Digital mapping interfaces: From immutable mobiles to mutable images

Abstract

Brief bio for author:Sybille Lammes is associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. She has published on SF film, games and digital cartography. In recent years her main research subjects have been related to the new media and digital culture. Her research programme in computer games examines how games can function as cultural spaces for new spatial and postcolonial practices. In her latest ERC research project Charting the Digital she looks at how and to what extent digital mapping has altered meanings of media and cartography in daily life. Abstract:In this article I discuss how digital mapping interfaces ask users to engage with images on screens in far more performative and active ways and how this changes the immutable status of the map image. Digital mapping interfaces invite us to touch, talk and move with them, actions that have a reciprocal effect on the look of the image of the map. Images change constantly through absorbing our mobile and physical actions. I approach digital mapping interfaces as mediators: They do not so much collect information as create spatial transformations for the user of the interface, thus instigating new moves on his or her part that are fed once again into the interface. I argue that it is therefore short-sighted to view digital mapping interfaces as mere points of passage. They are better understood as mediators that create spatial meanings by translating between and inviting movements of users, vehicles, programs, etc.

The map as playground: Location-based games as cartographical practices

“…While this visual transformability of maps is arguably a trait of all digital maps (cf. Lammes, 2016), in LBGs, this visual mutability is even more prevalent. Like in other mobile digital maps (e.g.…”

Simultaneous localization and mapping and the situativeness of a new generation of geomedia technologies

“…Latour draws on La Pérouse’s case to exemplify his concept of immutable mobiles (Latour, 1986), flat inscriptions that are needed to keep information in a stable form while transporting them from the periphery, the frontier of exploration, so to speak, back to the centers of calculation, where the information is accumulated by combining it with other inscriptions. With the advent of digital cartographic practices and geomedia, this assumed immutability of maps gets called into question (Abend, 2018): Highly mobile participatory and cooperative forms of map-making emerge, and digital mapping interfaces allow the immutable map to become editable in the form of mutable images (Lammes, 2017). While these developments often depend on a base map that is kept relatively stable (e.g.…”

Hybridity, Reflexivity and Mapping: A Collaborative Ethnography of Postcolonial Gameplay

“…Computer games are essentially concerned with spatial representation and negotiation, and therefore a classification of computer games can be based on how they represent -or, perhaps, implement -space' (Aarseth, 2000: 154). By sandwiching the opening cinematics between two 'mapping moments' (Dodge et al, 2011: 220-43), a strong emphasis is placed on mapping as a dominant and constant technology needed to explore and dominate the world, thereby fitting neatly in a (post)colonial cartographical discourse in which mapping is an essential 'immutable mobile' (Latour, 1990): a technology that does not lose shape when put in a different context, and is used to create and sustain asymmetrical power relations (Lammes, 2016). Thus, the opening scene of the game largely seems to celebrate colonial exploration by implementing space through mapping and other technologies.…”