Technology - Circuits
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September 30, 1999

Beyond Geography: Mapping Unknowns of Cyberspace

Mapmakers Stretch the Definition of Cartography to Help Visualize the Web
By PAMELA LICALZI O'CONNELL
The mapping of that vast territory known as cyberspace has begun in earnest.



University of Arizona
A multilayered map of the space represented by 100,000 entertainment-related Web addresses.

Cyberspace maps are being produced by geographers, cartographers, artists and computer scientists. They range from glorious depictions of globe-spanning communications networks to maps of Web information.

Many have no geographic references, instead turning to nature, the cosmos or neuroscience for spatial models. They stretch the definition of a map in their effort to capture, sometimes fancifully, what is sometimes referred to as the "common mental geography" that lies beyond computer screens.

The maps hold the potential to change, subtly or perhaps more directly, the relationship of the average person to cyberspace, the world of electronic communication that includes but is not limited to the Internet. How people envision the online landscape influences their behavior there, experts say.

"We need maps not just to navigate but to define and control new territory," said Martin Dodge, a researcher in the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. "Simply having a map allows a new perspective, a new way to orient yourself.

Relationships otherwise obscure may be revealed."

The largest collection of maps can be found at Dodge's Web site, An Atlas of Cyberspaces (cybergeography.com). The dozens of examples there include many that arise from science and instrumentation, while others are more products of imagination.

"We are in the very early stage of map making -- these maps are far from perfect at the moment," Dodge said. "Most have been produced outside traditional cartography by people such as data visualization researchers who may not even call their results a map."


Lucent Technologies and Telegeography, 1999
The featherlike tracings of data routes.

Maps of cyberspace fall into two categories: those depicting the physical structure and information traffic patterns of global networks, and those addressing the content and social spaces of the electronic world.

Structural maps, although seemingly straightforward, have proved quite thorny to create. Since the National Science Foundation relinquished its stewardship of the Internet in 1995, there has been no central source of information about the Net's backbone networks and traffic. Instead, there is a jumble of networks owned by phone companies and Internet service providers, some of which do not share information, for competitive reasons.

The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, or Caida, at the University of California at San Diego develops tools to collect and analyze data about the Net, like the specific paths a test packet of information may follow.

"We are not at a point yet where we are drawing maps with any compelling utility for any particular community," said K. C. Claffy, a researcher with the association, via -mail. "Though at the same time I contend we are doing 'state of the art' stuff at the frontier of this field; I just think the field's pretty young right now."

Useful or not, the Internet analysis group's maps can be quite beautiful. Some look like pointillist paintings. Others have brightly colored grids and globe-spanning arches, suggesting a world that is deeply, even inescapably, interconnected.

Connectivity, not necessarily geography or distance, is the primary parameter of a cyberspace map, said Gregory C. Staple, president of Telegeography, a company in Washington that provides statistics and maps of the international telecommunications industry.

His company has produced maps of "telecontinents," redrawing countries and coastlines to show how the flow of communications has created a new economic geography. At a glance, these maps reveal areas that are the telecommunications haves and have-nots, which Staple calls "the deep-water ports and teledeserts" of the information age (there are many more deserts than ports).



Lucent Technologies
DATA ARCS - A map by researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs that represents Internet traffic flow.

Geography is completely shunned by some mappers, like William Cheswick, a researcher at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories. "I want to take the Net on its own terms -- it's its own space," Cheswick argued. "Geographical maps I've seen have not worked very well. They're very blobby."

His maps, like those from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, are based on information probes sent to tens of thousands of destinations on the Net. Maps resulting from such probes are featured on his Web site (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/circuits
/articles/30maps.html#1). They look something like promiscuously propagating sea ferns, with countless feathery vines.

Are they useful? Although his maps may inspire awe because of their complexity, Cheswick explains that until such maps are interactive, allowing access to the database that created them, they are more powerful as symbols, perhaps, than as maps.

Most so-called content maps are interactive and are focused on the portion of cyberspace now most populated: the Web. They are, Staple said, "the equivalent of land-use maps in the traditional cartographic world."

