Exploration of Space, Technology, and Spatiality:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives Phil Turner Napier University, UK Susan Turner Napier University, UK Elisabeth Davenport Napier University, UK
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Table of Contents
Foreword . ...........................................................................................................................................xiii Preface . ................................................................................................................................................ xv Acknowledgment . ............................................................................................................................xxiii
Section I Moving through Space Chapter I Paths and Patches: Patterns of Geognosy and Gnosis............................................................................. 1 Alan Dix, Lancaster University, UK Chapter II Let’s Meander Through a Measured Space........................................................................................... 17 Jon Kerridge, Napier University, UK Chapter III Navigating a Speckled World: Interacting with Wireless Sensor Networks.......................................... 26 Matthew Leach, Napier University, UK David Benyon, Napier University, UK
Section II Social and Organisational Space Chapter IV Contested Terrain: Place, Work, and Organizational Identities............................................................. 41 John Willy Bakke, Telenor Research and Innovation, Norway Tom Erik Julsrud, Telenor Research and Innovation, Norway
Chapter V Technosocial Space: Connecting People and Places............................................................................. 54 Anne So.e Laegran, Norwegian University of Science and T echnology, Norway & Research Centre for Social Sciences, Edinburgh, UK Chapter VI Reconfiguring the Rose: An Exploration of the Use of Virtual Space by Artists Collaboratively Creating Digital Stained Glass............................................................................................................... 70 Lynne Hall, University of Sunderland, UK Delia A. Whitbread, University of Sunderland, UK Chapter VII Context, Boundedness, and Structure: The Apprehension of Place in the Development of Information Environments .................................................................................................................... 90 Elin K. Jacob, Indiana University-Bloomington, USA
Section III Auditory and Pictorial Space Chapter VIII Voice and Space: Agency of the Acousmêtre in Spatial Design.......................................................... 102 Richard Coyne, University of Edinburgh, UK Martin Parker, University of Edinburgh, UK Chapter IX Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence........................................................................................ 113 Susan Turner, Napier University, UK Iain McGregor, Napier University, UK Phil Turner, Napier University, UK Chapter X Representing Space: The Pictorial Imperative..................................................................................... 128 Stephen Boyd Davis, Middlesex University, UK Chapter XI The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative from Prehistoric Cave Paintings to Computer Games............................................................................................................................. 141 Fiona Carroll, Swansea University, UK Chapter XII The Interactive Spectacle and the Digital Situationist......................................................................... 155 Shaleph O’Neill, University of Dundee, UK
Section IV Cognition, Language, and Space Chapter XIII Spatial Language in Computer Mediated Communication.................................................................. 168 Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, UK Emile van der Zee, University of Lincoln, UK Laura Daley, University of Lincoln, UK Chapter XIV Space, Place, and Memory Prosthetics................................................................................................ 183 Phil Turner, Napier University, UK Chapter XV Materializing Communication Concepts: Linearity and Surface in Linguistics and Information Theory ............................................................................................................................. 196 Julian Warner, Queen’s University of Belfast, UK Chapter XVI On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry................................................................................. 214 Sándor Darányi, University of Gothenburg, Sweden & University College Borås, Sweden Péter Wittek, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 226 About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 247 Index.................................................................................................................................................... 252
Detailed Table of Contents
Foreword . ...........................................................................................................................................xiii Preface . ................................................................................................................................................ xv Acknowledgment . ............................................................................................................................xxiii
Section I Moving through Space Chapter I Paths and Patches: Patterns of Geognosy and Gnosis............................................................................. 1 Alan Dix, Lancaster University, UK Map, mazes, myths, magic, and mathematics, computation, cognition, community, and the constructed environment, all reveal something of our internal models of space. Whilst the spaces we inhabit have many objective properties, we only perceive and process certain of these, and add many social and subjective qualities of our own. In fairy tales and science fiction, some of the “real” properties are let slip, yet the worlds remain comprehensible. Studying the essential and nonessential qualities of space can guide the construction and navigation of information spaces. However, the very idea of information spaces, and indeed cyberspace, presupposes that spatial metaphors can make sense of information. This chapter explores the relationships between our understandings of physical space and conceptual spaces; from childhood memories, to transarticulation, the way words shape our conceptual and physical landscape, we will see that our understandings of space and of knowledge itself are similarly shaped. Chapter II Let’s Meander Through a Measured Space........................................................................................... 17 Jon Kerridge, Napier University, UK This chapter concerns the question of how people navigate through a space in which other people are also present. Issues addressed include how the space itself affects the way people navigate, how this is changed by the presence of others in the space on a collective or individual basis, and how navigational abilities and behaviour can be measured. Such measurements can then be used, for example, to identify
aberrant behaviour in public spaces. The state-of-the-art and current challenges in this domain are discussed. A new empirical approach to the tracking of pedestrians who are navigating populated spaces is then described, and its verification, validation, and further extension discussed. Chapter III Navigating a Speckled World: Interacting with Wireless Sensor Networks.......................................... 26 Matthew Leach, Napier University, UK David Benyon, Napier University, UK The Speckled Computing project is a large multisite research project based in Scotland, UK. The aim of the project is to investigate, prototype, and produce tiny (1mm3) computational devices, called Specks, that can be configured into wireless sensor networks, called SpeckNets. Our particular interest is in how people might interact in such environments, what interaction tools they require, and what characteristics are required to be provided by the operating system of the Specks. Interaction in these environments places the human physically inside an information space. At one time, the human may be interacting with one Speck, at another with a hundred, and at another with several thousand. Moreover, the Specks themselves have no input method, apart from their sensors, and no output display. We explore these issues through taking some theories of distributed information spaces, some design principles from information visualization, and report on some empirical studies of prototypes and simulations that have been developed.
