Atlas of Cyberspace

by Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge

The Barnes & Noble Review
How do you map the Internet? In myriad ways, as it turns out. Collectively, they are remarkably revealing. Occasionally, they are remarkably beautiful, too. The full-color Atlas of Cyberspace brings together the most fascinating attempts to map the Net. More than any other book, this one makes the "virtual" world real enough to grab and hold onto.

Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have discovered a remarkably wide range of approaches to visualizing the Internet. Some of these experiments succeed better than others; each has something revealing to say. There are technical maps of infrastructure and traffic: domain names mapped onto physical maps, ISP marketing maps, 3D Internet topologies. There are maps of "information spaces," including powerful visual analyses of how web sites evolve and how users move through them.

Perhaps most interesting, there are maps of "conversation and community": the patterns people create through their one-on-one interactions. For example, Marc Smith's Netscan Dashboard, which maps the social structures of Usenet at multiple scales: individual message threads, interrelationships among newsgroups, and whole chunks of Usenet space. There are maps of chat interactions -- including one that attempts to measure users' constant "oscillation" between physical and virtual worlds.

In the last chapter, Atlas of Cyberspace abandons actual measurement, showing us artists' fantastic visions of the Internet -- from seminal texts like Neuromancer and Snow Crash to "typographic sculptures" to "subversive" web tools that shred and reconstruct existing pages in strikingly new ways.

To map a work of imagination as remarkable as the Internet, you need remarkable imagination -- and that's what's on display here, on every page.

(Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

Genres: Art Design

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2001

About the author

I'm a professor at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the author or editor of 28 academic books and a 12 volume encyclopedia, and author of four crime novels and two collections of short stories. My passions are reading and writing crime fiction and undertaking research on social issues. I contribute to three blogs: The View From the Blue House, Ireland After NAMA, and The Programmable City.

Reviews

[Michael Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Half art, half teaching material, Atlas of the Cyberspace examines the main goals and associated techniques for mapping the cyberspace. Besides an introductory text on cyberspace mapping, which includes cyberspace-specific issues (e.g., ethics), Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin summarize hundreds of projects in four main topics: physical infrastructure (the wires up to routers), logical infrastructure (the Web), the human component (the communities), and the imaginary component (more or less artistic visions of the Internet). Maps are selected to illustrate either the types of information that have been mapped or the mapping technique; the accompanying text analyzes the mapping project and summarizes the key underlying ideas. Browsing the rich illustrations present in this volume gives the feeling of looking at a modern art catalogue. A most wonderful read!
PS: This book is licensed under the Creative Commons License and for personal use is freely available online at http://www.kitchin.org/atlas/index.html .

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting but not sufficiently equiped in the sector that interested me most, visual arts.