Charting the Digital: Play, Discourse, Disruption

This looks interesting:

8-9 October 2016, Venice (Italy)

First call for papers

Organised by the ERC funded Charting the Digital team: Sybille Lammes
(Principal Investigator), Chris Perkins (Senior Research Fellow), Sam Hind
(PhD candidate), Alex Gekker (PhD candidate) and Clancy Wilmott (PhD
candidate and Research Fellow).

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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. During this final
conference of the ERC project Charting the Digital we will share and
discuss what this transformation means.

Over the last 4 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 expanded concepts of navigational interfaces; play, playfulness and
playful mapping; casual politics; cartographic reason and logic; and
mapping experimentation, risk and failure.

Now it is time to set up the next stage of this inquiry. Through discussion
with scholars whose ideas influence, challenge or resonate with our work,
we wish to open the question of what digital mapping is, has become, or
could become in the future.

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We are interested in a variety of themes, which include, but are not
limited to:

Playful cartography

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videogames and maps – minimaps, player representation,
post-colonialism
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location-based games
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pervasive games with/out maps
–

mapping as play, play as mapping: the relations between game maps and
physical movement
–

actions/activities/manoeuvres
–

situationism and pyscho-geography
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cheating

Mapping and discourse

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systems of thought
–

interoperable logics
–

rationalism
–

authority
–

transformations
–

transplantations
–

abstraction and formalisation
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cartographic reason
–

maps and culture

Performative mapping

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embodiment
–

materiality
–

new technologies
–

new vocabularies

–

imaginaries
–

spatialities
–

limits to representation
–

temporality (immediacy, ephemerality, (a)synchronicities)

Big data, small data, ‘sweaty’ data in digital mapping practices

–

empirical/ethical challenges
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‘offline’ to ‘online’ articulation
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visualisation: the transformation from data to map (layering,
inscription)
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cartographic politics of big data
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issues of representation/scale
–

applicability of big data metaphors (‘fumes’, ‘sweat’, stacks etc.)

Disruptive cartographies

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tactical/strategic/logistic
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interrelation between disruption, disobedience, disorientation and
dislocation
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risk and excess (and play)
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cartographies of care
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autonomous mapping practices
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‘disruption’ as innovation (critique of)
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post-colonial mapping
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new epistemologies/ways of mapping/unmapping
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hacking, hacker culture and crypto-politics
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failure (systemic, glitches, inter-active/haptic, capture/collect,
privacy/crypto concerns, as productive/non-binary,
entrepreneurial/motivational discourse)

Mapping methods

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in pedagogy
–

design and making
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conceptual frameworks (situatedness, moments, traces, instantiations,
models etc.)
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playful mapping as method
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interdisciplinarity
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mobile methods & fieldwork

Future Maps and future mapping

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self-driving cars and mapping
–

predictive maps and crisis maps
–

embodied, sensory maps/wearable technology
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personalised maps
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‘dumb’ phones, un-mapping and non-maps

We invite contributions from methodological, theoretical and practical
vantage points, and are particularly interested in bringing together a wide
range of approaches, from junior and senior researchers, and from diverse
disciplinary backgrounds.

Please send a proposal of 500 words (including keywords) before 30 January
2016 to: chartingthedigital@gmail.com

Thank you in advance,

The Charting the Digital team