Section II Social and Organisational Space Chapter IV Contested Terrain: Place, Work, and Organizational Identities............................................................. 41 John Willy Bakke, Telenor Research and Innovation, Norway Tom Erik Julsrud, Telenor Research and Innovation, Norway Workplaces are key loci for expressing and studying organizational identity, even in distributed work. In organization studies, there is a growing recognition of the importance of spatial processes, and workplace design has become an instrument for organizational change. This chapter explores organizational identity through a change process where the office layout was redesigned to strengthen organizational identity and increase productivity. The study shows that identity processes get shaped by the material environment and by technologies enabling distributed and mobile work. It also shows that previous events frame the interpretation of current processes. The chapter is based on a qualitative and quantitative study of the national branch of an international oil company. Chapter V Technosocial Space: Connecting People and Places............................................................................. 54 Anne Sofie Laegran, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway & Research Centre for Social Sciences, Edinburgh, UK
The chapter is based on a study of Internet cafés in Norway, and interrogates the way space and place is produced in interconnections between people and technology in the Internet café. Drawing on actornetwork theory and practice-oriented theories of place and space, the Internet café is understood as technosocial spaces producing connections between people and places at different levels. Firstly, the Internet café can be understood as a hybrid, a site where users and technologies as well as space are coconstructed in entwined processes where gender, as well as other identity markers, are central in the way the technology, as well as the cafés, develop and are understood. The next level looks at the production of Internet cafés as technosocial spaces. Despite being perceived as an “urban” and “global” phenomenon, Internet cafés are configured based on local circumstances, in urban as well as rural communities. Differing images of what the cafés want to achieve, as well as material constrains, are at play in this process. Finally, the chapter shows how Internet cafés are places of connections, producing space beyond the walls of the café, linking the local into a translocal sphere. Chapter VI Reconfiguring the Rose: An Exploration of the Use of Virtual Space by Artists Collaboratively Creating Digital Stained Glass............................................................................................................... 70 Lynne Hall, University of Sunderland, UK Delia A. Whitbread, University of Sunderland, UK This chapter discusses artists’ use of virtual space to collaboratively create a digital stained-glass rose window. It explores the use of virtual space to provide a working environment for artists, the Wombrose workspace, using the design metaphor provided by the rose window to create a collaborative space. This space focused at supporting practice-based artists in a democratic and effective negotiation process with the aim of developing a potentially monumental artwork to be installed as a digital projection in a real architectural space. Chapter VII Context, Boundedness, and Structure: The Apprehension of Place in the Development of Information Environments .................................................................................................................... 90 Elin K. Jacob, Indiana University-Bloomington, USA In distinguishing between space and place, one approach is to contrast the physicality of space with the sociality of place: space directs attention to the material configuration of the physical environment while place indicates an individual’s understanding of the social behaviors that are appropriate within that environment. However, such a distinction juxtaposing the physical configuration of space to the social orientation of place is, on consideration, too limiting in its applicability. A more effective and generalizable distinction between space and place must also consider perceptions of context, implications of boundedness, and the influence of organizational structure. This broader approach to analysis of space and place can lead to the identification of meaningful differences that influence the functional activities of an information system and contribute to a greater understanding of what it is that constitutes an information environment.
Section III Auditory and Pictorial Space Chapter VIII Voice and Space: Agency of the Acousmêtre in Spatial Design.......................................................... 102 Richard Coyne, University of Edinburgh, UK Martin Parker, University of Edinburgh, UK The widespread use of mobile telephony prompts a reevaluation of the role of the aural sense in spatial understanding. There are clear correlations between voice and space. The attributes of the voice constitute important variables in the way people position themselves in public spaces: to speak, to hear, or to get away from the voice. The voice can connote intimacy, communality, and welcome, but also has the potential for disquiet and disruption, particularly as an unseen acousmêtre, (a term developed in film studies). Spatial design can benefit from an exaggerated consideration of voice, to counteract the primacy already given to the visual field. This chapter examines the relationship between the voice and space in public spaces, and the technologies and practices involved. Chapter IX Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence........................................................................................ 113 Susan Turner, Napier University, UK Iain McGregor, Napier University, UK Phil Turner, Napier University, UK This chapter considers the role of sound, and more specifically, listening, in creating a sense of presence (of “being there”) in “places” recreated by virtual reality technologies. We first briefly review the treatment of sound in place and presence research. Here we give particular attention to the role of sound in inducing a sense of presence in virtual environments that immerse their users in representations of particular places. We then consider the phenomenology of listening, the nature of different types of listening, and their application: listening is active, directed, intentional hearing, and is not merely egocentric, it is body-centric. A classification of modes of listening that draws on work in film studies, virtual reality, and audiology is then proposed as a means of supporting the design of place-centric virtual environments in providing an effective aural experience. Finally, we apply this to a case study of listening in real and simulated soundscapes, and suggest directions for further applications of this work Chapter X Representing Space: The Pictorial Imperative..................................................................................... 128 Stephen Boyd Davis, Middlesex University, UK The chapter is concerned with the relationship between the planar space of graphic representations and the world space that they represent. To achieve some coherence in thinking about the spatiality of different media such as film, television, and videogames, two opposed modes of composition, the configurational and the pictorial, are described, both historically and in current practice. The film theory concepts of diegetic and extra-diegetic are also unified with these two modes of composition. It is argued that the
