Daly-Goggin, Maureen. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the
Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.
Searchable text available in Google Book Search.
Daly-Goggin, Maureen. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the
Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.
Searchable text available in Google Book Search.
The "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?’
What if Borges’ (or, more properly, Alfred Korzybski’s) map/territory
contrast is just an overplayed maxim, a dwindling truism due for reversal?
(Fine, so I’m not the
first and
only to consider the question.)
The aggregator turned up
a report about laws in the Philippines and Malaysia that ban what is being called
"participatory GIS", the ad hoc mash-up efforts combining cartography
technologies with material models in an effort to define boundaries for lands
held by indigenous groups. The ban on such processes is, in itself,
fascinating (a way to keep the partitioning of the land specialized, in the
hands of experts). But
I’m also struck by the layers to this story, a coordination of compositional and
rhetorical elements–mental models of spaces, the image-assisted translation of
mental models into scaled relief maps made of various materials, the use of these
constructs for legal claim-making, the implied omnipotence of Google Earth.
From the report, the moment of reconciliation between satellite imagery and
the experiences and memories of the person and tribe (map as totemic?):
The modeling technique often starts by showing village elders satellite
images, which they use to record their mental maps of tribal territories,
hunting grounds, and sacred sites.
The material manifestation–something like a folk geodiorama or raised relief map–blends the
latest digital technologies with everyday craft supplies:
[A]ctivist groups…have been helping indigenous communities mix
computers and handheld navigation devices with paints, yarn, and cardboard
to make simple but accurate three-dimensional terrain models.
Simple but accurate? Accurate enough to warrant a ban, anyway.
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.
Over 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.
Flickr
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.
What happens to onomastics or proper place-names with infusions of the
digital? How do the logics of the web, networked writing and folksonymy
let loose (a plentitude of named small-pieces, loosely joined) the
propriety of an onomastics founded on scarcity, where place-names refer formally
to physical locations and also depend upon authorization, a kind of official
license? We will have one name and one name only! Erm, okay, two…two
names. No more. Granted, place-names or toponyms are not altogether
unraveled or let loose. Kansas is still "Kansas," or "KS," even in Google Maps (at
a certain scale, though, the name vanishes because it’s too specific,
too local; KS fades into anyplace). But while these stabilized place-names
remain on highway signs and also showing at certain scales of the
cybercartographic mash-ups, the digital introduces a capacity for differently
circulating and contending name systems. Toponyms are further compounded. For now I don’t care whether
we’re online or on I-90. New (by which I mean not pre-fixed), folksonomic names
and tags don’t automatically replace the official names, although they might one
day contend with them and even displace them or unsettle them a bit.
The 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.
Again 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).
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.