Cybercartography

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Cybercartography

• Sunir Shah (993610990)
• CSC2514 November 13, 2003

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Space vs. spatiality

• 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 users mental model
• Designed, built, or enlivened.

(Dodge Kitchin, 2001b)
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Artistic maps

• Metaphoric
• Abstract
• Non-interactive
• Inaccurate
• Yet reflects artists conceptual model
• Spatiality
• (Ugly? Artistic?)

(December, 1994 as qtd. in Dodge Kitchin, 2001b)
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Artistic navigable maps

• Artistic! personal homepage
• Page structure fits metaphor
• Fully conceptual ? spatiality
• Hypertext clickable.

Shelly Jackson (1997) The body.
http//www.altx.com/thebody/body.html
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AlphaWorld
http//mapper.activeworlds.com (Dodge Kitchin,
2001a)
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Hand drawn

• Kunark region
• EverQuest
• Accurate
• ? Space

http//www.tapr.org/OutridersKarana/
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3D

• Physical model!
• Cubes rooms rods links
• Spheres teleports
• ? Logical adjacency map
• Logical? Of course
• Non-Euclidean data structure
• but close.

(Vollaro, Sealer, Anders, as qtd. in Dodge
Kitchin, 2001a)
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Automatically drawn

• Automatically maps
• Only what user has seen
• No spidering!
• No long downloads!
• Change awareness.
• Automatic!
• Also interactive
• Click to autowalk

http//www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/screen.htm
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Text chat

• Identities are text
• Multiple chat rooms, where?
• Overlapping conversations
• Invisible (non-manifest)
• Scrolls rapidly
• History ? context
• Work around?
• Ugly

http//web.media.mit.edu/fviegas/circles/new/exam
ples.html
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Graphical chat

• Identities are icons
• No improvement on
• Overlapping
• Multiple chat rooms
• No history context!
• No spatial relationship
• Absurdist (?!)

(The Palace as qtd. in Dodge Kitcin, 2001b)
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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)
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Chat Circles

• Clustered
• Audible range
• Shape of conversation
• Identities visually distinct
• Lurker awareness
• Crowd numbers seen
• No history (? extra UI)

(Viegas Donath, 1999)
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Design as art

• Network topology
• Accurately reflects source space
• Very large data set!
• ? Artistic representation
• This space is fundamentally socially
  constructed
• Space, yet spatiality?
• Objective, social maps?

Hyun, Y. (2000) http//www.caida.org/tools/visuali
zation/walrus
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References cited
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
http//www.media.mit.edu/fviegas/chat-circles_CHI
.html