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Cartographic Excess

Dec 27, ’11 1:51 AM

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Last week we drew to a close our second year of Urban Media Archaeology, a graduate studio in which my 15 students; my Technical Associate, the ever capable Rory Solomon; and I work together to map historic media networks. Last fall, in the inaugural section of the class, our students mapped everything from the history of walking tours, to newspaper company headquarters, to Daily News delivery infrastructure, to the social lives of East Village zines, to key sites in carrier pigeon history. This semester the projects were no less innovative; we mapped “media actors” in the debate over the Atlantic Yards development; data-driven systems of graffiti removal; the spatial history of the Young Filmmakers Foundation (intended to seed a larger map of youth media organizations in New York); the evolution of street signs in Manhattan since the  late 19th century; the old West Side Cowboys of Chelsea (this project, one of my favorites, involved “ontography“; see below); the changing landscape of independent bookstores in Manhattan and Brooklyn; the social networks of the Soho Fluxus community; 100 years’ history of theaters around Union Square; key individuals and places in the history of subway graffiti; the spatial history of the Bell Telephone system;  the forgotten histories of official memorials and murals in East Harlem; surveillance networks in Corona, Queens; locations in Woody Allen’s films; and historic jazz performance venues.

via Jonathan's Last of the West Side Cowboys: http://urt.parsons.edu/urt/research/record/938

Duncan's Media Actors of Atlantic Yards: http://urt.parsons.edu/urt/research/project/urban-media-archaeology/atlantic-yards-media-actors

We learned this year, as we did last year, about media archaeology, about maps as media, about the spatial- and digital humanities, about archival research, and about paper prototyping. And this year we added a new lesson on “spatial data modeling” to help students translate their conceptual models into “database language.”

We also learned quite a few things that could never be spelled out in the obligatory “learning goals” section of a syllabus. I’ll try to describe a few of those hard-to-articulate lessons here:

Learning Doesn’t Happen in 15-Week Chunks. Many students commented that they had a hard time knowing when to stop researching. They had a tough time gauging when they had enough archival images, enough data to discern a spatial pattern of some sort, enough contextual information for each of the records they plotted on the map. Many of my students spent weeks sorting through official data sets or in various archives, either frustrated that they hadn’t yet tracked down the “magic data set” or the “magic box” of archival treasure, or thrilled to have found much great material — and in many cases, eventually overwhelmed by the volume of material they gathered. Whatever their individual experiences, they almost invariably felt incomplete at the end of the semester. “If I had another week, I would’ve….”

We had to come to terms with the fact that learning — the most natural, meaningful kind — doesn’t stop at the end of the semester. The most exciting projects, with the most potential for future development, will inevitably remain undone — much to the benefit of those who come after us, who’ll take inspiration from our work and build upon the foundations we’ve laid. DH projects in particular require that we recalibrate our internal self-critics to take into account that fact that our work is often only one small part of a larger, longer-term endeavor. At the same time, this “recalibration” doesn’t diminish our sense of personal accountability; knowing that others — our contemporary and future collaborators — are counting on us, and knowing that our audience is larger than our professors and ourselves, we appreciate that there’s a lot more at stake than an end-of-semester grade.

Learning Can Be Deeper, and More Rewarding, When It Pushes Us Out of Our Comfort Zone. Some students commented that venturing into new research venues and employing new research skills; having to gather the pieces to construct a “multimodal,” spatial argument; and realizing that they needed to have something to show for all their work, resulted in an unprecedentedly deep level of engagement. “I’ve never been this invested in, or learned this much from, a research project before.” I suggested in our last class that most folks can BS their way through a 20-page seminar paper, but when you have to show stuff to back up your claims — when you have to plot records to support a spatial argument — your research will require getting your hands dirty.

Some students also learned not to fear the error message. We created our own mapping system, and asked students to construct their own data models, so they could see what’s behind the social media systems that they regularly use — systems that have been naturalized and seamlessly integrated into their everyday lives. Opening the black box, if you’ll pardon the cliche, requires that we test its limits, that we often push the system until it breaks. And when we do break something — when we encounter one of those ugly “TemplateSyntaxError” messages — rather than panic or give up, we can actually learn to hear what the system is telling us, and work with others in class — most likely those with a different set of technical skills than our own — to fix the problem. These small defeats and victories tell us a lot about how a system works. And ultimately we learn more from these error-pitted processes, uncomfortable though they might be, than from those that proceed perfectly smoothly.

