we read articles about cybercartography as remediation, introducing problems and opportunities for the well-guarded post of the cartographer as one who draws and labels paper maps.
Just one more bit from class: Because I'm in back-to-back seminars on Tuesdays, I find somewhat difficult to keep the geography conversations fresh and to return to them later. The second class ends up bumping out all of the short-term goods from the first half of the day. What remains mixes in with the comp theory conversations...result: confusion (heh, it's generative confusion, nonetheless). We read two articles from Political Mapping of Cyberspace (2003); one on authenticity and authentication and the other on confession, parrhesia and communities. The authenticity/authentication article reminded me of Dick Hardt's OSCON Keynote, Identity 2.0. The chapter connects a related set of issues with Foucault's technologies of the self (84), "regimes of normalization" (84), and self-writing (91). It also lead us to a line of conversation about self-identifying in weblogs (v. much related to Jeff's piece from a week ago), including traditions of spoof scholarship, such as The Journal of Irreproducible Results; the falsification of co-authors, as in a colleague of our prof who published an article with a fictive co-author dubbed "Roscoe Gort;" and other variations of "academic fraud" (like the Sokal "Social Text" happening). What might a JIR of rhetcomp look like (just for kicks, of course...a thought-experiment more than a bona fide proposal)?
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Mapping War
A colleague from the cybercartography course shared an email with this link to the Iraq War Coalition Fatalities Map produced in Flash by graphic designer Tim Klimowicz. He mentioned it during yesterday's session when we were working through maps and motion. It's both upsetting and fascinating: upsetting for the long sequence of flarepoints indicative of deaths, fascinating as an example of design, map animation and the coordination of temporal and geographic data.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Phenetic Urge
I was reading along in an article called "Neighbourhoods on the Net" when I ran across an unfamiliar phrase: phenetic urge. The article evaluates the impact of datasets circulating online about real neighborhoods. The three authors collected links to 33 sites that make use of "geodemographic" data--income, pollution, average selling price homes, etc. They reduced the list to seventeen profiled examples, and from there, zeroed in on four sites for extended "case studies." To conclude, the article offers a set of implications for policy, which includes conclusions about screwy data leading to flawed representations of certain places and accessibility concerns, notably--and repeatedly--cast in terms of age and economic status ("Those sections of the population that are financially unable and/or unwilling (as is the case with many older people) to access online sources will be increasingly disadvantaged as information availability and society's dependence on it expands" (37)).
Phenetic urge nods to the taxonomy impulse, the classificatory move. Here's the immediate context:
Allowing for the enormous difficulties involved in 'un-inventing' IBNIS ['Internet-based Neightbourhood Information Systems'] (let alone the 'phenetic urge' of which they are so potent a symbol), the core policy issue to come out of this report is how best to ensure that the advantages of IBNIS are not outweighed by the disadvantages listed above. (36)
Specifically, the disadvantages are much like those I already mentioned: "mis-characterising localities," "inacurate depiction[s]," "unwarranted 'redlining,'" and "online marginalisation." Ultimately, the concern-as-delivered is over the datasets (geodemographic and, perhaps, beyond) representing neighbourhoods on the net. A Beckettian critique: "The danger is in the neatness of identifications." IBNIS, their place-identifying data, are a potent symbol of "phenetic urges."
I went about digging around for "phenetic," and found its association with clusters whose correspondence rests in observable patterns. Near neighbor: phylogenic: groupings based on known-to-be-inherited traits. I wonder how this positions the phenetic urge differently in time. Does this mean that phenetic urges are always momentary and impulsive or can those observations take years? Also, does phenetic classification rely only on observational methods (phenomenology, the report of senses, etc.)? Thinking through this keeps me at the question about the "urge," too. Urgency; the urgent-ic state. Given that the article is concerned with datasets as they apply to spaces, I'm interested in what this might mean for tagging, for the urge to apply a tag. But there's more: how do our own tendencies for placing texts, let's say, in particular intellectual traditions reconcile with these two orientations: phenetic and phylogenic?