historical, developmental path to the spatiality of modern media suggests an almost irresistible pictorial imperative. So while we may at times regret the dominance of one particular mode of picture-making that, for some purposes, certainly has weaknesses in both informational and affective terms, in the end we must acknowledge its attraction and its power. Chapter XI The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative from Prehistoric Cave Paintings to Computer Games............................................................................................................................. 141 Fiona Carroll, Swansea University, UK The art of the visual-narrative is not a new phenomenon. Artists and designers have been using images to tell stories for thousands of years. From cave paintings to computer animations, they have been manipulating visual elements and tailoring techniques to attract our attention, to stimulate our interest, and to entice us into a process of interpretation and story making. Indeed, it is a tradition that has worked its way successfully through time, adapting along the way to meet the advancements of each successive and increasingly visual generation. The aim of this chapter is to explore the spatial journey of the visualnarrative. In particular, it will examine how each new medium has brought with it a new treatment of space, and then how this has influenced the visual-narrative and the art of storytelling. Chapter XII The Interactive Spectacle and the Digital Situationist......................................................................... 155 Shaleph O’Neill, University of Dundee, UK The Situationists defined the increasingly spectacularized society (The Society of the Spectacle ) as the alienation of the individual by an increasingly mediated and commoditised modern world that has spread across the globe, pacifying and alienating its audience with the manufacture of lack and the control of desire. Set dead against this spread of spectacular culture, the Situationists sought to free themselves from the commoditisation and mediation of everyday experience. By employing direct action and the creation of “situations,” they attempted to make clear the restrictive boundaries, both intellectual and environmental, that the habituated processes of modern capitalism (in the form of production and consumption, work and leisure) had placed upon society. In the era of the emerging digital or interactive Spectacle that now permeates every aspect of our culture, what has been added to the Spectacle is the illusion of agency administered through the new technological conduits. Virtual environments, for example, deliver visitation and visualization of places that, despite attempts at access by the viewer, remain remote. However, in our new digitally enhanced cultural spaces, despite restrictions, Situationist style interventions can still be made. Views can be expressed that had no outlet in previous media forms, allowing for the development of communities and exchange of ideas that require, at least in some part, the agency of the individuals taking part in them. Situationist theory takes its place in helping to describe such activities, even though, in some cases, the polemic is often watered down. Here we shall consider a number of examples of this kind of intervention, in relation to the Situationist practices of the dérive and détournement, to help give some structure to the critical analysis.
Section IV Cognition, Language, and Space Chapter XIII Spatial Language in Computer Mediated Communication.................................................................. 168 Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, UK Emile van der Zee, University of Lincoln, UK Laura Daley, University of Lincoln, UK People use spatial language in everyday face-to-face conversation, and we also now use such language during everyday computer-mediated interactions. Commonly, such interactions can take place over mobile phones or in shared virtual environments such as multiplayer games. However, to date, very few academic studies have looked at how people use and understanding of spatial language might differ when it is computer mediated. Our own experimentation has investigated the relation between the uses of route, survey, and also gaze perspectives in a simple virtual environment. Chapter XIV Space, Place, and Memory Prosthetics................................................................................................ 183 Phil Turner, Napier University, UK Recent years have witnessed a number of initiatives to develop technology (“memory prosthetics”) to enhance and extend human memory. Typical of these is “Memories for Life,” which is one of the Grand Challenges in Computing identified by the British Computer Society in 2004. So far, the emphasis has been on the development of psychologically informed technology. This chapter, in contrast, proposes a conceptual framework based on the Heideggerian concepts of being-with and being-in for the development of such technology. Chapter XV Materializing Communication Concepts: Linearity and Surface in Linguistics and Information Theory ............................................................................................................................. 196 Julian Warner, Queen’s University of Belfast, UK This chapter is concerned with exposing the material basis for the concepts of the syntagm and paradigm from linguistics, and the message and messages for selection from information theory. The priority, given to abstract concepts over their material basis when cutting paper is conceived as a pedagogic technique to illustrate the distinction of syntagm from paradigm, is reversed. Materialities of linearity, of surface, and of store or reservoir, are revealed to lie behind the abstractions of linguistics and of information theory. The paradigm is regarded as generated from the immediately present material reality of the syntagm as the line of writing. The understanding of the word, as a cohesive group of letters with strong statistical influences, is understood as more explicitly revealing the material basis for communication, and to correspond to the instantiation of the word in paper- and computer-based systems. A rematerialization, rather than a dematerialization, of communication is discerned in current transitions in information technologies and practices.