Even the “Objective” Calls for Reflexivity. Many students came to realize that the primary materials they were gathering were determined primarily by choices they made — which streets to travel, which times of day to visit, which people to talk to, etc. Even data — either self-generated or pulled from an “open data” bank — aren’t immune to researcher bias or subjectivity. We came to be keenly aware of how data and other research materials come into being, and are discovered by ourselves and other researchers — and many students decided to build themselves, through self-reflexive methodology maps, into their own projects. As David Bodenhamer writes in “The Potential of the Spatial Humanities” (In The Spatial Humanities, Indiana University Press, 2010, “A humanities GIS-facilitated understanding of society and culture may ultimately make its contribution in this way, by embracing a new, reflexive epistemology that integrates the multiple voices, views, and memories…” (29).

Mapping Isn’t Always About Big Data — Or, Mapping ≠ GIS. Several students began their projects looking for the data “motherlode” that would reveal clear temporal and spatial patterns and allow them to make big, profound, earth-shattering claims. “I intend to correlate huge changes in socioeconomic data to movements in these massive infrastructures.” “I plan to develop a comprehensive map of all the people and places involved in this social movement.” When, by mid-semester, they hadn’t experienced the “data epiphanies” they were waiting for, many were either apologetic (for not looking hard enough or in the right places), frustrated, or defeated.

I wondered if perhaps, influenced by the prevalence of GIS and “data fetishization,” and by the way so many of us tend to use the terms “mapping” and “data visualization” interchangeably, my students assumed that their maps had to show large-scale patterns in quantitative data. Many of them had forgotten that the personal and the partial, the subjective and the speculative, are also mappable — and worthy of being mapped. The “GIS mindset” was stifling to some students. As Bodenhamer puts it, GIS can appear “reductionist in its epistemology. It forces data into categories; it defines space in limited and literal ways instead of the metaphorical frames that are equally reflective of human experience” (24).

Eventually coming to terms with the “non-systematicity” of their conclusions, accepting that they wouldn’t be creating a heat map showing conclusive evidence of quantifiable macro-scale changes, they recognized the breadth and flexibility of mapping as a method. We can map the qualitative, the necessarily incomplete and inconclusive, the fuzzy. And we can even infuse a little poetry into our data models (as many of my students did by developing creative many-to-many relationships) to capture the nuance and nebulousness of our subjects.

Our Maps Can Contain an Implicit Critique of Mapping Itself. Despite whatever opportunities we might have to detourn the map and its underlying database, we sometimes run up against the operative or epistemological limitations of these systems. Not all stories are spatial. Not everything can be plotted to a point, line, or area on a map. And not everything can be translated into a data model — at least not without losing something. Many of my students offered amazingly insightful reflections on the values and limitations of mapping as a method and a mode of presentation in their own projects:

I think proximity is a point to be made, but not the whole point, and it might push users to get caught up in spatial observations. (via)

I’ve noticed that all the presentations involved navigation tasks that would seem obscure without the author walking us through them. Why do the maps come so alive when we have a guide walking us through them? (via)

At its most basic, my conceptual point about Atlantic Yards is to look at as much as you can. When you see my map from far enough away, it looks like all of Brooklyn is covered in green circles, but zoom in further and there are gaps begging to be filled in. And I think for now at least, that’s how it’s supposed to look. (via)

They’ve come to accept that some gaps are supposed to be there, that their projects will be defined by holes and incompleteness. In recognizing what maps can and can’t do well, we’ve been able to look at them more critically as media, and at mapping as a method — as only one of myriad media and methods at our disposal.

Bodenhamer advocates for the integration of multiple media formats — “a letter, memoir, photograph, painting, oral account, video” — and types of research material — “oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, images, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place” — into what he calls “deep maps,” maps that are “visual, time-based, and structurally open” (26-8).

They are genuinely multimedia and multilayered. They do not seek authority or objectivity but involve negotiation between insiders and outsiders, experts and contributors, over what is represented and how. Framed as a conversation and not a statement, deep maps are inherently unstable, continually unfolding and changing in response to new data, new perspectives, and new insights” (26-7).