Stopping here. I'm swamped, and need funnel what's left of the shortening evening toward a list of coming-dos in the week ahead.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Frappring the Consortium
B efore the break, I spent part of an afternoon mapping all of the programs from the Composition and Rhetoric Consortium web site into Frappr, then copying/pasting the associated informational bits and URLs. Once finished: a Frappr of the Comp/Rhet Consortium. Sing sweet confessions, it was a fit of uninhibited geekiness, motivated in part by my recollection that, when I decided to apply to doctoral programs, I didn't have a simple way to single out the programs proximate to the Great Lakes--closest to where we ultimately hoped to move after KC. Of course, the map stands the chance of amplifying other (surprising-insightful?) qualities of the consortium's East-leaning geography. It's possible that I've missed a program or two. If you spot one, please let me know. I'll add it (as long as its affiliation is undisputed).
Beyond that, there's another practical motivation: I'd been meaning to give Frappr a whirl (initially, I was thinking a collective From project with a DL course). It's free and relatively easy. The groups systematically associated with the CR Consortium seem a bit off. The Crochet Dude and Dr. Vino? Uh...if you insist. Also, the system wants to remain open for others to add themselves. It would be nice if there was a moderator feature for sifting new member additions (the moderator is able to delete membrs and comments, fwiw, but anyone can add...I think). Also, the data and profiles are somewhat constrained. It's not possible--yet--to reorganize the listing of members. They can be sorted by location, but you'll see that Syracuse is listed at the top. I can't change that (well, right, maybe I wouldn't if I could, but still).
My hunch is that another mapping option (Google Maps EZ or a Google Maps API hack) would be better suited for the CR Consortium. And although Frappr does an okay job of making available what I'd hoped to, I just might tinker with switching the map to a different system in the months ahead--especially if the geography course I'm taking encourages experimentation with Google Maps/Google Local.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Wayfaring
I signed up for a free Wayfaring account yesterday after I ran across it in this list of Web 2.0 apps (via). Having monkeyed with it for a few minutes (btw, there's a greasemonkey script for it in Firefox...encouraging sign), I'd say Wayfaring appears to be easy to use and especially friendly for those who don't want to bother with the code required for Google Maps EZ. Wayfaring incorporates waypoints (markers), notes, and routes (paths). Code is readily available for sharing maps (like this one) to a blog. And it's simple to designate maps for private/public access and for individual/group changes.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Addressing Addresses Addressed
B elow the fold you'll find a map-like project I've been working on for a little while today. It's a spread of the CCCC addresses since Lloyd-Jones in 1977 with pop-ups including the details about each chair's address (notice: Roen's upcoming collection). If the corresponding text of the talk has been run through parsing and posting at CCC Online, you'll find a link to it from the map.
Why this? Why now? For one thing I wanted to get back in and tinker around with Google Maps EZ. I used it when it first came about, but there have been a few changes, including an expanded range of options for coloring and labeling the markers. The markers work with single characters; I've color-specified the placemarkers by decade, then used a number to show the year of the convention and talk. It leaves something to be desired, but it's good enough for now. Ultimately, I'd like to see two-digit markers; probably ought to look into how to do that myself. On the other hand, I probably should finish up grading. And on the other other hand, I probably ought to turn off Judge Mathis and stop playing Sudoku.
To add just a bit more rationale for this/now, I'm taking a course in geography in the spring called Seminar in Cartography: Web Mapping and Cybercartography. I don't have much formal training in geography; the course welcomes students from across the disciplines, and it will be the only course outside of CCR that I'll take during this program of study. I don't have all the details about the GEO course yet, but we'll be looking at a book called Mapping Hacks and hacking and writing a few maps of our own. And because, at my geekiest, I'm keen on mapping disciplinarity (among other stuff, imaginaries, etc., as well...might even argue that disciplinarity is an imaginary, and that it's too vast and complex to know totally, so we map away). Yeah, well, that's why this/now. I'd say more, but I have to walk over to a chiropractic appt. (neck's still killing me), then catch up with D. for a ride to Ph.'s game.