Chapter XVI On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry................................................................................. 214 Sándor Darányi, University of Gothenburg, Sweden & University College Borås, Sweden Péter Wittek, National University of Singapore, Singapore Current methods of automatic indexing, automatic classification, and information retrieval treat index and query terms, that is, vocabulary units in any language, as locations in a geometry. With spatial sense relations among such units identified, and syntax added, the making of a geometric equivalent of language for advanced communication is an opportunity to be explored.
Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 226 About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 247 Index.................................................................................................................................................... 252
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Foreword
The message, then, is clear. Only by maintaining linked, relational conceptions of both new information and communications technologies and space and place will we ever approach a full understanding of the inter-relationships between them (Graham, 1998, p. 181). How do we negotiate, remember, and/or map space around us? Is it physical spatiality that defines how we act? Or is it the context of our actions that determine how we perceive the space around us? These are some of the questions being asked in this book, Exploration of Space, Technology and Spatiality: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The investigations contained in this book represent a wide array of disciplines ranging from art to computer science. Given this broad range of perspectives, there are many conceptualizations of space and spatiality represented. What is meant by “Space” varies by chapter and examples include moving through a physical space, collaborating in a mediated space, and designing space. There are also discussions of space as places. Some chapters focus on second place or work environments (Oldenburg, 1991): Chapters VI, Reconfiguring the Rose: An Exploration of the Use of Virtual Space by Artists Collaboratively, Creating Digital Stained Glass by Lynne Hall and Delia Whitbread; Chapter VII, Context, Boundedness and Structure: The Apprehension of Place in the Development of Information Environments by Elin K. Jacob; and Chapter IV, Contested Terrain: Place, Work, and Organizational Identities by John Willy Bakke and Tom Erik Julsrud. Third places, or community building places (Oldenburg, 1991) are explored in Chapter V, Technosocial Space: Connecting People and Places by Anne Sofie Laegran. A unique variable presented in several chapters is the contribution of voice and sound. The aural component of space is discussed by three teams of researchers. In Chapter XIII, Spatial Language in Computer Mediated Communication, Shaun Lawson, Emile van der Zee, and Laura Daley discuss the use of spatial language. This chapter covers differences in spatial language due to culture, spoken language, and gender differences, and its impact on new media use. In Chapter VIII: Voice and Space: Agency of the Acousmêtre in Spatial Design, Richard Coyne and Martin Parker describe the aural component of voice in design, and details how voice can inform spatial design. The discussion of technology and space introduces the concept of how to deal with machines with voices and the “humanness” we attribute to them. A third set of researchers investigates listening in Chapter IX, Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence. Susan Turner, Iain McGregor, and Phil Turner examine various types of listening impacting people’s sense of space and sensations of presence. The results demonstrate that prelistening is most effective in the creation of presence. Related to these chapters on sound are two chapters that explore language and space. Julian Warner, in Chapter XV: Materializing Communication Concepts: Linearity and Surface in Linguistics and Information Theory, discusses differences between physical space and semiotic space. In Chapter XVI: On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry, Sándor Darányi and Péter Wittek conceptualize distinctions
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between information and language. Darányi and Wittek argue for representing meaning through metric space and mapping. The impact of technology on human perception is examined. The use of technology to influence space was detailed in Chapter XI: The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative from Prehistoric Cave Paintings to Computer Games by Fiona Carroll. This chapter moves the reader through time to modern day, including gaming environments and the shifts between inside and outside picture space. In Chapter X: Representing Space: The Pictorial Imperative, Stephen Boyd Davis details the two competing models of how to interpret pictorial representations. He addresses the continuing tension between film and television representations, and draws our attention to the role of technology in creating different relationships to space in the two modes. Measurement of physical movement and the impact of space on movement are presented in Chapter II: Let’s Meander Through a Measured Space by Jon Kerridge. In Chapter I: Paths and Patches: Patterns of Geonosy and Gnosis, Alan Dix deals with human understanding of physical space. The abilities to name and convey information about our environment are important for mobility and navigation, and Dix asserts that the retelling of spatial information is impacted by cultural, language, and ethnic differences. Such differences can impact our ability to remember spaces. In Chapter XIV: Space, Place, and Memory Prosthetics, Phil Turner discusses how places are remembered. Turner also makes distinctions between “being-in” and “being-with” places. We see these differences examined in several chapters. An example of “being-with” a place occurs in Chapter VII: Context, Boundedness and Structure: The Apprehension of Place in the Development of Information Environments by Elin K. Jacob. Jacob argues that a sense of space is defined by context and not the physicality of the space. Thus, places are understood through individual understanding of space based on its funcition. The remaining chapters all discuss how people are “being-in” places. In Chapter III: Navigating a Speckled World: Interacting with Wireless Sensor Networks, Matthew Leach and David Benyon discuss the creation of a network where humans can navigate and interact with computers. Shaleph O’Neill examines the impact of various gaming environments on a user sense of agency in Chapter XII: The Interactive Spectacle and the Digital Situationist. The focus of this chapter is on how technology impacts how we perceive and feel about ourselves in mediated environments. Overall, this book presents an overview of research on space and technology. As technology becomes more mobile, our perceptions of spatiality will expand. This text is an excellent resource for researchers, artists, and designers who seek to understand, predict, and facilitate human use and perceptions of space.
References Graham, S. (1998). The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology. Progress in Human Geography, 22, 165-185. Oldenburg, R. (1991). The great good place. New York: Paragon House.