Whether we regard mapping as the “umbrella” strategy encompassing these other methods and modalities, or mapping as only one component of a “deep” spatially-oriented methodology, it’s important that we think critically about each component of our “toolbox” — that we resist the temptation to fetishize the data or the map, that we appreciate what each of our tools can and can’t do, that we devise a strategy by which these various tools can work in a complementary fashion to do justice to the rich spatial and temporal dimensions of our subjects of inquiry.

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Urban Research & Mobile Media

Oct 13, ’11 3:47 AM

Here’s my presentation for the Urban Research & Mobile Media panel at Mobility Shifts:

Mattern_MobilityShifts_URT

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Spatial Humanities

Jul 26, ’11 11:35 PM

Plate of Wards 23 & 25, City of Brooklyn, Via NYPL Maps: http://bit.ly/njgWVK

Today’s New York Times featured an article about the emergence of a “new” field of study called the “Spatial Humanities.” “Like the crew on the starship Enterprise,” the Times‘ Patricia Cohen writes, “humanists are exploring a new frontier of the scholarly universe: space.” I hope the fearsome “Temporal Humanist” gang learns to get along with these new kids.

The Spatial Humanities, despite what its rather peremptory name might lead you to believe, doesn’t have a monopoly on all things spatial. Such a claim would be silly. Scholars — in the humanities and the social and hard sciences — practitioners, artists, etc., have long focused their attention on space.

What these humanist Trekkies are doing that’s different is using digital mapping tools, particularly GIS, and developing new ways to “spatialize” their research material — e.g., plotting the scenes of a narrative on a map, or posting historical photos and audio clips to a map — to address both timeless and new questions in the humanities. The Times article quotes geographer Ann Kelly Knowles, who says: “Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t possibly know… It enables you to see patterns and information that are literally invisible.” I’d prefer a slightly more modest claim: creating maps using a combination of GIS, historical maps, sensor data, and other resources, we could possibly see spatial dimensions of history, or of contemporary reality, that might otherwise be difficult to discern. And layering this “data,” then analyzing the intersections of those layers, could enable us to identify meaningful patterns that might be “literally invisible” — they could be created by sounds, or atmospheric conditions — or they could be merely immediately unobservable.

I think it’s important to maintain a degree of modesty in these pursuits: Spatial Humanists certainly aren’t the first people making the “spatial turn,” nor are they the first group to turn a critical eye to maps and mapping technologies, or to use those technologies as valuable research tools. Geographers have been at this for quite a while. Archaeologists and architects and other folks, too.

Yet there are some really exciting potentials in this work. For me, the potential for simultaneity — for layering resources, “data,” arguments, etc., and giving users the option of turning those layers on and off — allows both those creating the maps and those reviewing the completed maps to appreciate the “overdeterminedness,” the richness, the convergence of forces, that make things happen…in space and time. These are, as David Brodenhamer puts it in the Times article, “’deep maps,’ which can capture more than one perspective.” Historical events, demographic shifts, climatic changes — all, if plotted out on a map, show themselves to be highly spatio-temporally complex phenomena, hard to sum up, hard to pin down in a linear narrative.

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Critical Sutures

Mar 1, ’11 1:43 AM

I’m participating in “Critical Futures 3” at Storefront next Tuesday night. I’ve got some great company on this panel. After the “complimentary drinks and music,” I go home, pack, and head to the airport for an early-morning flight to New Orleans for SCMS, where I’m chairing a workshop on “Urban Informatics, Geographic Data, and the Media of Mapping.”

Critical Futures
Tuesday 8 March 2011, 7pm
FREE ENTRANCE
Storefront for Art and Architecture
97 Kenmare St., New York (NY)

Over the past decade, several transformations regarding media and communication systems, among others, have reshaped the context within which architecture is conceived and debated. The Internet has made images and information free and instantly ubiquitous; magazines, once the undisputed platforms for the criticism of architecture and design, have been challenged to redefine their purpose and economic model in the light of dwindling readerships; blogs have given a global audience, potentially of millions, to anyone with an Internet connection. In all of this, the continued relevance of architecture criticism as practiced today has been put in doubt: as Alexandra Lange writes, “Online, both everyone and no one is a critic, and architecture talk proliferates, often in the absence of buildings.”

Is criticism in the traditional sense still relevant or useful, and can it be more than the legitimation of the new? If the role of the print publication in contemporary production irreversibly declines, what is its future? Will online publishing (from press-release feed blogs to the few bastions of criticism online sites) ever be able to fill this void? What forces might shape architectural production in a post-critical environment?

