Mapping Databases: Online Representation of Spatiotemporal Experience ¹

Sharon DANIEL and Karen O'ROURKE

Mapping is inter-subjective communication - the visualization or representation of information. The term Map applies both to a clear representation and the act of analysis required to create such a representation. To map is to assign a correspondence. A map fulfils the function of record and statement -- it is a history of the subject’s, or mapmaker’s relation to that which is mapped and an act of communication with others who will interpret and use it. To "map" is to locate -- position is always "relative to". It implies a particular point of view. In order to transform experience into a spatial representation, an image or text -- a map, one must acknowledge point of view, establish criteria of pertinence, make relevant choices and classify data in terms that are appropriate in a given context.

Far more than simple tools used to organize, elaborate, or conserve knowledge, the database and the map are significant components of our perceptual world, and of our perception. Our perception of the importance and relative position of experiential data depends to a great degree on our particular socio-cultural context. Both classification and mapping involve the interpretation of experiential data using systems of representation which are culturally constructed. These systems can be hierarchical, and function as repressive and normative forces. However, digital information and communication technologies provide the material context, tools and environments, which can be exploited in ways that challenge these dominant representations and provide alternative means of self-representation. Here our research is both critical and utopian. We attempt to re-imagine classification systems as emergent systems - where names, categories and associated data structures arise from the "bottom up" through collective usage. We have each employed cartographic methodology as an interaction metaphor in the design of dynamic, evolving systems that allow participants to create and archive their own itineraries and maps online. These systems explore the aesthetic dimensions of the database. ²

In a workshop/exhibition which took place in November 2002 at the Université Paris 1, ³ we presented and tested prototypes of these two developing systems, Subtract the Sky and A Map Larger than the Territory. In what follows we each provide a brief description of the premise and implementation of our respective projects. We then conclude with some preliminary findings from the workshop/exhibition and our shared research.

1. Subtract the Sky (Sharon Daniel ⁴)

In my practice the use and development of collaborative tools has taken many forms from developing sophisticated, large-scale, database-driven collaborative systems for online communities such as Subtract the Sky to developing collaborative systems for specific communities in their own social contexts. My goals are: to avoid representation - not to attempt to speak for others but to allow them to speak for themselves, to build collaborative networks that  address the special problems of communities with limited access to information technology and culture, and to build collaborative tools on line for use by communities in their own empowering, authoring practices.

While political and economic power are increasingly dependent upon access to and presence within the global information culture, the voices of the culturally, economically, and technologically disenfranchised, are becoming less and less audible. This dangerous trend might be reversed if communities of interest across the socio-economic spectrum had access to information technologies and the ability to map their own positions in information space. Subtract the Sky provides individuals and groups with an online environment for collective and emergent methods of mapping.

The project takes its name from a method used in astronomy. Astronomers must eliminate the light of all the stars they don't wish to see in order to capture the light of a single star. Effectively, astronomers must define what "sky" means for every observation. In other words, there is no single meaning for "sky", but many, given the perspective of the observer. To "subtract the sky" is to interpret data from a subjective perspective. We use the phrase as a poetic and literal metaphor for the process of collecting, authoring and contributing data.

Subtract the Sky invites participants to become cartographers, enabled with the tools they need to produce an archive of maps that trace their own histories and re-map their own social and political worlds. We, the project collaborators, ask Subtract the Sky participants to map any subject from their own individual or community perspective and thus, to challenge dominant or normative representations of the world. The definition of "map" in this context is inclusive across a broad spectrum from geographical maps employing GIS and GPS data to the purely conceptual maps. Subtract the Sky participants will map their worlds by contributing and classifying new data (images, texts and sounds), creating new categories and associations between data objects, and re-interpreting existing data, using a real-time visualization of Subtract the Sky's evolving database. This interface, itself, provides a map of the current state of the database that dynamically expresses changes made by participants collaborating across the network in real time.

Participants may view this map from several different perspectives -- through the filter of classification and categorization, by genealogical association between contributed images, texts and sounds, or from their own, personal perspective - by creating a set of personal associations. Participants may search the database (or the web) by category or keyword. They may add selected images from their search to a palette which will later be downloaded to their own computer along with subtract the sky's map authoring environment.

This multi-user map authoring environment will allow participants to collaboratively author images, texts, and sounds, using source data from the database and/or their own data. Participants may then contribute their maps to the database by adding a new node to the map of the database and updating that node to contain their own map. Here participants may categorize their map and describe it with keywords.

The classification system we have designed consists of highly contested terms like nature, culture, aesthetics, public, private. It is our hope that the maps contributed under these categories and the key words used to described them will begin to inflect the meaning of the terms themselves and create new associations for them -  re-locating and re-mapping language, multi-vocally.