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Preface
Exploration of Space, Technology, and Spatiality brings together researchers working at the intersections of digital, geographical, geometric, linguistic, information, and organisational space. They address complex and challenging issues that cross traditional domains of study, and together bridge perspectives from information science, geography, design, anthropology, computing, psychology, and philosophy. The nucleus of the collection has been developed from papers presented at the second international Space, Spatiality and Technology workshop held at Napier University, Edinburgh, supplemented by a subsequent wider call for contributions. After peer-review, around half the submissions have been accepted for this book. This new collection builds upon the coverage of the first Space, Spatiality and Technology workshop and the resulting edited volume (Turner & Davenport, 2005) by addressing new areas that include our primary experience of space, the social and organisational dimensions of the places where we work and play; the artistic representation and use of spaces and places and, finally, how we talk about space and place.
Space, Spatiality, and Technology This book addresses the three interrelated themes of space, spatiality and technology and we begin by briefly considering each of these in turn. From a Euclidian perspective, space is an unbounded volume in which everything exists. Curiously, both an individual atom and the entire universe are largely empty space. Interstellar space contains about one atom per cubic centimeter (there are about five sextillions atoms in a drop of water – or five followed by 21 zeros), but this is the space of the physicist, of the astronomer, and is beyond our immediate experience and is not something with which we can directly engage. Of greater interest, immediacy, and relevance is spatiality, the experience of local, bounded, and human-scale space. One readily recognizable form of which is the experience of place, that is, space given meaning by the activities we engage in there (e.g., being born, living, and dying). It is experienced through the senses and, perhaps more importantly, through our bodies. Finally, there is technology. A word derived from the Greek Tεχυη meaning craft or skill, and that has, only in the last 100 years or so, became associated with the current state of our civilization. With technology, we believe we can master space; note, for example, Arthur Mee, the great encyclopedist, writing of technology and space, “If, as it is said to be not unlikely in the near future, the principle of sight is applied to the telephone as well as that of sound, earth will be in truth a paradise, and distance will lose its enchantment by being abolished altogether.” (Mee, 1898). Mee, anticipating the videoconference by decades, imagined that technology could be used to effectively eliminate the space between people and in doing so, mediating a new form of spatiality.
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Making Sense of Space, Spatiality and Technology Equipment has its place, or else it “lies around”; this must be distinguished in principles from just occurring at random in some spatial position. When equipment for something or other has it place …Heidegger (1926/62: section 22). Making sense of these three themes is no small matter. Space is an absolute as it is not defined in terms of anything other than itself; spatiality is personal, human scale and experiential; and technology is the cultural product of our skills and crafts. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that we turn to philosophy for an explanatory framework. Heidegger notes in the same section of his Being and Time as the previous quotation that “The bare space is still veiled. Space has been split up into places.” The presence of the term place in both references is not a coincidence. Early writers were clear about the fundamental association between being and place. In the fourth century B.C., for example, we find Archytas of Tarentum observing that: “to be (at all) is to be in (some) place” (Casey, 1997:4) an observation that virtual reality researchers have returned to in recent years (cf. Turner & Turner, 2006). Aristotle includes where as one of the 10 essential characteristics of every substance. Aristotle’s concept of place is as a container or boundary for an object, as in the sense of being held in place, was widely accepted for centuries until being superceded in relatively recent times. However, from Plato until almost the present, this primacy of place is submerged in Euclidean space, in concepts of the relationship between space and time, and in the hegemony of the positivist scientific tradition. Place disappears as a fundamental aspect of being, and becomes a mere site or specific instance of universal Euclidean space until the concept is reclaimed by modern and postmodern authors. Among others, Kant, Husserl, Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger were all active in reintroducing place to philosophical discourse, and were also instrumental in demonstrating the importance of the body when thinking about place. For Kant and Goerwitz “… this body is my body; and the place of that body is at the same time my place” (1915/ 2003). Kant goes on to argue that positions in space are relational, that is, should be understood in reference to aspects of the body, an observation only recently recognized by psychologists (e.g., Shepard & Hurwitz, 1983). These ideas lay dormant until amplified by Whitehead, who writes, “We have to admit that the body is the organism whose states regulate our cognition of the world. The unity of the perceptual field therefore must be a unity of bodily experience” (Whitehead, 1925: 91). Husserl also noted the privileged position of the human body: for him the body not only gives rise to the three dimensions but “everything that appears belongs to its environs” everything that is encountered is around the body. Similarly, in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues that it is only though our lived bodies do we have access to what he describes as the primary world. Without our bodies, there could be no world. The lived body is central, as is his corporeal intentionality, replacing the Cartesian mind-body distinction. The world and the lived body together form what Merleau-Ponty calls an intentional arc that anchors us in and to the world. More than this, Merleau-Ponty argues that the movement of the lived body actually creates (produces) existential space. It is not, however, the “objective” movement of the body as such, but rather the experience of this movement, “Far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body” (ibid). To feel our body (kinaesthesia) sensing its surroundings is not merely an exercise in self-reflection but the means by which we prehend the world. This kinaesthetic feedback is the means by which we both objectify the world and orient ourselves within it. To orientate ourselves is to adopt an external point or frame of reference. Thus, we need bodies to both create the world and to orientate ourselves within it.
