Читать книгу Abstract Machine - Charles B. Travis - Страница 16

During this period, the word mapping emerged as a significant metaphor in the arts and humanities as scholars began to show strong interests in the roles of place, space, and the implicit geographical dimensions of literary and cultural texts.²³

Emphasizing the spatial and postmodern trends emerging in the 1980s, Roland Barthes defined the word text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”²⁴ The cross-pollination of these two methodological metaphors across disciplinary boundaries informed cartographic historian J. B. Harley’s seminal observation:

“Text” is certainly a better metaphor for maps than the mirror of nature. Maps are a cultural text. By accepting their textuality we are able to embrace a number of different interpretative possibilities. Instead of just the transparency of clarity we can discover the pregnancy of the opaque.²⁵

Despite the new semiotic approach to studying landscape, by the end of the twentieth century, developments in computer science allowed GIS to become the indispensable tool for geographical research and analysis in government, business, and academia.²⁶

This development in the arts and humanities coincided with the unprecedented phenomena of digital globalization facilitated by visual broadcast media and the World Wide Web. Marshall MacLuhan’s observation in 1964 that, after more than a “century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned,” was radically prescient.²⁷ The ubiquitous use of personal computers, tablets, and smartphones; consumption of 24-hour mass-media outlets; and proliferation of social media profoundly shaped twenty-first-century geographic perceptions and practices. GIS, GPS, computer cartography, and online open-source geospatial software are framing the earth as a geocoded world that is continuously being coded, decoded, and recoded as new cybernetic language systems and platforms emerge and evolve.²⁸ Manuel Castells’ argument that the geography of the new history will be constructed out of the interface between places and flows seems remarkably apt.²⁹ Contemporary human geographical practices are engaging space as a dynamic “lifeworld” and a “quasi-material construct” produced by social interaction. Rather than a passive container, today space is increasingly considered as an active agent, infused with human behavior and perception, which is constantly shaping, producing, and reproducing places socially, politically, and economically.³⁰

Recently, Nigel Thrift has promoted nonrepresentational theory as an experimental perspective concerned with the geography of what happens. This approach pulls the vibrant energy of the performing arts into the social sciences by crawling out on the edge of a conceptual cliff. Thrift proposes that, because of the intervention of software, the human body has become a tool-being in symbiosis with a new electronic time-space that shapes our perceptions and experiences of the world, echoing Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory.³¹ Therefore, the current geographical concern with human performativity and dynamic social space, and their relationships to “automated” mapping functions, cyber linguistics, and Web 2.0 (social media)/3.0 (semantic, geosocial, and 3D visualization) platforms, can facilitate deeper and more experimental forms of GIS engagement with research and scholarship in the arts and humanities.