The next few posts concern net visuality. Most of the focus on visualization and data collection but I think they are nonetheless of interest for the way a concern for visualization reiterates dominant modes of net visuality or suggests new ones.
Most of the projects below are interesting for both the types of data collection and the forms of visualization that they show as prevailing in cartographic circles and the rhetoric that justifies this kind of research or activity. In short the dominant aims stated in the blurbs of these projects is to come to terms with the structure of internet and its use so that we can better develop network frameworks and applications for the future – the ones that aren’t concerned with technical systems are purely ethnographic. Very few high level (data intensive) visualizations have navigation/discovery/end user in mind. While there is an obvious understanding of the way our potential to visualize the network affects our potential to develop for that network there is little concern for the way prevailing network visualities have operated as ‘governmental’ technologies that structure the development of policy, technology, infrastructure and use – and, one might hasten to add, never to specifications of a governmental strategy. In the cases that are reflexive at this level there appears a disconnect between that act of measuring and modelling and what we might do with that data in terms of infrastructure or utility; measuring and modeling it seems is often an end in itself