Visualization: Human, Social, and Historical Issues
Organized by J. B. Krygier, Department of Geology and Geography, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, 43015, E-mail: jbkrygie@cc.owu.edu
Discussant: Denis Cosgrove, Department of Geography, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1524, E-mail: cosgrove@geog.ucla.edu
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AAG GViz sessions: All of them, including this one (posted by Aileen Buckley at U of O)
Session folks, thanks for your efforts in getting the abstracts and other info to me. I will request that the session be scheduled on Wednesday (the first day of AAG) as Denis has to leave thursday. Also, this session is affiliated with Visualization sessions organized by Aileen Buckley (Univ. of Oregon) and Jeremy Crampton (George Mason Univ.). Their names may be added as organizers if they wish. As for payment, I think we are set: i have Visa numbers for Nik and Matt K. and Denis, and Matt M. will pay via the AAG web site. The session title is 'normal' due to a request from Jeremy. Email me with any additional questions. Finally, Denis requested that he get copies of the papers by March 24 of next year. I am not sure which address he will be at (he is on the move from Royal Holloway to UCLA Geography) but we can figure that out early next year.
Media: there will be a slide projector and overhead in the room by default. I will probably bring my portable Mac G3 and projection device, and run my presentation on that (i think i will do it in HTML so i can put it on the www later). So if you want to use that set up you can. I do have Windows 98 installed on my Mac so it works in both realms.
Nikolas H. Huffman, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802. E-mail: nhh101@psu.edu. Mapping Maps and Atlases of the Holocaust.
As part of a broader study on the geography of the Holocaust, a large number of maps from books and atlases about the Holocaust were collected, compared and analyzed. By searching for common patterns in the cartographic elements of the maps, different geographical themes and conceptions of geography in the Holocaust literature were revealed. The comparative analysis of these maps was adopted as an interpretative design approach, suggesting additional geographic stories which need to explored and mapped within Holocaust studies. Integral to the project was the use of geographic visualization techniques to create collective representations of the map sets based on different cartographic elements. Map elements such as scale, spatial and temporal extent, and places and regions, as well as a variety of thematic elements were mapped and compared. These composite maps show how the cartographic features reveal the main geographical themes within the Holocaust literature and suggest other types of maps that can be brought to bear on the geographic study of the Holocaust.
Keywords: cartography, visualization, Holocaust
Matthew W. Kuehl, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. E-mail: mkuehl@student.umass.edu. Capturing Battle Cries: Suppression of Radio in the Conduct of Warfare.
Historical geographers have established a sub-discipline of Geography devoted to the study of physical terrain in military history. In this paper I also consider the potential role of terrain in military conduct. Rather than portray the causal roles played by physical terrain, I instead consider how sound technologies, particularly radio micro-stations, serve to construct fluid and fleeting or otherwise alternative topographies or terrains of "battle". Beginning with a sharp turn away from the realm of the visual, I consider Martin Jay's thoughts on ocularcentrism, and enter the world of Sound through Jacques Attali's work on the suppression of Noise and strategies for social control. These propositions are considered jointly in a critical reading of the rhetoric of ATDI, an international consulting firm that markets both electronic warfare software and radio station planning visualization software, as well as an analysis of literature advocating the "communication jamming" of a Hutu-operated radio station that operated in mid 1990s Rwanda. Multiple battle sites emerge from these readings. The relationships between these spaces transcend certain popular ideas about globalized space and suggest instances in which the military practice of visualization is a creative act that remains un-captured by the dominant critique of cartographic representation.
Keywords: Sound, Radio, Cartographic Visualization
Matt McCourt. Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027. Internet: mjmcco0@pop.uky.edu. Navigating Space, Time, and Representation in an Historical Landscape Visualization Application.
The spaces of human-computer interactions are riddled with problems for critical GIS applications that emerge, for us, in the design of an application for 3D visualization of historical landscapes. This presentation begins by critically questioning how the spaces of human-computer interaction are imagined and implemented in geography, computer science, and art, especially in work focusing on tactile and embodied interfaces. It then turns to the application in question, which is designed to integrate historical photographs, text, maps, and audio, with a 3D terrain model, enabling a user to explore the historical geographies of a road corridor. The visualization application implements a tactile interaction method by allowing users to place "push-pins" to trace a route, thereby employing a culturally-specific metaphor that attempts to create an interactive experience struggling to stand in difference to ocularcentric implementations borrowing from the idioms of flight simulators and gaming. The additional navigable dimension stemming from the incorporation of historical information spurred investigations into the use of color to "map" historical epochs, orienting the user in relation to a potentially limiting linear model of time. Thus, combining insights and experiences from human-computer interaction, cartography, and critical geography, we broach questions of the spaces and representations of human-computer interaction design.
Keywords: GIS, human-computer interaction, visualization
J. B. Krygier, Department of Geology and Geography, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, 43015, E-mail: jbkrygie@cc.owu.edu, and Nikolas H. Huffman, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, E-mail:nhh101@psu.edu. Projecting Bodies: The Art and Science of Mapping the Body.
This presentation examines the relationship between mapping bodies and mapping the Earth in the recent cartographic self-portraiture of artists Lilla Locurto and Bill Ocoult. These body maps are critically discussed with view to a variety of technical and theoretical issues linking art, cartography and geographies of the body. Because global projections show all of the Earth at once, the artists were inspired by Fuller's Dymaxion map to adapt this quality of Cubist 'simultaneity' in their use of self-portraiture as an artistic vehicle. They proceeded to create mapped images of their bodies by gaining access to a sophisticated 3-d scanner and creating full body scans. A cartographer and a mathematician wrote the Body Mangler software which was used to transform the native 3-d file into a projected surface file that could be read by the projection software GeoCart and mapped onto a variety of map projections. The final mapped body images were reproduced as high-quality, large-format photographic prints. These mapped self-portraits will be critically reviewed in the context of other body maps, and the cartographic and geographic themes to which they speak.
Keywords: Bodies, self-portraiture, cartography‹world projections, Cubism
E-mail: jbkrygie@cc.owu.edu
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