A new site called Newsmaps.com (newsmaps.com) creates "visual information landscapes" -- grid-based topographical maps -- of Web-based news articles and online discussion groups on topics like fears of year 2000 computer problems. Peaks appear on the map where there is a high concentration of documents or messages about the same topic. The distance between peaks shows how topics are related.

In a different approach, the artificial intelligence laboratory in the management information systems department at the University of Arizona at Tucson (ai.bpa.arizona.edu/start.html) drew a map of more than 100,000 entertainment Web sites pulled from Yahoo's database using an automatic-indexing system. The map looks something like a jigsaw puzzle with colored pieces. Users can select categories like movies or comics, or terms like "love" or "beer," and the map will adjust, "shifting down a layer" until a customized map listing specific sites is reached, explained Dr. Hsinchun Chen, head of the laboratory.

Lee Boot doesn't deal in math-based systems. Boot, a self-described "telemedia" artist who teaches film, video and computer art to high school students in Baltimore County, Md., recently created what he calls a Web Map About Teen-Agers' Happiness (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/circuits
/articles/30maps.html#1). "Mapping and diagramming is basic to the kind of art that I do," Boot said. "My map is crafted rather than automatic."

The map itself suggests doodles from a brainstorming session.


British Telecommunications P.L.C.
UNDERGROUND INSPIRATION - A Web site map patterned after maps of London's subway system.

Collections of words of different sizes and colors are arranged within seemingly penciled circles, and lines indicate relationships between the terms. A click on a word (say, "drugs") takes you to a site Boot has selected on his theme of teen-age happiness. It is, he writes on his site, an attempt both to create "a visual presence" for an issue and to suggest his feelings about it.

Boot's map was included in an online exhibition titled Omnizone: Mapping Perspectives of Digital Culture (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/circuits
/articles/30maps.html#1), in which artists were asked to contribute "artworks that function (however obtusely) as maps of digital space and culture," a guideline to which most contributors religiously adhered. Another online exhibition, an ongoing effort by the Guggenheim Museum called Cyberatlas, set its sites a little broader by not limiting the maps included to those dealing with cultural content (cyberatlas .guggenheim.org/home/index.html). Almost all the maps in both exhibitions are interactive.

"We need to find representations of cyberspace that encourage us to see advantages we can exploit -- ways we can bend and stretch the metaphor of space into new possibilities," said Jon Ippolito, the assistant curator of media arts for the Guggenheim and organizer of the Cyberatlas project. "We don't want to be stuck in older geometries."

Is a map of cyberspace, particularly the Web, needed at all? Lev Manovich, an artist and assistant professor in the visual arts department at the University of California at San Diego, argues that the hyperlinked Web "is in a way its own map -- its own reality."

"It's not like a painting, which is a representation of reality," he said.

Still, some people see it as something close to a moral imperative to develop cyberspace maps.

Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author and self-described pop-science journalist, says that such maps could alter our experience of the online world.

"The best maps won't be true to our experience -- they will serve to refigure and change our experience," he said.. "What makes the invisible visible? New metaphors, sometimes, but I'd be betting on better instrumentation. A picture of the Earth from space did more for environmental awareness than any number of ecological urban legends."

The era of personal maps that can provide that sort of perspective is approaching. A company called Invisible Worlds (invisible.net), founded by two men who have helped developed many Internet technology standards, Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose, is readying the underlying technology that will allow such maps to be created and shared. Although the demonstration on the Web site is not visually compelling, the company hopes that independent developers will create various appealing interfaces as the technology catches on.

"Having maps will be like turning on the lights on the information," Malamud said. "Regular people can experience the structure of the Net as a tool they can use. We can create a conception of space that is good and usable."

The essence of Invisible Worlds' idea is to provide an Up button for people traveling in cyberspace to go along with the current, and restrictively linear, Forward and Back controls. By providing a vista from above, Malamud said, the user's "viewpoint becomes one of the parameters of the map, or even the key parameter."

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