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The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. The emergence of novel objects, forms, processes and approaches in the digital era has, however, posed a swathe of new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices, and in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. In this peer-reviewed collection we bring time back into the map, taking up Doreen Massey's critical concern for 'ongoing stories' in the world, but asking how mapping continues to wrestle with the difficulty of enrolling time into these narratives, often seeking to ‘freeze’ and ‘fix’ the world, in lieu of being able to, in some way, represent, document or capture dynamic phenomena. This collection examines how these processes are impacted by digital cartographic technologies that, arguably, have disrupted our understanding of time as much as they have provided coherence. The book consists of twelve chapters that address different kinds of digital mapping practice and analyse these in relation to temporality. Cases discussed range from locative art projects, OpenStreetMap mapping parties, sensory mapping, Google Street View, visual mapping, smart city dashboards and crisis mapping. Authors from different disciplinary positions consider how a temporal lens might focus attention on different aspects of digital mapping. This kaleidoscopic approach generates a rich plethora for understanding the temporal modes of digital mapping. The interdisciplinary background of the authors allows multiple positions to be developed.
confusion. As digital mapping and tracing increasingly become ‘tools of the trade’ for emergency response, reams of data are amassed by agencies during humanitarian crises ( Altay and Labonte, 2014 ). Troves of data can ‘paralyse’ a humanitarian organisation as much as inform it, through volume and sheer complexity ( Meier, 2015 ). Interoperability of data is also a factor in large-scale interventions, since datasets gathered by different agencies on different platforms
moments, worked on this book serves as a useful allusion to how temporality has taken on new meanings since the advent of digital mapping. Much like the digital mapping practices we have discussed in this book, time proved to be tricky, asynchronous, serendipitous, sticky and ephemeral, thanks to – or despite – digital technologies. Someone was sent out of the room where she Skyped, someone else had to walk a dog, was hungry and had to grab lunch, forgot about time differences, spilled a drink over a computer, or failed to find the right document. Every time we faced an
1 Introduction: mapping times Alex Gekker, Sam Hind, Sybille Lammes, Chris Perkins and Clancy Wilmott Digital mapping, though generally conceived as a spatial activity, is just as strongly grounded in time. The digital era has disintegrated the representational fixity of maps, and instead given rise to maps that shift with each moment and movement. Scholars, adept at grappling with the spatial implications of digitality, continue to struggle to conceptualise and communicate the temporal consequences of maps. In this collection, we seek to take up Doreen Massey
: as Valerie November and her coauthors argue in their unpacking of the new understandings of space produced by digital mapping technologies and practices, ‘no one and no thing ever resided in the virtual image of the map’ (November, Camacho-Hübner, and Latour, 2010: 594). The map, as it has been imagined in the Western scientific tradition, is lifeless; static; denying processes and temporality; cleaving time from space to construct it. As Doreen Massey put it, the map is ‘the sphere of a completed horizontality’ (Massey, 2005: 107). Denis Wood and John Fels take a
the science fiction animations. In some ways the construction of performance in Final Fantasy was not dissimilar to the reconstruction of Bacon’s performance in Hollow Man: both Hollow Man’s substituted performance via digital mapping and the extensive use of ‘motion capture’ 6 in the creation of characters in Final Fantasy relied initially on the recording of human performance. The difference
the ideological precepts by which they are informed and conditioned. Especially in an age of geographic information systems – wherein lies an increasingly stark disparity between the visual appearance of the map itself on one hand, and the numerical data that it claims to represent on the other – the parameters within which such representations are given, and the socio-political consequences of such ‘givenness’ must be analysed with intense scrutiny. Digital mapping gives us a world through the binding of quantitative information to a set of representational
, advances in the assembly and representation of geospatial knowledge are equally necessary. The Soviet era saw a fundamental shift in the methods of storage, dissemination, and display of geospatial intelligence from analogue to digital formats. Whereas the use of paper sheets forces the simultaneous presentation of all types of information on a limited physical space, digital mapping organises data by layers and allows the seamless display of a selection of stored information by theme (e.g., land use, hydrology, vegetation). This is especially useful for the creation of
this volume. This kind of idea contrasts with the flat-screen worlds of digital mapping at which we gaze (often while sitting relatively inert). William Cartwright (2013) refers to a transition in mapping that is happening in our time. Published paper maps that provide static depictions of places, frozen at the moment of compilation, are being replaced by digital mapping which enables dynamic, interactive visualisations where map readers can track changes or make changes over time. In this chapter I explore how this dynamism changes the way we think about and study
these coordinates are argued to coexist in digital maps that constantly update according to the user’s location, the result is a highly individualised and ‘performed’ one; Weileder’s Atlas offers instead a rare shared representation of time overlaid with (public) space which allows sustained and reflective study2 (see Figures 5.7 and 5.8). Virilio’s argument is certainly pessimistic, and discussion of digital mapping often veers between excitement and concern. In 2009, geographers Paul Kingsbury and John Paul Jones III diagnosed a field which they saw as clearly