Introduction

Abstract

Digital mapping, though generally conceived as a spatial activity, is just as strongly grounded in time. The digital era has disintegrated the representational fixity of maps, and instead given rise to maps that shift with each moment and movement. Scholars, adept at grappling with the spatial implications of digitality, continue to struggle to conceptualise and communicate the temporal consequences of maps. In this collection, we seek to take up Doreen Massey's (2005: 107) still critical concern: how do we cope with maps as mediators of the 'ongoing stories' in the world? Mapping has long wrestled with enrolling time into such narratives. This collection examines how this difficulty is impacted by the presence of digital mapping technologies that, arguably, have disrupted our understanding of time as much as they have provided coherence. The contributions in this book move beyond the descriptive to pay particular attention to what might be called the 'critical dynamics' of time. We, and other authors in this book, suggest that the relation between digital mapping and its temporalities should be conceived as plural, dynamic and situated. Also, as digital mappings are approached in this book from an interdisciplinary angle-as medial, cartographic and technological practices-different scholarly perspectives reveal different understandings of temporalities. These twin concerns with dynamism, and plural responses to dynamism, are the central foci of this volume. The chapters in this book reflect this multiplicity of tempo-spatialities rather than spatio-temporalities. 1 Many of the chapters implicitly reflect on Merriman's (2011) challenge that notions of 'space-time' and 'time-space' have frequently rested on rather static conceptions. In proposing ' movement-space' as an alternative, however, Merriman remains inattentive