CCCC Chair's Addresses Since 1977 (the first year of the ceremonial opening address)
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EXTENT
AQUA 6 March 22-25, 2006
AQUA 5Chicago, IL Theme: "Composition in the Center Spaces: Building Culture, Community, Coalitions" Chair: Akua Duku Anokye Address: March 16-19, 2005
AQUA 4San Francisco, CA Theme: "Opening the Golden Gates: Access, Affirmative Action, and Student Success" Chair: Doug Hesse Address: "Who Owns Writing?" March 24-27, 2004
AQUA 3San Antonio, TX Theme: "Making Composition Matter: Students, Citizens, Institutions, Advocacy" Chair: Kathleen Blake Yancey Address: "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" March 19-22, 2003
AQUA 2New York, NY "Rewriting 'Theme for English B': Transforming Possibilities" Chair: Shirley Wilson Logan Address: "Changing Missions, Shifting Positions, and Breaking Silences" March 20-23, 2002
AQUA 1Chicago, IL Theme: "Connecting the Text and the Street" Chair: John Lovas Address: "All Good Writing Develops at the Edge of Risk" March 14-17, 2001
AQUA 0Denver, CO Theme: "Composing Community" Chair: Wendy Bishop Address: "Against the Odds in Composition and Rhetoric" April 12-15, 2000
YELLOW 9Minneapolis, MN Theme: "Educating the Imagination: Reimagining Education" Chair: Keith Gilyard Address: "Literacy, Identity, Imagination, Flight" March 24-27, 1999
YELLOW 8Atlanta, GA Theme: "Visible Students, Visible Teachers" Chair: Victor Villanueva, Jr. Address: "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism" April 1-4, 1998
YELLOW 7Chicago, IL Theme: "Ideas, Historias y Cuentos: Breaking with Precedent" Chair: Cynthia L. Selfe Address: "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention" March 12-15, 1997
YELLOW 6Phoenix, AZ Theme: "Just Teaching, Just Writing: Reflection and Responsibility" Chair: Nell Ann Pickett Address: "The Two-Year College as Democracy in Action" March 27-30, 1996
YELLOW 5Milwaukee, WI Theme: "Transcending Boundaries" Chair: Lester Faigley Address: "Literacy after the Revolution" March 22-25, 1995
YELLOW 4Washington, D.C. Theme: "Literacies, Technologies, Responsibilities" Chair: Jacqueline Jones Royster Address: "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own" March 16-19, 1994
YELLOW 3Nashville, TN Theme: "Common Concerns, Uncommon realities: Teaching, Research, and Scholarship in a Complex World" Chair: Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Address: " Freedom, Form, Function: Varieties of Academic Discourse" April 1-3, 1993
YELLOW 2San Diego, CA Theme: "Twentieth Century Problems, Twenty-First Century Solutions: Issues, Answers, Actions" Chair: Anne Ruggles Gere Address: "Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition" March 19-21, 1992
YELLOW 1Cincinnati, OH Theme: "Contexts, Communities, and Constraints: Sites of Composing and Communicating" Chair: William W. Cook Address: "Writing in the Spaces Left" March 21-23, 1991
YELLOW 0Boston, MA Theme: "Times of Trial, Reorientation, Reconstruction: A Fin de Siecle Review/Prophecy" Chair: Donald McQuade Address: "Living in. And on. The Margins" March 22-24, 1990
BLUE 9Chicago, IL Theme: "Strengthening Community Through Diversity" Chair: Jane E. Peterson Address: "Valuing Teaching: Assumptions, Problems, and Possibilities" March 16-18, 1989
BLUE 8Seattle, WA Theme: "Empowering Students and Ourselves in an Interdependent World" Chair: Andrea A. Lunsford Address: "Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing" March 17-19, 1988
BLUE 7St. Louis, MO Theme: "Language, Self, and Society" Chair: David Bartholomae Address: "Freshman English, Composition, and CCCC" March 19-21, 1987
BLUE 6Atlanta, GA The Uses of Literacy: A Writer�s Work In and Out of the Academy" Chair: Miriam T. Chaplin Address:"Issues, Perspectives and Possibilities" March 13-15, 1986
BLUE 5New Orleans, LA Theme: "Using the Power of Language to Make the Impossible Possible" Chair: Lee Odell Address: "Diversity and Change: Toward a Maturing Discipline" March 21-23, 1985
BLUE 4Minneapolis, MN Theme: "Making Connections" Chair: Maxine Hairston Address: "Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections" March 29-31, 1984
