-ghosts in the machine-

Obviously, I stick to plans and schedules like a Post-it note sticks to carpet. I promised blogging responses to Language and Encoding, and I even eeked one out. Then life stepped in and cut severely into my blogging time. So several presentations are in my blog backlog (a term used by a student of mine to describe his collection of browser bookmarks of "things I could blog about when I have the time"). Of course, Liz, who wasn't even at the conference, responded to one of the presentations I was planning on blogging about: Lisa Jevbratt's attempts to map the infome.

In her presentation, Jevbratt shifted between biological and geological metaphors as she discussed several of her attempts to map the Internet. In the questioning period, Jevbratt answered this apparent paradox by describing her work as a sort of mystic realism, attempting to uniquely visualize the ghost of the network. In many ways, then, her projects seem related to spirit photography of the late 1800s.

The geographic and topographic metaphors are somewhat problematic to me. Joi Ito's comment to Liz's post touches on precisely what I find problematic: the seeming impracticality of some internet visualizations. The utility of Jevbratt's visualizations is difficult to place, because her maps are counter-intuitive to what we usually think of as a map. I would contend that the power of maps requires a degree of permanence in what they represent--if highways constantly shifted, Rand McNally would be out of business. So, one intuitively sees utility in a project to visualize the backbone of the internet through geographic markers, while one might see less seeming utility in a "topology" of dynamic web information flow. Of course, there is utility in these information visualizations, but it is less tangible--a practice in giving stasis to inpermanence.

A practice in catching ghosts.