In-Between Mobile Maps and Media: Movement

Abstract

This article moves beyond the textuality of the map to focus on the way in which mobile mapping is constructed discursively, semiotically, and experientially. It centers on the autoethnographic and reflective experience of the researcher analyzing video and Global Positioning System (GPS) recordings of walking interviews, during which the interviewees conversed about, and engaged in, mobile mapping practices. This reductive process can be considered in light of its re-presentation to the researcher for analytical purposes—a ghostly abstraction of a past spatial experience. The article considers the manifold hauntings stirred in the process of abstraction and the creation of multiple layers of experience: that of the firsthand experience of the walking interview and that of the secondhand analysis of the video and geocoded data. The discrepancy between firsthand movement and secondhand analysis underscores questions about the relationship between mobile maps, representation, and movement and about those epistemologies and ontologies that haunt the interstices between individual records.

Pluralising (im)mobilities: anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods

“…There is now a clear trend in qualitative methods around mobile methods, with a fast expanding literature exploring their myriad possibilities. To signpost but a few: the walking 'go along' (Kusenbach 2003;Middleton 2010;Evans and Jones 2011;Warren 2017;Ratna 2020); cycling/along (Spinney 2006(Spinney , 2011Jones 2012;Aldred and Jungnickel 2012); car ride-along (Laurier 2004;Ferguson 2010); 'wheel-along' (Parent 2016); photographic, video and virtual ethnography (Pink 2001(Pink , 2006Cook and Butz 2017), and mobile technologies, including GPS (Hein, Jones and Evans 2008;Jones 2020;Wilmott 2017). These methods have typically deployed more conventional interviews, participant observation or ethnography with technology to engage with thematic exploration of the more-than-human (humantechnology; human-animal), non-representational theory and practice; embodiment and (inter-) subjectivity; urban and rural diversity, including anti-racist, feminist, queer and disability studies; social justice; sustainability; health and well-being; globalisation; geopolitics and power; to psychogeography and participatory arts practices.…”

The not-yet-tropical: mapping recombinant ecologies in a Sydney suburb

“…Movements such as crossing the road, stopping to look at a plant, squatting to take a photo, detouring to let others walk by, are archived and represented on the route traced on the map as thickenings, zigzags, knobs and interlacings (see Figure 4). Map My Walk in this sense helps us to rethink representation and the spatio-temporal experience of movement, identified by Clancy Wilmott (2016) as key to understanding the complexities of geo-locative and Geo-Positioning-System (GPS) mobile technologies. These complexities, Wilmott argues, are amplified by the convergence in one single device – the smart phone – of different forms of media, such as maps, video, data sets, photography.…”

“…These complexities, Wilmott argues, are amplified by the convergence in one single device – the smart phone – of different forms of media, such as maps, video, data sets, photography. Mobile mapping then, is a way to generate what De Certeau (1988) called ‘spatial stories’: ‘practices, characterized by the dialogic action of touring, or moving, through space and making and reading maps’ (Wilmott, 2016: 4).…”

Mobile Mapping and Play

“…In this entanglement, mobile mapping can be understood as a relatively radical move away from classic post-structuralist cartographic theory towards an account of mapping which is more performative, material and more-than-cartographic. 14,15,16 Analysing mobile mapping is crucial to understanding mobile media art, which often engages the embedded, spatial, and movement-oriented aspects of artistic practice. The framework of mobile mapping offers the theoretical and critical ability to extend analysis beyond the artwork into the geographical and historical situatedness of the project: if mobile media art comes into being through movement and location, then where, when and who also matter.…”