BLUE 3New York, NY Theme: "Making Writing the Cornerstone of an Education for Freedom" Chair: Rosentene B. Purnell Address: "Using Language to Unlock the Limits" March 17-19, 1983
BLUE 2Detroit, MI Theme: "The Writer�s World(s): Achieving Insight and Impact" Chair: Donald C. Stewart Address: "Some History Lessons for Composition Teachers" March 18-20, 1982
BLUE 1San Francisco, CA Theme: "Serving Our Students, Our Public, and Our Profession" Chair: James Lee Hill Address: "Beyond Access to Education-- Literacy and Learning in Perspective" March 26-28, 1981
BLUE 0Dallas, TX Theme: "Our Profession: Achieving Perspectives for the 1980�s" Chair: Lynn Quitman Troyka Address: "Perspectives on Legacies and Literacy in the 1980s" March 13-15, 1980
RED 9Washington, D.C. Theme: "Writing: The Person and the Process" Chair: Frank D'Angelo Address: "Regaining Our Composure" April 5-7, 1979
RED 8Minneapolis, MN Theme: "Writing: A Cross-Disciplinary Enterprise" Chair: William F. Irmscher Address: "Writing as a Way of Learning and Developing" March 30-April 1, 1978
RED 7Denver, CO Theme: "Excellence in What We Do: Our Attitude Toward Teaching Composition" Chair: Vivian I. Davis Address: "Our Excellence: Where Do We Grow from Here?" March 31-April 2, 1977
Kansas City, MO Theme: "Two Hundred Plus One: Communicating in the Third American Century" Chair: Richard Lloyd-Jones Address: "A View from the Center" |
Monday, October 24, 2005
Lobotomap
I went ahead and lifted the Brain Map idea from here and created one of my own. I'm not sure how much brain-mapping diffusion proves it as a full-fledged meme, but I do recommend it.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Commonspace
A mong kids playing late today in our shared driveway: "You're not out when I'm out."
Figures, I was in. Slowly through the open window, their argument (more of an exchange about whose after-school play schedule was more peculiar) quieted to back-and-forth bicycling and shooting hoop.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
The Stark Reorientation
A fter dropping D. off at work this morning (so I could keep the car, pick up groceries, and catch Ph.'s soccer match later this afternoon), I headed over to the local grocery store. No need to name it. It's the closest mainstream grocer; even if you don't know it specifically, you know it generally. It's everystore. Its spaces, lighting, layout, products all commonplace, with only minor idiosyncrasies such as kidney beans shelved in three different places (really, what's going on with that?). I parked, grabbed a buggy, made my way down each aisle, total-coverage style, the way I always do.
I'm trying to shift habit into the checker-less checkout, so I tapped on the computer monitor and shoveled the products--barcodes exposed--through the infrared reader and into the bags (I did bag groceries for a while before the promotion to night stock crew). It was relatively early for grocery shopping; I was the only one in the self-check area and the clerk monitoring my activity was hawkish, scrutinizing (buying a few cups of yogurt warrants a furrowed brow? Ease up...they're not friendly with the scanner).
Point: the stark reorientation. In the parking lot--the most ordinary of spaces: I returned to the car, hoisted the hatch and shuttled the goods...
Two cars away, a woman alone in the passenger side of an older SUV, windows down (we're 93F in Syracuse today, +20 on the usual mark for Sept. 13). She's singing, in a gravelly, drunken voice, a song I don't know (not this rendition, anyway). Nothing against public singing; sounded happy for the most part. Next, she opened the door, struggled to her feet (meanwhile I parked the cart in the corral, other side of her vehicle). As I passed back by, eye contact, and she gives the message: "Excuse me, world, but I've got to pay the water bill." What, maybe a half of a second before I come to terms with what she means; my first thought, a perhaps-ironic hitch, was that the grocery store houses a bill-pay station for Niagara-Mohawk, the CNY region's natural gas and electricity monopoly. You can't pay the water bill here, I thought. Me with my reasoning: too slow. Indeed she went about paying the water bill right there in the parking lot.