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Of Heidegger’s complex and labyrinthine body of work, we have chosen to highlight two aspects only for the purposes of this discussion: his treatment of being-in-the-world as dwelling and his discussion of the nature of in. Heidegger identifies the existential character of being-in-the-world with human beings’ propensity of inhabiting and dwelling. The following passage has been frequently quoted, and as can be seen for good reason - “‘In’ is derived from ‘innan’ – ‘to reside’, “habitare”, “to dwell”. ‘An’ signifies ‘I am accustomed’, ‘I am familiar with’, ‘I look after something’ … The expression ‘bin’ is connected with ‘bei’, and so ‘ich bin’ [‘I am’] means in its turn ‘I reside’ or ‘dwell alongside’ the world which is familiar to me in such and such a way … ” (Heidegger, 1971). Heidegger holds that human beings (who he refers to as Dasein) and world are not two distinct entities, but only one that results from Dasein’s involvement in the world. Dasein’s way of being-in consists in dwelling or residing, that is, being “alongside” the world as if it were at home there. Thus the in of being-in-the-world is unrelated to ideas of Aristotelian containment, instead in is better understood in terms of involvement. Heidegger characterises everyday life as being an engaged, absorbed involvement in an undifferentiated world.
The organization of this book Organising the 16 chapters of this book has proved to be remarkably difficult and is testament to overlapping cross- and multidisciplinary nature of the subject matter. However, the following four themes have been identified • • • •
Moving through Space Social and Organisational Space Auditory and Pictorial Space Cognition, Language, and Space
and it is to these we now turn.
Moving through Space The first chapter, from Alan Dix, is a wide-ranging discussion of the experience of space. It opens the book not only by reason of its stimulating content, but also because it heralds topics that will recur in other chapters. The chapter explores the interconnectedness of memory, stories, lived space and perhaps most importantly, journeying, traversing 1960s Cardiff, ancient Turkey and Carthage, and modern Nottingham, and considers the delineation and constitution of space by words and mathematics, maps, thresholds, and boundaries. The chapter explores the relationships between our understandings of physical and conceptual spaces. From childhood memories of the back lanes on the way to school to trans-articulation, the way words shape our conceptual and physical landscape, we will see that our understandings of space and of knowledge itself are similarly shaped. Kerridge’s chapter stands in sharp contrast to this by discussing the role of the objective measurement of (pedestrian) spaces, considers what can be measured, why those measurements are important, and how such measurements can be used to build better pedestrian spaces. Of equal importance, the chapter discusses what cannot be measured and why we should not even think to build representations that include such unmeasurable aspects. Unlike Dix’s first-person perspective, Kerridge’s third-person perspective focuses on the design of technologies for tracking and measuring peoples’ movements through
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particular interior or exterior spaces. The data thus gathered can be used, for example, to streamline emergency evacuation arrangements, to support the design of built spaces so that the pedestrian experience is enhanced, or even to identify aberrant behaviour. Leach and Benyon conclude this section with a discussion of the microscopic. Tiny computational devices called Specks can be configured into wireless sensor networks, dubbed “SpeckNets.” These specks could be incorporated in to the fabric of buildings or even sprayed on to surfaces. The data generated by these specks creates a new kind of information space that, in itself, creates a range of new challenges for the technologist; what kinds of applications can make use of this space and how does one design interaction with the microscopic? Leach and Benyon conclude that one striking use of this information space is by way of augmented reality whereby real world places are overlade with digital information.
Social and Organisational Space This section opens with a chapter by Bakke and Julsrud, who aim to extend our understanding of the workplace as a key expression of organizational identity (cf. Relph’s concept of place identity – Relph, 1976). The chapter argues for the need to incorporate technologies into the discourses on organizational identity based on a study of the national branch of an international oil company. Bakke and Julsrud’s workplace study concerns the experience of the spatial reorganization of the offices belonging to a division of large oil multinational, set in the context of the recent turn to spatiality in organizational theory and technology studies. Their empirical observations are amplified with the views of the office workers themselves, which exemplify the differing perspectives on the organizational process underlying these new arrangements. The authors highlight the interdependency of physical features, social relations, and organizational design in the production of the workspace, and note how this resists the impact of information and communication technologies (ITC) that might have been expected to marginalise the traditional physical office by removing a need for co-location. The next chapter by Laegran is another Norwegian study concerning the dynamic use of space in Internet cafés. An Internet café can be understood as a technosocial space producing connections between people and places at different levels. Laegran argues against the conceptualisation of computer-mediated spaces and ICTs as placeless, proposing that to understand usage patterns properly, it is necessary to consider the local physical and social settings in which technologies are used. The chapter reports a study of four Internet cafes, and examines the way places are created from the interaction between people and technology. The author draws on actor network theory and practice-oriented theories of place and space to understand the co-constructed technosocial space of an Internet café. These spaces create connections between different levels of granularity: the building itself; its parent village or city; national, and the transnational; and the “space” of the Internet itself. Laegran’s rich account of these settings, illustrated by verbatim material from their inhabitants, not only supports her theoretical argument, but affords a vivid sense of life at these particular intersections of space, place, and technology. Whitbread and Hall discuss artists’ use of the virtual spaces, afforded by Internet chat rooms, to collaboration in the creation of a strikingly beautiful digital stained glass rose window. Historically, rose windows have been a major characteristic of the great cathedrals of Europe, their light filling the otherwise monochromatic interiors. Whitbread and Hall explore the use of these virtual spaces to provide a working environment for artists, the Wombrose Web site, using the design metaphor provided by the rose window itself to create and structure a collaborative space. This space supported the team of practice-based artists in a negotiation process with their aim of developing this monumental artwork.
