Final Report Summary - CHARTING THE DIGITAL (Charting the Digital: Digital Mapping Practices as New Media Cultures)
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.
Over the last 5 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 contributed to the development of mobile and experimental methods, as well as expanded concepts of navigational interfaces; play, playfulness and playful mapping; casual politics; cartographic reason and logic; and mapping experimentation, risk and failure.
Over the last 5 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 contributed to the development of mobile and experimental methods, as well as expanded concepts of navigational interfaces; play, playfulness and playful mapping; casual politics; cartographic reason and logic; and mapping experimentation, risk and failure.