The event will take place at Storefront for Art and Architecture, a non-profit gallery and events space in SoHo, New York.

Participants:
Justin Davidson – architecture critic, New York magazine
Eva Franch – Director, Storefront for Art and Architecture
Alexandra Lange – journalist and critic, Design Observer
Shannon Mattern – Department of Media Studies & Film, The New School
Kazys Varnelis – Netlab, Columbia University GSAPP
Lebbeus Woods – architect and blogger
Mimi Zeiger – writer and blogger
Moderated by Joseph Grima – Editor, Domus

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Of Pigeons and Power Plants

Jan 4, ’11 5:35 PM

On the very last night of the fall semester I pulled an all-nighter to finish reviewing my Urban Media Archaeology students’ final projects before my husband and I caught a 6am flight for our Christmas visit to Chicago. Thus, I didn’t get a chance before the break to say anything about the students’ fantastic projects. It was a whirlwind semester: we learned about “urban media” and media archaeology, about maps as media, about the digital humanities and multimodal scholarship, about archival research, about data management, about software development, and loads more stuff. We took a walking tour of Lower Manhattan’s internet infrastructure with Andrew Blum, talked with Jesse Shapins about his own urban media art projects and parallels between our class and his Media Archaeology of Place class at Harvard, did a Pecha Kucha, played with paper prototypes, and did some mad-crazy things with spreadsheets.

The students developed some fantastic projects; their topics included subway symbols; the human labor of newspaper circulation; locative media and food delivery; literary, film- and music-focused walking tours; PacMan and urban navigation; the lost movie theaters of Brooklyn; carrier pigeons; zines’ production and distribution networks; New York media companies’ evolving headquarters; the history of New York radio; speakeasies; cell phone signal strength; screen-based public art; the evolution of New York’s electricity networks; and the history of the city’s coffeehouses. I shared their works-in-progress as part of Parsons’ Streaming Culture series and at the Reimagining the Archive conference at UCLA in November. Rick Prelinger tweeted us some props.

Our semester wasn’t without its hiccups, though. Our collaboration with another class didn’t work out exactly as planned — so we ended up with a mapping tool that didn’t have all the bells and whistles we were (perhaps naively) hoping for. And we don’t yet have an interface design, so the final projects don’t look quite as pretty as we would’ve liked them to. It took me a little while to figure out how to help everyone, including myself, “reframe” these minor disappointments. In thinking through our process over the course of the semester — and marveling at the student’s dedication to their projects, and how thoughtfully they approached their work — I came to realize that all those un-checked-off items on our wish list weren’t signs of failure. Rather, they were an integral — and incredibly meaningful — part of the process. Our class, it became obvious (and should’ve been obvious all along), was way more about process than product. I think we learned some super-valuable lessons about accepting the inevitable frustrations of collaboration and technical snafus, about being comfortable with incompletion, about looking past the gee-whizzery of interactive tools (especially mapping tools — and particularly in regard to research-based projects in the digital humanities) and appreciating the quality of the research and arguments they’re meant to present.

For now, I’ll highlight a few projects that represent not only the great promise of “multimodal” scholarship, but also strong scholarship by any standard, in any format. Again, the interface isn’t yet intuitive (or attractive) — so my advice is to start with the project description, then work through the “Arguments,” which will link you to relevant archival records that have been posted to the map. The system’s still pretty slow, too, so please be patient!

“Architecture of Media” examines the evolving headquarters of the New York Times, Tribune, World, and Herald, and the Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to appreciate how publishers use “their own buildings in New York City as a way of advertising their preeminence and establishing themselves as an integral part of the city’s cultural fabric.”

The objective of “Mapping the Social Life of Zines” is to “both physically and theoretically map the trajectories of self-publishing channels/networks in NYC. The premise is that mapping the social dimensions of zine exchange — the ways in which zines were produced, appropriated, and consumed throughout their histories by different individuals, at different times —  provides valuable insights into how sub-cultural communities were formed and social ties maintained. Moreover,   mapping the geographic circulation routes of exchange allows for a unique spatial analysis of how zines influenced political moments and alliances between movement organizations.”

“Pigeography” examines pigeons as communication conduits and makes use of fantastic sound-based arguments. [The video isn't a part of the project.]

