Archive for January, 2006
There’s been plenty of discussion on the geoweb about the latest offering in what I’ve heard called the ‘online mapping arms race’, Microsoft’s Local Live. You can zoom in on photos of cities, move about and rotate your viewpoint.
While it’s technically interesting, impressive, geeky, and all that, I think it’s interface also illustrates a shift in what we’re perceiving maps to be. Generally thought of as being a medium of information communication (and although MS Local Live is still that), the nature of cartographic representation is obviously changing, and online mapping is driving that change.
Here’s a sixteenth century map of Edinburgh:
And here’s downtown LA in Microsoft’s new mapping system:
The similarities are pretty obvious: isometric(ish), literal, evocative. In many ways, these maps are similar. One leads logically into the other.
Yet there wasn’t a direct evolution of the nature of cartography between these two examples. Maps after the engraving of Edinburgh started to change. In fact, these maps, created half a millennium apart, seem to have more in common with each other than they do with the more symbolic, representative, top-down maps that came between them and lasted for centuries (your typical A-Z roadmap, or an Ordnance Survey map, for example).
It’s interesting to note what’s been lost in transition, the elements that were no longer deemed necessary in the newer map. The people in the foreground and detail in the background have been dropped - we no longer need the reference point of humans, or the surrounding hills and fields for the map to make sense of the map. Perhaps this comes from a shift away from a focus on the self to a more universal world view, driven by scientific discovery. As science learned that the movements of the planets were not centred around earth — as people realised, literally, that the universe did not revolve around them — their understanding of their position in relation to the physical world changed, and became more abstracted. A shift in perception is reflected in changing methods of mapping. Our knowledge of the world allows us to see it in different ways, and this manifests itself in new graphic representations.
Maps are more than representations of places; they reflect a time and outlook. Read a map, and find the lie of the land in more ways than one. There are layers of history, reason, thought that have influenced why a place has been abstracted precisely in the way it has. John Berger writes that
An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made it’s appearance and preserved — for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as it is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.
The marks we make reflect our way of seeing, our interpretations from within our own sphere of reference.
Back to Local Live — what’s going on here? The map is becoming less abstracted and more literal, more tactile, seemingly coming full circle to a literal representation of my place within a wider world view. Is mapmaking returning to a medieval approach to representation? What is this saying about how we think about location and ourselves? Why now?
Like the changes that happened after the Edinburgh map and up to the Local Live map, I think this is at least partly due to developments in technology. The introduction of photography brought about it’s own crisis in the meaning of representation. Think about how the internet has allowed us to become self-centred individuals again, albeit individuals with a sense of scale and place in a massive world, zooming in from the macro to the micro (à la powers of ten), making the paradox of mass personalisation possible. Or think about the small circular maps in first person video games - as you move about, the entire map changes around a static arrow that represents you, the individual.
Or how our understanding of our context within a technology-filled world now allows the fact that how we know we would look if viewed from satellites that are floating in space high above the planet to be a representative mapping medium.
(Some of this comes from a couple of days knocking heads last month with colleagues at i-DAT, in particular a discussion with Dr Mike Punt on the relationship between technology and history.)
A friend from Ireland who now lives abroad told me this week about how his father had said to him, “My hope for you is that you’ll eventually come back to Ireland and make this place poor again”.
Anyone who has ever met an Irish person whose memory stretches back beyond the early 90’s has probably at some stage heard tales of hardship and poverty, which are invariably concluded with the Irish-as-it-gets coda, “We hadn’t much, but we were happy”. Ireland was dirt poor back then, and yet in these times of huge economic success, it’s still the tough times that we recall most fondly.
Thinking about this, I’ve noticed that the people I talk to about the state of the nation are almost always friends of mine who have moved away but that I keep in touch with. I guess nothing makes you question your own national identity more than leaving it behind. They think about what their Ireland was like, and if they will be able to reconnect with it in the same way if they ever decide to return — if their stride will fall in with the pace of new Irish life.
If someone from another country asks me what Ireland is like, I find it really difficult to provide a straight answer. How can you talk about Ireland today without reference to Ireland twenty years ago, even though they are completely different countries? Things are expensive now, they were cheap then (but we couldn’t afford them anyway); we’re all sophisticated now, we were oh-so-unknowing then; things are exciting and fast now — things were slow then.
That’s what people miss when they get nostalgic: the pace, the slowness. Here we are, crashing headlong into a bright new era where we’ve got all this choice and freedom and opportunity (and don’t get me wrong, this is certainly A Good Thing). But when we all become busy, successful city-dwellers, we miss out on the interactions that slow-paced country life affords us. Sure, it’s partly a romantic conceit, but it’s also a human need for close contact and reflection. That’s not an Irish thing, it’s universal.
It seems that the spiritually-attuned East is leading the way in active change here. Kakegawa City has declared itself a “Slow Life city”, and drawn up this Slow Life manifesto:
SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.
None of this requires you to be poor, or pre-modern, or unsuccessful. It just requires you to reasses what you deem success to be.
So what did my friend’s Dad mean when he said he wanted Ireland to be poor again? I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wishing that we all had less money. Obviously he wanted his son to come home. Maybe he also wanted him bring with him some perspective on the country, a change of pace, and the return of what he misses about the romantic Ireland (dead and gone?) that his son lived in.
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(For more on this, see The Pope’s Children, Japan Grows a Beard, Wabi-Sabi, Slow Food Ireland, Griffner Coillte, and the wonderful RTÉ documentary series ‘Hands’)
Since we’re already done with one of only 26-odd fortnights in the year, it’s time I put an end to the extended radio silence. Rest assured I’ve not been slacking off, but rather engaging in the act of toil, the fruits of which will be online at the start of February.
Being a time of fresh beginnings, I took a couple of hours out to do some blog housekeeping. I enjoyed having all of the links/photos/music feeds in the ’small pieces, loosely joined’ sidebar for a while, but have decided in the end that it didn’t really add much to the site apart from clutter1. I’d like to concentrate a bit on writing actual content this year (please, this intention is not to be misinterpreted as a “resolution”), so I’ve swept all of that out, and created an about page instead.
I’ve also set up the ability to post brief remarks/links that don’t constitute full posts inline with the main blog, so short items of note will continue to appear. It’s published in a seperate RSS feed, to avoid the main feed being polluted with the inevitable nonsense digressions.
I moved servers and upgraded Wordpress too, so if funky things are happening, let me know.
Happy new year!
[1] As an aside, I think my tendency with this site has increasingly been to create something less and less (aesthetically) designed, maybe as a counterbalance or reaction to my day job as a designer. Were I a technical writer by trade, I imagine you would, at this very moment, be listening to an embedded midi file.
