Discuss: Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer
by Aaron Rester
- Editorial Comments
12 Very High-brow, whats the practical use?
Fascinating article, but what is the on-the-ground use for this comparision to Cartography? Would love to hear those thoughts.
posted at 05:41 pm on August 26, 2008 by Divya Manian
13 Untitled
As I have some background in cartography I started to compare cartography and web design.
There is a process that is conducted when creating a map content. It is called cartographic generalization
This process is divided into 4 basic levels: * Selection (Reduction): you select which objects will be shown on a map * Simplification: you simplify shapes to increase visibility * Combination: you comine some elements where their existence is mor important then their position * Moving: you move elements apart so they don’t overlap
We can clearly find a lot of similarities in this older craft. I guess I was never thinking ot of the box and realized there are infact quite a lot similar principles in web design and cartography
posted at 05:53 pm on August 26, 2008 by Blaz Grapar
14 coming next?
Interesting article and I agree with Pete N. vision. As info architects or geographers (or both), I think we can give new inputs to users, not only to map their way to use, read and surf websites. Isn’t this the sense of mapping…mapping the present to suggest (or experiment) the next step?
posted at 05:53 pm on August 26, 2008 by emanuela sala
15 Thanks
Thank you all for your comments. I knew ALA readers were on the ball, but I didn’t expect 10 comments before I even got to work! I’ll try to respond to as many of your questions and comments as I can.
@ David Ramos – You’re right that I have played a bit with the idea of what cartography is. That’s the problem with metaphor: one system never translates directly to another. What I am arguing (and I probably could have made this clearer) is that a web designer is like a cartographer in the way that the ancient rhetorician is like a cartographer (and there fore the designer is also like the rhetorician). I think that the act of imagining a place is essentially the act of creating a map (a representation), just as creating a map is imagining a place. I disagree that a map has to take a fixed form — what is the fixed form of Google Maps, for example? Finally, I’m not sure I see why “enabling social interaction inside a memory map” is necessarily a muddling of the metaphor; it seems to me that things like MMORP games have been been doing that for years.
@ Shahar Hesse and Divya Manian – To be honest, I’m not really sure how to put these ideas into practice, but “a user-defined architecture that evolves over time” as Shahar sums it up quite well. Tag clouds are certainly one method that might prove fruitful. It’s possible that truly doing these ideas justice might require technologies that don’t yet exist — but I’d love to hear suggestions.
@ amber simmons – Whew, that would be a pretty big paper… maybe even a book. :-) Again, I’d love to hear ALA readers’ takes on the questions you raise.
@James Arthur – I wish I could have come up with this phrase: “Websites are also the emergent property of the activity that can be mapped.” It sums up nicely a Lefebvrian view of cyberspace.
Looking forward to continuing the discussion!
posted at 05:59 pm on August 26, 2008 by Aaron Rester
16 Cartographic generalization
@ Blaz Grapar – That’s fascinating. I’ll admit to not having done any in-depth research on the actual processes of cartography, but it would be an interesting case study to compare and contrast the processes of a web designer and a cartographer as they move through a project.
posted at 06:03 pm on August 26, 2008 by Aaron Rester
17 Psychogeography
@ William Selman – Very interesting. I’ve never read any Debord, but it seems like that might be a fruitful theoretical path to explore. Thanks.
posted at 06:07 pm on August 26, 2008 by Aaron Rester
18 Untitled
Hi Aaron,
Yeah, it might be a book ;) But more information and analysis, even thought and discussion, on topics that we haven’t already covered to death is almost always a good thing! We’re still an emerging field, and I think philosophical forays like these are important. I don’t worry too much about the practical purposes—lay the groundwork first, and the application will follow, I’m sure of that. I get the feeling you might have more to say on the topic, and my point is, I’d love to hear more
posted at 07:29 pm on August 26, 2008 by amber simmons
19 Incredible Article!
What a useful perspective, utilizing concepts of philosophers that couldn’t have intended their theories to be applied in this sense. But what a logical and reasonable extension it is!
This makes me wonder what Paul Virilio would think, when he discusses his ‘dromoscopy’ in which geography is destroyed at the point information can travel without any seeming spatial/time relation. Clearly, the web space has a geography of its own, in its file structure and further in its aesthetics that enable the user to achieve the goal provided by the function the designer enables and creates. This type of cartography is possible only through the collaboration of users and the conscience integration on the designers part.
Thank you for your coherent explanation and fresh perspective!
posted at 08:07 pm on August 26, 2008 by Joe Rstom
20 Mini Bibliography - Art of Memory
- [Cicero] Ad Herennium. Trans. H. Caplan. Loeb Classical Library, 1954, (esp. p. 205 on).
- Frances Yates. The Art of Memory. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966.
- George Johnson. In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads, NY: Knopf, 1991.
- Paolo Rossi. Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. Trans. Stephen Clucas. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Jonathan D. Spence. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Penguin, 1984.
posted at 08:40 pm on August 26, 2008 by Daniel Potter
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11 Since we're talking about theory
Excellent article.
The mention of Lefebvre reminded me of the work of Guy Debord and the SI, esp. the idea of psychogeography. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography) Specifically, I was thinking of what they referred to as the process of dérive which is defined as:
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there”
Users do this all the time unconsciously when they browse through sites. Certainly, the architecture of the site is guiding them, but at the same time, users make their own paths through sites, esp. when exploring. Through the use of log analysis, information archtects can follow the flows of traffic from page to page within a site which parallels relatively closely the idea of following the psychological flow through a space.
posted at 05:37 pm on August 26, 2008 by William Selman