The map authoring environment will track parent/child relationships between each new map contributed and the data objects used to author it.  This information is uploaded with the contributed map and the associations are  automatically represented in the genealogy view. While each individual or group contribution is automatically integrated in to the map of the database with associations drawn by classification and genealogy -- participants may also construct a representation of their own, personal perspective of the database by editing and reconstructing relations between data object in their "personal" visualization of the database

Phase III of Subtract the Sky will engage technology and scientific research projects through interactive interfaces on the Internet. These interfaces will give the public access to astronomical, genomic and geological databases. These databases will be integrated into the map authoring environment and map archive provided in phase I and II. Participants will be given tools to understand, interpret, and visualize this data, contextually, using methods that are meaningful to them, and obtaining results that are useful to their communities.

One primary goal of the project since its inception has been to allow art and science to inflect and effect each other's methodologies and assumptions. The research and educational interests of participating Astronomer Puragra Guhathakurta are central to the epistemological and aesthetic development of the project. Guhathakurta's research using the Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope will provide the initial astronomical data for the database.

The Keck Observatory exemplifies the kind of situated complexity that Subtract the Sky will engage. Subtract the Sky offers the mediating tool of cartography as a site of activist intervention in some of today's most pressing conflicts, for example, the environment, science, and indigenism. Keck's summit consists of what is called the Science Preserve, an almost 12,000 acre plot that literally rings Mauna Kea's peak. On 600 acres of this sit 20 observatories. In other areas of the Preserve, and between the altitudes of 9000 and 13,000 feet encircling Mauna Kea, are over 4000 shrines sacred to native Hawaiian families. In the late 60's University of Hawaii and the State Bureau of Land Management were given a 65 year lease with the charge to maintain both the environmental and cultural integrity of the summit, and that a maximum of 8 observatories be built. Last year, the Hawaii State legislature order an audit of their management practices. The report was damning. In apparent defiance, the response to the audit is to expand the current 20 observatories to a total of 54. The response at public hearings has been complete outrage. Native Hawaiian Sovereignty representatives, scientists, environmentalists, legal firms, non-native residents, observatory staff in some cases, have joined in protest. Issues of science (both western and indigenous), land rights, environment, religion, politics, economics, etc. all collide here. ⁵

Subtract the Sky is about giving voice to this type of complexity, aiming to be interventionist, but from a complexly layered, multiaxial view. For example, all parties to the controversy around the proposed expansion of the observatories at Mauna Kea will be invited to participate as prototype mappers. While GIS and GPS Data have already been employed in the presentation and defense of the new Master Plan -- proving the power and acceptance of maps as political tools ⁶ –Subtract the Sky will provide a frame in which every perspective might be "mapped" --- from the point of view of the families whose shrines co-exist with the dishes of the large Baseline Array to the perspectives of individual Scientists who use them -- and all the environmentalists, politicians, snow boarders, and school children in between.       

Subtract the Sky is a tool.  It is designed to give voice to communities and individuals on issues of relevance within their own social world.

It will be available for use by any visitor online but will also be used in specific contexts as a tool for constituencies who don't normally have access to communications technologies and whose voices are not heard in information space. I will use subtract the sky as a tool to collect the perspectives of women prisoners, their families and communities in a project called justvoice/justice now a collaboration with a non-profit organization that supports the rights of women in prison. We are attempting to collect images, interviews and proposals for building a world without prisons from those most closely affected by the prison industrial complex.

Media representations are always actively mapping a complex geopolitical terrain that must be examined from many perspectives - not accepted as a monolithic absolute. Worlds should not be mapped using only the "available data". Data may be mapped and re-mapped from multiple perspectives. The field of data must be open to additions and reconfiguration from every perspective, without hierarchical ordering or restriction. A map is always perspectival. It locates but it is, itself, already located. Maps are political instruments which should be authored and employed by collectives and grassroots networks, not only by governments and authorities. Grassroots networks, non-profit organizations, disempowered, and often technologically disenfranchised groups need a context, access to the field of data, and tools for "imagery activism," developing collective and emergent methods of mapping and visualizing data – this is the premise of Subtract the Sky.

A Map Larger Than the Territory (Karen O'Rourke)

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.

Australian aborigines find their way in unfamiliar country without using navigational instruments or notions of astronomy. They construct cognitive maps based on myths, traditional songs and stories, which describe in general terms the physical features of their ancestors' Dreamtime tracks, camps and sacred sites. Their very precise geographical knowledge comes above all from wayside conversations with other travelers who delight in describing in great detail the places they know, either from firsthand experience or from hearsay. ⁸

A far cry from Breton's experimental wanderings or Baudelaire's "flâneries", our own daily itineraries would appear at first to be rather well-beaten trails, limited in scope. Their very banality would seem to automatically exclude any discovery or chance encounter. In the métro at rush hour don't we sometimes feel we've seen those same faces so often they have become landmarks? At least we're not on the wrong platform… By asking participants to recount their paths across the city, this project aims to build experiential maps based on such notions as landmark, district, edge or boundary, path, rendezvous. What details reveal a neighborhood, an intersection, a street? What characteristics of places or routes help us to find our way in a complex urban center? What information is charted on our mental maps? What makes them specific to Paris, London or Tokyo?