I don't need to say much more about this, but I was thinking about peopled spaces and activity--the possibility for interaction to transform the ordinary space. Space remade, if temporarily (always temporarily). The look of surprise, abhorrence, disgust from the only other person in the parking lot, the one walking from the other direction--a different perspective. Often the start reorientation is more extreme than this; other times, less so. A gross example? I only wanted to note it as an example of spatial refiguring, of the chance encounter that disturbs spatial constancy in the most ordinary locations.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Assescement
I f you seek thorough notes on today's Fall Teaching Conference, you might be disappointed. The four-hour conference covered several interesting and important projects: Syracuse community-based writing courses, upcoming service-learning initiatives, and the annual address from the chair of the department. The featured speaker--a professor from Vermont--gave a talk on "Assessing Diversity," a topic which, you might agree, is both vast and complicated--tangled politically and theoretically. The talk worked through asking the right questions, devising alternative models, mixing methods and identifying subtle (if isolable) variables. All of the presentations were held in Hall of Languages 500, the top floor of the building I wrote about earlier this month. Here's a photo I snapped about fifteen minutes before the sessions started this morning; it's a north-ward look from the place we gathered.
Ironically, the featured talk included a clip from the movie Addams Family Values: the part where young Wednesday breaks from the script in the Thanksgiving play-performance at summer camp. I'd never watched the movie before, and its involvement in the talk made sense, was appropriate and smart. Of course, I couldn't help being mildly distracted by a second Hall of Languages/1313 Cemetery Lane coincidence in three weeks. I kept it to myself; nobody else appeared to be chilled by the unlikely loop: watching a clip from a 1993 movie based on a television program, the house-set for which has been rumored to be influenced by the architecture of the building (Hall of Languages) in which we sat, watching a clip.... Uncanny.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Amphigeography and Doppelspace
R oland Barthes in Roland Barthes on Amphibologies:
[I]n general, the context forces us to choose one of the two meanings and to forget the other. Each time he encounters one of these double words, R.B., on the contrary insists on keeping both meanings, as if one were winking at the other and as if the word's meaning were in that wink, so that one and the same words, in one and the same sentence, means at one and the same time two different things, and so that one delights, semantically, in the other by the other. This is why such words are often said to be "preciously ambiguous": not in their lexical essence (for any word in the lexicon has several meanings), but because, by any kind of luck, a kind of favor not of language but of discourse, I can actualize their amphibology, can say 'intelligence' and appear to be referring chiefly to the intellective meaning, but letting the meaning of 'complicity' be understood (72).
There's something to this passage that I can't quite put my finger on. What if we spin it around from word-sentence semantics to image-space rhetorics? I love R.B.'s notion of meanings winking. My mother-in-law is a winker, and so I've come to know the wink-gesture by her sometimes surprising use of it (when the hyper-winking takes off at a family get-together, what does it all mean?). Take the word-meaning wink and replace it with an image-meaning wink. What do we have? (With this, I'm asking about more than the problem of a helluva lot of winking.)
I suppose this doesn't make much sense (yet!). I'm thinking about the doubling of the virtual and the actual/real--the tense play between Google Maps' satellite imagery and the scripted layers (intricately spatialized, discursive). Something, somehow is winking between the amateur photos (images of finds, things I notice) and the places. But the wink is elusive, often subtle; the two+ spaces (a park I walk through and a park on my computer screen...and on the news, and in the photo-image) entangled in the documentary activity. It's writing, yes? This thing--amphigeography--takes on, maybe confronts, the latency of spatial discourse. Read through the influx of Google Maps hacks, it might be called the event of the summer--a felicitous and widely celebrated image-space wink-fest.