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Finally, Jacob contrasts the physicality of space with the sociality of place. She draws on two recent lines of work in information science, philosophy of information and information architecture, to probe the relationship between space and place. Her approach is uncompromisingly humanistic, and she provides a meticulously argued account of the paths by which elements in a generic information space (e.g., a collection of resources) are transformed into a collective habitat, or information environment/place, by means of customised structures (such as information architectures, and ontologies). She concludes with some thoughts on “optimising” design, a well-executed architecture will support the “apprehension” of place. This approach can lead to the identification of meaningful differences that influence the functional activities of an information system and contribute to a greater understanding of what constitutes an information environment.
Auditory and Pictorial Space The first two chapters of this section consider the relationship between space and the voice, listening, and the visual and pictorial. Coyne and Parker open this section with their Voices Off: The Spatial Implications of Voice in Ubiquitous Digital Media, in which they examine the significance of the voice in modern networked communications. They argue that the voice in this context has been accorded a renewed spatial significance in that it resides not only in what it says, but simply the fact of its being voice. Voice is a spatial entity, and the pursuit of its spatial characteristics can inform contemporary media design. Specifically, Coyne and Parker discuss the relationship between voice and space in the design of public spaces. They observe that this is a reciprocal relationship: spaces can be designed around the properties of the human voice, while individuals modulate their voices in response to the social norms pertaining to a place. The chapter explores how while the vocal mode, and architectures and technologies designed around it, can connote intimacy, communality and welcome, the voice, particularly the unseen voice, can be disquieting and disruptive. The authors advocate greater attention to voice in spatial design to counteract the existing dominance of the visual. Next, Turner and her colleagues consider the role of sound, and more specifically, listening, in creating a sense of presence (of “being there”) in “places” recreated by virtual reality technologies. They begin by reviewing the treatment of sound in place and presence research. They report that sound is used to inducing a sense of presence in virtual environments that immerse their users in representations of particular places. However, this is treating sound as an instrumental property to be modulated and manipulated. But, presence is primarily concerned with experience; how we feel about the sound, what we understand by it, how we interpret it. The authors then consider the phenomenology of listening, the nature of different types of listening and their application: listening is active, directed, intentional hearing, and is not merely egocentric, it is body centric. A classification of modes of listening, which draws on work in film studies, virtual reality and audiology, is then proposed as a means of supporting the design of place-centric virtual environments in providing an effective aural experience. Finally, they describe a case study of listening in real and simulated soundscapes, and show how their classification system can be used to understand this otherwise neglected aspect of presence research. Boyd Davis’ chapter marks a change in tone from the auditory to the visual. In his Representing Space: The Pictorial Imperative, he examines the relationship between the planar space of graphic representations and the space that is represented. An historical developmental path is shown to be evidence of an almost irresistible pictorial imperative. Examples are taken from the history of painting, film, and television, in addition to computer games and other forms of computer graphics.
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In his consideration of the relationship between the space of graphic representations in painting, film, television, computer games, and other computer graphics, and the “real” space that is represented, Boyd Davis contrasts the pictorial mode, in which the graphic presents a unitary “world space,” to the configurational mode, where different graphic elements combine to convey meaning. He traces the current hegemony of the pictorial mode in visual media to the then revolutionary development of perspective techniques in the Renaissance. An underlying theme throughout is the relationship between representational technique, meaning making, and the viewer of the image. The fourth chapter in this section is from Fiona Carroll and is entitled, The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative from Prehistoric Cave Paintings to Computer Games. The author considers the nature of visual narrative, where the artist arranges images within some sort of space in order to engage people in a narrative. From prehistoric cave painting dating back more than 10,000 years to state of the art computer games, the aim is to explore the spatial development of the visual narrative. Carroll’s contribution also considers the treatment of space in visual representations, but with a focus on narrative. A visual narrative is not simply a series of visual forms, but a treatment of space within and around the image. Such techniques position the viewer with respect to the narrative, promoting flow and engagement. The discussion notes how, despite changing technologies, the central aim is to tell a story, and success rests on how far the representation achieves this. The argument provides a wide range of illustrative examples. The final chapter in this section is from O’Neill and concerns “digitally enhanced cultural spaces.” O’Neill’s chapter is informed by the work of the Situationists. The Situationist International developed a coherent and incisive critique of modern society, the major tenet of which was a reaction to the alienation of the individual by an increasingly mediated and commoditised modern world that surreptitiously encroached upon felt life. The purpose of returning to Situationist ideas here is not only to highlight the level to which the spectacle has now permeated our everyday lives, in the form of computer-enhanced spaces, virtual environments, and convergent technologies; but to critically re-engage, using Situationist tools, with the problems of living within the newly evolving digitally interactive spectacle. The chapter provides a succinct introduction to selected aspects of Situationist thought. It is then argued that new media spaces, as diverse as virtual environments and reality television, constitute instances of the “spectacularisation” of society, a process of “commodification” and mediation that positions individuals as passive consumers, despite the illusion of agency. A selection of digital productions are discussed that subvert and reclaim accepted media genres in the manner of the original Situationists of the mid-twentieth century.