Many of our waking moments are devoted to getting from one place to another. Although we often feel this is time wasted, like negative space in a graphic design, it models the "positive" moments in surprising ways. However mundane, each of our urban itineraries tells a unique story. Why this particular trip today? How did we find our way? Which path, which means of transportation did we choose? What was the weather like? What did we see, hear, smell on the way? What remains afterwards?

Our itineraries reveal not only our personal choices or tastes but also cultural and political determinations. The hundred kilometer trip from Jenin to Hebron on the West Bank could take either two hours or fourteen, depending on whether we are required to stop at the 24 army checkpoints on the way. ⁹ To a greater or lesser degree, our travel vicissitudes point to larger issues, providing clues about living conditions in a given time and place.

Guy Debord defined the dérive [literally: "drifting"] as "a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll." ¹⁰ Geography "deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." ¹¹ The Situationists looked out for the subliminal messages in urban planning, for them psychogeography was a sort of city-space cut-up. ¹²

A Map Larger than the Territory develops a Web application that will enable participants to represent their urban travels online, using images, texts and sounds. The result will be a kind of "Map of Tender" charted by surveillance technology. Each trip can be analysed and/or simply recounted. The five minute walk to school could be structured like Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a shopping expedition to the Printemps department store could mean advancing into the "Heart of Darkness" of the January White Sales.

The project involves:

1. A Web-based method of notation for participants to recreate and visualize their itineraries online, using both text and image files they have uploaded and information available from the database and on the Internet.

2. A searchable, modifiable online database of participants’ urban itineraries made up of information gathered online and links to other material. At present the database contains textual descriptions culled from responses to an online questionnaire. ¹³ It aims to restitute the variety and complexity of the narratives, allowing readers to draw meaningful parallels. In order to consult it, one is asked to contribute an itinerary.

3. A rescalable, zoomable map interface that allows one to view all the itineraries on file. The mapped relationships will be semantic, topographic rather than strictly geographic.

4. An online Rummage Sale for used itineraries, a networked Market where users can preview, download, buy, sell and exchange copyrighted, copylefted or trademarked itineraries.

The database intentionally confronts descriptions of very different itineraries, adults driving to work and children running off to play, well-worn commutes and spontaneous joy rides, quick jogs over to the corner drug store and slow traffic crossing town, early-morning dog-walks and late-night bar hops, each capable of revealing a specific aspect of our urban imaginary. The infinitesimal details of our subjective itineraries, which on their own might seem trivial or anecdotic, take on significance when confronted with others, many others. In conjunction with a great quantity of other details, unique stories and ordinary trips, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole which is greater, more intelligent than the sum of its parts.

The Map with its marketplace of itineraries and network of links holds up a mirror to the city. The more a city favors diversity, the more lively it is. Versatile, multifarious, abundant, it is a dynamic system that results largely from simple interactions between its inhabitants and their living spaces. ¹⁴ Acting individually, interacting with others at a local level, they produce complex, collective behavior at a higher, global level. The Map, like the city as a whole, forms an organized complex system made of "situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously in subtly interconnected ways". ¹⁵ Rather than creating an object for contemplation, ¹⁶ this project focuses on the interconnections, the ways in which data networks "work".

The exhibition/workshop accelerated the development of both projects. Artists, computer programmers and participants worked together in the gallery space. We began by presenting the projects to invited groups and individual visitors. The gallery/workshop space allowed them to consult the artists and developers, explore the websites, and to contribute to the databases by preparing a map or responding to a questionnaire. At the same time participants were able to give us feedback throughout this process. This kind of preliminary user testing is essential to building a participatory project. The discussions with members of the academic community offered us some engaging cross-cultural perspectives: the participants were French and American, students and professors, artists and computer scientists. Presenting the two projects in the same space also allowed us to measure their differences and begin to examine cross-cultural perspectives on the following issues:

1. the representation of spatial and temporal experience in non-hierarchical information systems

2. the design and use of interactive interfaces to networked databases

3. participatory design processes in a public environment

4. the social implications of classification systems and information architectures.

Notes

1 - This research was supported by a grant from the France-Berkeley Fund

2 - See AI and Society, vol. "Database Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and Category in Online Art," Springer-Verlag,. 2000.

3 - UFR des Arts Plastiques et des Sciences de L'Art, Fontenay-aux-Roses.

4 - This project is a collaboration with Mark Bartlett, assisted by John Jacobs, Olga Trusova, Adam Hiatt and Victor Dods. Development has been supported, in part, by the Langlois Foundation and the Banff Center for the Arts.