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F1319 Digital Cities and the Cartographic Imagination, Victoria Szabo

Szabo Victoria

This course combines theoretical and practical approaches to digital places and spaces as an emerging new media form, with a special focus on digital cities as sites of historical and cultural representation and influence. Digital Cities are defined here as digital representations of urban spaces that serve to inform, engage, and/or influence the user who interacts with them. These might include, for example, web-based mapping and annotation projects in Google Earth or other online mapping systems, interactive information graphics focused on statical data and other information about a city and its inhabitants, and GPS-based systems designed for real-time navigation within an urban environment. Digital city annotations within these contexts might focus on historical data, architectural or urban history, the lives of individuals and communities within city spaces, artistic and scientific communities who operated within its bounds, and representations of change over time, networks of association, and other data products of urban analysis.

 

We'll begin the class by reading about the history of mapping and critical cartography as they relate to the construction of urban space, and by discussing how maps have shaped and continue to shape our experience of the world, past and present. This portion of the course will draw upon the work of John Pickles in A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World, as well as excerpts from various other histories of mapping, such as John Monmonier's How To Lie With Maps. We will complement this theoretical analytical approach by exploring the work of the psychogeographers and international situationists who examined the experience of the city through artistic and political interventions in the 1950s and 60s,through readings by Merlin Coverley, in Psychography and Guy Debord,in Society of the Spectacle,as well as supplementary readings from Mackenkie Wark's The City Beneath our Feet. We will also examine the work of contemporary digital city creators from around the world as published in Google Earth, OpenStreetMap, and other online systems in order to understand the state of the art,as well as explore creative, game-based digital city projects as profiled in de Souza and Sutko's Digital Cityscapes.

 

Over the course of the semester we will not only examine various historical and creative map-based digital city projects, but also create our own. Using Venice as our "lab" and possibility space, we will work with Global Information System (GIS) data, web-based digital mapping and annotation systems, and augmented reality authoring environments to create digital city projects based on existing Visualizing Venice materials and our own original research. No particular technological experience will be required prior to signing up for the course. Final Projects will include both a digital city project and a written critical analysis and self-reflection about what you have done.

 

Learning Outcomes
-Knowledge of history of cartography and its effect of the representation of cities, both in analog and digital form
-Facility in criticizing mapbased representations of places and spaces, both in quantitative and qualitative terms
-Awareness of how digital mapping technology is transforming the representation and dissemination of knowledge about cities, as well as the experience of moving within them
-Skill in working with basic GIS, GPS, webbased mapping, and augmented reality authoring systems
-Hands-on experience working with historical source material and adapting it to a digital presentation format
-Practice writing analytical essays that include critique of digital media forms

 

Teaching and Evaluation Methods
The course will function primarily as a discussion seminar, with a hands-on lab component, mini-lectures introducing key points, and on-line reading-response and digital critique assignments to completed outside of class. In addition, each student will be responsible for facilitating discussion of course readings during one class session.
Evaluation of digital projects will focus on argument, effective use of technologies, and design. Final projects will be presented to the class and invited guests at the end of the semester, and will focus on the creation of a digital city project along with a written meta-analysis of that work referencing the semester's readings.