“Walking Tours: The City Underfoot and Over Time“aims to explore “how…three walking tours…offer (or don’t) a new way of exploring the city conceptually, historically and physically” — and “how walking tours offer radically new and enlightening ways of exploring and understanding the city, whether in its current state, its historical incarnations, or its never-ending transformations.” There’s an unfortunate bug here: the sheer volume of data points on this map overtaxed the system,” which means that despite the fact that each record is geotagged, there don’t appear to be any markers on the map. If you navigate via the “Arguments,” you’ll still encounter all the relevant geotagged records and appreciate the richness of this project.

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Critiquing Maps

Aug 29, ’10 2:51 AM

"And what exactly is it you're trying to tell me?" History of the Union Army @ HistoryShots: http://www.historyshots.com/Union/index.cfm

As part of my recent “assessment obsession,” I’m now researching strategies for critiquing maps. Each week, students in my Urban Media Archaeology class will be reviewing a selection of maps and assessing what they illuminate and obfuscate, how they integrate form and content effectively and poorly, whether or not they serve their intended purpose, and what lessons we can take away from them and apply, or avoid, in our own mapping projects. Here’s my preliminary round-up of map critique resources; we’ll have to work together to distill all of this into some kind of flexible rubric — one that applies to maps as multimodal media (which is not how most of these folks seem to conceive of maps).

Harvard GSD, “Elements of Cartographic Style“:

  • Must consider difference between topographic and thematic maps

All maps should contain:

  • Title
  • Name / Institutional Affiliation / Date
  • Caption: “explains the critical concepts and relationships you are trying to illustrate”
  • Labeled Key Elements
  • Citations and dates for primary sources of data
  • Citation of projection method and case
  • Graphical Scalebar
  • Graphical Hierarchy: “key concepts as discussed in the caption should be given emphasis with a bright color and bold lineweights and labels. Key relationships may be portrayed with diagrammatic graphics”
  • Concise Legend, if Necessary

Advice for Thematic Maps: “The map is not the territory… Just so your map readers know that you are not confusing data with a perfect representation of reality your discussion of a thematic map should begin with a description of what the data literally represent — observations of particular classes of entities made for a specific purpose at a particular time, with a particular precision and aggregate units. After this explanation, you can go on to make statements about how the data do or do not adequately represent the concepts of interest for your study.”

Elements that every thematic map should have:

  • “Contextual Framework Portraying data without a contextual reference overlay as discussed in the sections on topographic mapping is pointless.
  • Concise, evocative legend Your thematic data should be re-categorized if necessary so that your readers are not challenged to keep track of more than 5 different classes. Seven, maximum.
  • Use plain terms in legend headings and labels If you accept the software defaults for your legend labels and headings, people who understand maps will also understand that you simply don’t care about communicating.
  • Try not to hide important information in arbitrarily broad categories The categories portrayed in the legend, whether qualitative or quantitative, should highlight distinctions that are useful.
  • Discuss the Aerial Precision of Mapping Units Whether the data are quantitative or qualitative, thematic data have a particular granularity. For example Census Data may be aggregated at a Block level or Tract. Land Use Data may only register distinctions for patches of ground larger than a stated Minimum Mapping Unit (like 5 acres, or a 90 meter cell.)
  • Graphical Hierarchy the same ideas about graphical hierarchy that apply to topographic maps may also apply with thematic maps. This is especially true with regard to the foreground layer of key topographic features and a reference layers to provide context. You may decide to drop some of the labels used in your reference layer — particularly when your map document includes separate maps for presenting the contextual framework. Typically, the thematic layer will be the background layer of the map but you may also use transparency and an aerial photo at large scales, or shaded relief at smaller (broader) scales. When mixing background layers with transparency you should be careful that whatever background layers you use — particularly aerial photos and or shaded relief, to not make the key distinctions in your thematic layer more difficult to read.”

Adrienne Gruver, “Visual Thinking and Visual Communication” Lesson in Geography 486: “Cartography and Visualization,” Penn State:

  1. Subject
  2. Purpose
  3. Audience
  4. Data Variables Shown
  5. Visual variables used to represent or symbolize the data variables (e.g. hue, size)
  6. Is there a logical match between the kind of data variable shown and the kind of visual variable used to represent it?
  7. Appropriate map specifications, e.g. color, size, output file, etc depending on how the map should be read/used (print, web etc).
  8. What is confusing or takes time to understand?
  9. What is well-done vs. what could be improved?
  10. How does design contribute to all of the above?

