Whether a navigation device that adjusts its route-display according to where the driver chooses to go, or a map in a computer game that is co-produced by players’ input, digital mapping has transformed our daily lives and how we engage with and shape our worlds. During this final conference of the ERC project Charting the Digital we will share and discuss what this transformation means.
(A handy PDF version of the call can be found here)
8-9 October 2016, Venice (Italy)
Organised by the ERC funded Charting the Digital team: Sybille Lammes (Principal Investigator), Chris Perkins (Senior Research Fellow), Sam Hind (PhD candidate), Alex Gekker (PhD candidate) and Clancy Wilmott (PhD candidate and Research Fellow).
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Over the last 4 years the Charting team has interrogated what this shift entails, taking on board new developments in the field as well as novel technological possibilities. This has encompassed the deployment of theoretical and methodological frameworks in order to analyse a broad spectrum of digital mapping applications, platforms and devices – from the use of mobile apps such as Google/Apple Maps, Citymapper, Ingress, TripAdvisor, Waze and many more to revolutionary platforms like Google Earth and OSM and devices from smartphones and watches to fitness trackers.
Using an interdisciplinary approach we have examined digital maps in relation to each other, to ‘traditional’ non-digital cartographies and to other media forms concerned with mapping and navigation. In so doing we have expanded concepts of navigational interfaces; play, playfulness and playful mapping; casual politics; cartographic reason and logic; and mapping experimentation, risk and failure.
Now it is time to set up the next stage of this inquiry. Through discussion with scholars whose ideas influence, challenge or resonate with our work, we wish to open the question of what digital mapping is, has become, or could become in the future.
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We are interested in a variety of themes, which include, but are not limited to:
Playful cartography
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videogames and maps – minimaps, player representation, post-colonialism
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location-based games
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pervasive games with/out maps
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mapping as play, play as mapping: the relations between game maps and physical movement
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actions/activities/manoeuvres
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situationism and pyscho-geography
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cheating
Mapping and discourse
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systems of thought
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interoperable logics
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rationalism
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authority
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transformations
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transplantations
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abstraction and formalisation
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cartographic reason
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maps and culture
Performative mapping
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embodiment
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materiality
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new technologies
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new vocabularies
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imaginaries
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spatialities
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limits to representation
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temporality (immediacy, ephemerality, (a)synchronicities)
Big data, small data, ‘sweaty’ data in digital mapping practices
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empirical/ethical challenges
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‘offline’ to ‘online’ articulation
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visualisation: the transformation from data to map (layering, inscription)
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cartographic politics of big data
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issues of representation/scale
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applicability of big data metaphors (‘fumes’, ‘sweat’, stacks etc.)
Disruptive cartographies
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tactical/strategic/logistic
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interrelation between disruption, disobedience, disorientation and dislocation
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risk and excess (and play)
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cartographies of care
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autonomous mapping practices
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‘disruption’ as innovation (critique of)
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post-colonial mapping
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new epistemologies/ways of mapping/unmapping
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hacking, hacker culture and crypto-politics
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failure (systemic, glitches, inter-active/haptic, capture/collect, privacy/crypto concerns, as productive/non-binary, entrepreneurial/motivational discourse)
Mapping methods
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in pedagogy
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design and making
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conceptual frameworks (situatedness, moments, traces, instantiations, models etc.)
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playful mapping as method
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interdisciplinarity
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mobile methods & fieldwork
Future Maps and future mapping
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self-driving cars and mapping
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predictive maps and crisis maps
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embodied, sensory maps/wearable technology
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personalised maps
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‘dumb’ phones, un-mapping and non-maps
We invite contributions from methodological, theoretical and practical vantage points, and are particularly interested in bringing together a wide range of approaches, from junior and senior researchers, and from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
Please send a proposal of 500 words (including keywords) before 30 January 2016 to: chartingthedigital@gmail.com