Remaining: to spatialize discursive shards--finds, whats'its, orts--all punctumoniously abuzz and stinging, fiercely kindled by desires split by the obvious, boring and banal-bland and, on the other hand, the unspeakable, self-doubting, wonder-lost (is it nothing?). Rush to gather it together again. And so we give in to this frenetic always-making of paths-trails-traces (actual, virtual), combinatorially manifest in unceasing possibilities, technological, sensational, spatial. Turn up-on-to writing technologies and we begin to enjoy the luck of the "precious ambiguities" in image-space rhetorics, begin to actualize amphigeographies.
Monday, August 15, 2005
ClustrMaps
C lustrMaps is back on the scene with a recent beta release. I don't know that it was ever completely off the scene, but I dropped my map sometime in the spring because it didn't seem to be updating any longer. It's quite likely that they've worked around some of the problems they had late last fall with high-traffic maphogs, sluggish updates and so on, although my current (re-added today) ClustrMap's reflection of two visits since July 27 suggests there's still a glitch or two with the beta rollout. Or much worse, it's accurate, meaning that I've had just two visitors in 19 days (welcome to both of you, if that's the case). Yet another (highly likely) possibility, you actually have to have the map showing on your site for the visits to reflect. Either way, the beta release is available to others by invitation only from existing users. And so, since I signed up last October, I have two invitations available--exactly enough to pass along to both of you. No, seriously, if you want a ClustrMap, just drop in a comment, and I'll have one of the sign-ups sent to your email.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Stroll
B urnet Avenue runs parallel to the I-690 loop just east of downtown Syracuse. After parking near the school where D. works, she and I walked several blocks along Burnet this morning.
Finds: "Poisoning??" 
Swappy's 
, the Fisheria's for rent 
, and high-pants insistence
.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Mapping Contenders: A More Writable Space
O ver at The Map Room, Jonathan Crowe posted a few notes about MSN Virtual Earth that tipped me on to a few ideas and the Virtual Earth weblog where MSN is inviting input. In light of the clamor raised over two notable features at Virtual Earth--the absence of Apple headquarters and the presence of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, Crowe verifies (if there was any doubt) that VE uses "very old imagery." As I see it, the age of the satellite images concerns me less than their superior resolution. Right, already been over this.
And yet, the release of Virtual Earth comes with a need to understand the temporal dynamics associated with the images. Could be that we perceive them as timeless or, equally implausibly, as ever-current--maps of both "here" and "now." Wave to the camera on high. Seems likely enough that we'll see this synoptical, real-time satellite cam soon enough, but in the interlude between now and that bright future moment, I think the horse race between Google and MSN for the best mapping venue is really fascinating.
One, I expect (yeah, pure spec-ulation), will steer toward the commercial flows--the trafficking of people and goods, roadways and restaurants, hotels and coffee shops. This site will be determine its quality and future developments around issues of advertising and appeals to hubs of marketable activity. The other (or perhaps yet an other) will also integrate some of this commercial flavor (i.e. need to find the nearest Denny's?). But this one will develop capacities (functionality?) for other kinds of capital. How impressive it would be to have one of the map-aspirants (Yeah, Google, you...or MSN, you.) devise our shared world as a space to be written--inscribed with the memory-notes and also with links (even blog activity, for example)? I'm getting dreamy with this, I know (was cleaning the bathroom during this thought...chemically inspired--Comet and Tilex), but think of this: a mapping site that gives us ways of seeing patterns beyond the roadways and coffee shops, something that takes into account the topo-logical haze in language--either in the Zonal Memoria notes or in the composing that is done in/at/around a point. This is rather jumbled, so let me try it another way--listed:
I want to be able to:
- See my zonal memoria notes layered with the same kind of notes by others over a common space.
- Incorporate photos, either by link or with thumbnails. Flickr world map and Mappr both have shades of what I want, but I don't need the whole globe at once as much as the local sites (sliding between them is okay). Give me neighborhoods, city blocks, better detail--like the detail we get in VE. And be able to mix the images and the text, play them together.
- Selectable tags (applied by users or derived by parsing) that sift away a particular layer of discursive activity for a particular area. Let's say we have a square mile. I want a way to lift a tagged set of writing/photographic activity involved with the area. In this sense, the system would be friendly to social geography (like the mapping hunger in Onondaga Cty. project done here at SU). Oh, and give us a couple of classes of tags: arch tags (broad, engulfing) and minutiae tags (narrower).