We need to extend these variables so that they encompass multimodal maps — i.e., maps that aren’t purely visual.

Denis Wood & John Fels, The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008):

From Robert Karrow, Jr.’s, review, in Technology and Culture (October 2009):

“In terms of methodology, Wood and Fels rely, first, on extremely thorough and systematic “unpacking” of the map, the kind of analysis they famously directed at a North Carolina state highway map in The Power of Maps. And to assist in this process, they’ve adapted some terms from literary analysis that allow them to talk about a map’s context. They speak of the parimap as the verbal and physical expressions that surround and embody the map, everything from titles and legends to paper stock and typography. They also recognize an epimap, constituting information not physically a part of the map, but circulating freely around it. Elements of an epimap would include advertising, commentary, and packaging, like the issue of National Geographic that holds a given map. Together, parimap and epimap constitute the paramap, “everything that surrounds and extends a map in order to present it.”

“Climate Cartographics“:

Guidelines for critiquing maps, drawing on Wood & Fels:

1. Layout and Perimap: How do the title, captions, text color, balance and other elements of the perimap set the context for reading the map?

2. Data Presentation: What symbology, colors, background, projection and other features in the map image contribute the map’s message?

3. Data Analysis: What type of data is shown? What are the classification techniques, choice of scale, research methods, and sources?

4. Message: What is the message of the map? How effectively is it communicated? Who is the intended audience?

5. Recommendations: How should the map be changed so that it would communicate the message more effectively?Xx

From James Corner’s “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention” In Denis Cosgrove, Ed., Mappings:

  • Consider “what is selected and prioritized…, what is subsequently left aside or ignored, how the chosen material is schematized, indexed and framed, and how the synthesis of the graphic field invoked semantic, symbolic, and instrumental content” (216)
  • Consider “the graphic system within which the [map's] extracts will…be organized. The system includes the frame, orientation, coordinates, scale, units of measure and the graphic projection (oblique, zenithal, isometric, anamorphic, folded, etc.). The design and set-up of the field is perhaps one of the most creative acts in mapping.” (229)
  • Consider the essential operations in mapping: “first, the creation of a field, the setting of rules and the establishment of a system; second, the extraction, isolation or ‘de-territorialization’ of parts and data; and third, the plotting, the drawing-out, the setting-up of relationships, or the ‘re-territorialization’ of the parts. At each stage, choices and judgments are made, with the construing and constructing of the map alternating between processes of accumulation, disassembly and reassembly” (231)

Other Resources:

**Judy M. Olson, “Multimedia in Geography: Good, Bad, Ugly, or Cool?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87:4 (December 1997): 571-578.

Cynthia Brewer, Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users (ESRI Press, 2005).

Vidya Setlur, Cynthia Kuo, Peter Mikelsons, “Towards Designing Better Map Interfaces for the Mobile: Experiences from Example” COM.geo 2010.

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Call for Proposals: 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Workshop on “Urban Informatics, Geographic Data, and Media of Mapping”

Jul 15, ’10 1:01 AM

I posted the following CFP to the SCMS conference bulletin board. See the conference FAQs for more information about the workshop format, submitting a proposal, SCMS membership, etc.

Dan Hill-Keynote: New Soft City from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

The past several years have seen increasing corporate and educational interest in, and major funding for, projects that make urban histories, knowledges, data, etc., accessible, visible/audible/tangible, and, ideally, intelligible to urban publics. Examples include the projects of the recent Towards the Sentient City exhibition at the Architectural League of New York, UCLA and USC’s Google Map-based Hypercities, and mobile-phone- or mp3-based audio walking tours, like Justin Hopper’s “Public Record.”

This workshop will examine a selection of these projects, critically addressing their rhetorical and aesthetic strategies and examining their utility as platforms for research, as pedagogical resources, and as political tools for civic engagement. Acknowledging the widespread commitment among these projects to “making the invisible, visible” (which occasionally results in collapsing “the urban” into “the visible”), we will pay particular attention to the media and sensory modes of mapping and “content” presentation.

Please send 300-word abstract, links to relevant media, and c.v. to Shannon Mattern (matterns AT newschool DOT edu) by Wednesday, August 11. All will be contacted regarding the status of their proposals by August 15.

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