ITH - Centrum för studier av IT ur ett
humanvetenskapligt perspektiv och
Center for Collaborative Innovation vid Högskolan i Borås
8:3
Dynamic Maps
Guest editor: Patrik Svensson
Cartographic maps are
a powerful means for visually representing the world around us
and communicating the ways in which we understand reality.
Computers and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide
increased possibilities to make the maps dynamic; to allow us
to interact with the geographical information, create added
value by linking the maps to different data sets, and display
relationships between for instance time and space.
Our guest editor for
this special issue on Dynamic Maps, Patrik Svensson from HUMlab (Umeå University, Sweden), has put together a number of
articles that nicely illustrate the different uses and
implementations of dynamic maps today. These uses include
other forms of dynamic visualisation than cartographic, as in
Zachary Devereaux and Stan Ruecker’s interactive
network mapping of how specific issues or communities are
presented on the Web. In Devereaux and Ruecker’s two studies,
the maps are a means of presenting research results in a way
which allows the reader to come closer to and to some degree
interact with the material.
Using the digital medium for
making traditional paper maps more interactive can help
develop a new generation of cartographic maps for the general
public. William Cartwright explores the possibilities
offered by applying inspiration from computer games to the
interface of digital maps in order to make the maps more
easily accessible, particularly to the computer-savvy
generations. In four projects, Cartwright makes use of various
interfaces to investigate users’ reactions to working with
games-inspired digital maps rather than paper maps, and
he looks at the ways in which the
users solve tasks when using the different
interfaces.
Furthermore, dynamic
maps can provide improved methods for visualising data that is
otherwise difficult to interpret. This is the case in two of
the articles, which report on experiences that came out of a
number of projects involving dynamic maps in the humanities.
In both cases, the authors see promising opportunities for GIS
and dynamic map techniques to visualise humanities research,
but they also point to possibly problematic areas,
particularly with regard to the types of data that humanities
scholars work with. These are often characterised by a certain
fuzziness and incompleteness, and the authenticity of the data
is not always completely reliable. This is important to keep
in mind in the exploration of the maps, as a sleek interface
to the data can be deceptive.
Martyn Jessop
at the Centre for Computing in
the Humanities (CCH), King’s College London, discusses the
advantages of dynamic maps to humanities computing issues, in
particular the possibilities they offer for displaying time in
connection with spatial data. His examples are drawn from the
many dynamic maps projects at the CCH and cover the use of eyewitness accounts to
map the movements of an early 20th century naval
battle, and the “Mapping Migration” project on forced
migration on the Balkans from 1880 to the present.
The work of the
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is presented by
Jeannette Zerneke, Michael Buckland, and Kim
Carl. The projects involved in this international
initiative also focus on temporality and the possibilities of
displaying time geographically, particularly by using the
software Time Map. One of the most interesting aspects, from a
library point of view, concerns the work done in some of the
described projects with linking maps to library
catalogue search queries and results in a way which makes use
of the dynamics of constantly updated catalogues. The authors
also point to the usefulness of gazetteers in handling place
names and the names of time periods, which tend to change over
time and with the cultural place from which the describer is
speaking.
The area of dynamic
maps is multidisciplinary, covering the humanities, the social
and natural sciences, and technology, but it is also a concern
outside of the strictly academic world. As an
example of this, the editors are very pleased to include in this issue
Jan Svenungsson’s description of his own artistic
process in working with the project “Psycho-Mapping Europe”
from 1998. Svenungsson is a practicing artist who has had a
number of international exhibits. His thoughts on the concept
of geography and the role of the human artist’s failure in
exact copying highlight one way in which the subjective factor
enters what we often consider to be an objective reality.
Unlike the maps in some of the other projects reported on in
this issue, which attempt to capture a passing of time, these
maps of the art work are dynamic by the very fact that they
illustrate the impossibility of keeping time still, despite
the obvious ambition to do so. The twenty maps that make up
"Psycho-Mapping Europe" are also included in the article.
It was, in fact, the
desire to make available to Human IT:s audience an
animated GIF of “Psycho-Mapping Europe” that led us to
introduce in this issue a web page between each article’s
reference in the table of contents and the actual article in
PDF form. This web page will display the article’s abstract
and keywords to let
potential readers decide whether or
not it seems worthwhile to download the article, but most
importantly it will be used to link to additional material
when motivated. Such additional material can be larger and
better resolution images from the articles or the option to
download image-heavy articles with high or low resolutions, as
in the case of Svenungsson’s article in this issue. We
encourage our future authors to take advantage of this
possibility to include material related to their articles in
different media formats or perhaps to submit the data that the
research is based on.
We hope that this
special issue will provide some interesting reading and wish
our readers and authors a peaceful or productive summer,
depending on what the objectives and ambitions for the
upcoming months are for each of you!
Borås in May 2006
Helena Francke