- Selectable periods of time. 2000-2005, let's say. Or January of '04. Scaling down to months--in terms of temporal sorting--would be good enough for me (the others, they'd want something more probably). This will get easier as the imaging systems get snappier. But it would make it possible to watch a site evolve (even if only year by year).
- Include audio and video files--the full documentary effects. These can be tagged, too. Why not?
- Block spam from this space.
- Visualize the development of multiply composed (multi- in both people and technologies), multiply constituted texts as they relate to particular places. This is a set of conditions, I think, making possible Barthes' notion of mapping mythologies. Watch them morph--fads, trends, mass consciousness, the popular, political ideologies, diet, etc.
I'm sure systems exist for processes like this in geography programs (yes?). I'd say one of the web's mapping contenders could blow it open by giving us a more writable map with a social quality, a space where so many of these writing technologies might converge in exciting ways.
Added (something in the arena of what I'm thinking here): Geotagging del.icio.us. And geotagging Flickr. Terrific, this one (and up for almost a month already).
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
View of the World
H eading to San Francisco first thing in the morning to give a paper called "Ping! Re-Addressing Audience in the Blogosphere" at the flagship CCCC, the annual conference for college composition and communication. And I've never been to California before (no closer than Portland and Phoenix, anyhow). Because I still have to pack, have this, a statement on worldview:
Saul Steinberg�s "View of the World from 9th Avenue" (via)
No telling whether I'll luck into a reliable net connection in SF (which I'd use to post a few photos, probably, little else).
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
At the Corner of
E ncompassing: Google Maps, now in beta. (via)
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Heliostatic Bounce
A
lpine
townsfolk in Rattenberg, Austria figured out
one way to promote "psychological well-being" despite resting in the shadow
of sun-blocking mountain (Statberg Mtn.). To deny the ominous rock-face one consequence of its presence, a redirect, a mirror-refraction from nearby Kramsach. (via)
Dr. Peter Erhard: "Erecting mirrors to shine a bit of light on our village is a great idea." Redirect.
Here in Syracuse, we don't live at the foot of the Alps, but Thornden Hill obscures sunrays in the neighborhood. Well, the hill and the clouds, and the standpipe. On overcast, frigid winter days, I've started thinking about ways to bring such a device to Westcott (E. Syracuse). But even more than an application for lifting the shadows with eight-foot mirrors, I dig this setup for its figurative applications. Redirect. Shine a bit of....
If all of this is unusually off-balance, the break I deserve is that I've been in just more than seven hours worth of class time devoted to prefigurative tropes, blog issues, RSS feeds, Bloglines, OPML imports with 205ers, Hayden White, transclusion. To relax this evening: a quick game of Operation. Guess the part nobody could get. Yeah. Wrenched ankle. Gets me all the way from naive metaphor to self-critical irony.
Monday, January 3, 2005
Gauging Winter
G rand gap in the living room since D. and I dismantled the Christmas tree earlier today. Pulled it apart limb by limb by limb, crammed its needle-shedding tangled-ness into the old cardboard box, smacked it all with tape, then lifted it to the attic. Now I know artificial trees aren't supposed to shed needles, but this one's recycled--the hand-me-down conifer from D.'s former boss back in KC, who'd upgraded to something more grandiose, tall, magnificent. Free tree. Tried to unload the tree at the garage sale last summer: ten bucks? four bucks? Both yellow stickers still mark the face of the box. Didn't sell. (If interested, please send email.)
We'll fill the space left behind by pulling up the exercycle from the basement. Never been resolute enough to keep with all the habit-altering involved at the first of the calendar year (although there was the time...), but I'll hop on the machine a few times throughout the winter, break a sweat, pretend it's not miserable outside. If not, the work of moving exercise equipment makes up for extended periods of non-use. Up and down the stairs a few times or across half of the U.S.--punch it in the calorimeter.
[8:46 p.m.] Whoa! Just about missed Who's Your Daddy? on the Fox Network. Nah, not really. I wasn't about to watch that crud.&