Cognition, Language, and Space Shaun Lawson and his colleagues examine the ways in which spatial language in computer-mediated communication. They found that people use spatial language in everyday face-to-face conversation. Such interactions can take place over mobile phones or in shared virtual environments such as multiplayer games. However to-date, very few academic studies have looked at how people’s usage and understanding of spatial language might differ when it is computer mediated. Our own experimentation has investigated the relation between the uses of route, survey, and also gaze perspectives in a simple virtual environment. Turner, in his Space, Place and Memory Prosthetics, discusses how there have been a number of recent initiatives to develop technology (“memory prosthetics”) to enhance and extend human memory. Typical of these is “Memories for Life,” which is one of the Grand Challenges in Computing identi-
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fied by the British Computer Society in 2004. So far, the emphasis has been on the development of psychologically informed technology, a technology that helps us to remember to feed the cat, take our blood pressure medication, and make our dental appointments. Yet memory is intimate, personal, selfdefining, and without our memories, like those unfortunate suffers of Alzheimer’s disease, we cease to be ourselves. Nor can we separate memories from where and how they were formed. So rejecting this simple instrumental design and use of memory technology, an alternate conceptual framework is proposed based on the Heideggerian concept of being-with. Finally, the last two chapters of this book are the most demanding, and attempt to use spatial concepts and constructs to illuminate aspects of information science. Though the focus in each of the two chapters is different, they are both concerned with fundamental domain problems that can be addressed in spatial terms. Darányi and Wittek, and Warner explore ways in which language and computation (or meaning and form) intersect, and how coding and decoding work across these different modes. The argument in both chapters is developed in spatial terms. This is a core issue in information science, a domain, according to Warner, that faces “both the technical world of bytes and data compression and the social world of language and meaning, and, equally significantly … requiring understanding from the human and discursive as well as the mathematical and computational sciences.” A second issue is how to characterise information, or the process of informing. Darányi and Wittek base their arguments on Bateson’s definition, “a difference that makes a difference.” Difference (and similarity) can only make a difference when it is perceived. This can be expressed in spatial terms, materially, for example, in a map or graph or geometric presentation, explored by Darányi and Wittek, and Warner. The approach in these chapters is speculative and philosophical, though all three authors provide examples of how and why the concepts and techniques that are presented might be relevant to design. They offer an informed view of some past and present perspectives on information space, and reveal some of what lies underneath, historically and in terms of engineering, many of our current computational habitats. Darányi and Wittek seek to clarify the geometry of information space by explaining, in nonmathematical terms, the process of vector space modelling. This provides a graphical presentation of similarities and dissimilarities between items that is based on probabilistic indexing techniques. The chapter also offers a useful summary of the history of this particular line of IR work, and provides insight into some of the spatial techniques that can improve efficiency in search engines. Warner’s chapter is an ambitious attempt to link explanation of the material acts of reading and writing to seminal theories in linguistics (Saussure) and computation (Shannon) in an exploration of the relationship between form and meaning. In this chapter, the term “space” is polyvalent, as Warner moves from discussion of the material phenomenon of the “space” between words, to more abstract discussion of how we express syntagmatic and paradigmatic language in spatial terms. The argument teases out relationships between the “line” and “surface” of expression, and notions of extension in time and space, and points are illustrated with a wide-ranging set of communication technologies, from ancient Greek script (the “boustrephedon”) through the telegraph to text messages. Our everyday interaction with modern information technologies is permeated by activities that involve transformation of spaces, from surfaces to line and surface, and from line to line. A fuller understanding, of user activities and experience: of the technologies themselves, of the theories that underlie the construction of the technologies, and of those that impinge on their use for writing, can be obtained by examining their material basis and their connection with the line, of space and of time, and with the extension of the line of space across a surface.
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Next As is evident from this introduction to the chapters, an unusually wide and varied range of disciplines have been called upon, leaving us with what we believe is a thought-proving collection of complementary (and occasionally colliding) theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. However, there is a notable absence of contributions that in themselves report cross-disciplinary work. If this emerging field is to realise its full potential, such projects must represent the next stage in its development.
References Casey, E. S. (1997). The fate of place. Berkeley, Los Angeles; University of California Press. Dourish, P. (2000). Where the action is. MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1926/1962). Being and time. (Translated by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson). New York: Harper Collins. Heidegger, M. (1971). Building dwelling thinking. In Basic Writings. London: Routledge. Kant, I., & Goerwitz, E. (1915/ 2003). Dreams of a spirit-seer illustrated by dreams of metaphysics. Whitefish, MT : Kessinger Publishing Co. Mee, A. (1898). The pleasure telephone. The Strand Magazine, September, 339-345. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1962). Phenomenology of perception. (Translated by Colin Smith). London: Routledge Classics. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion Books. Shepard, R. N., & Hurwitz, S. (1983). Upward direction, mental rotation, and discrimination of left and right turns in maps. Cognition, 16, 161-193. Turner, P., & Davenport, E. (Eds.) (2005). Spaces, spatiality and technology. Springer. Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2006). Place, sense of place and presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(2), 204-217. Whitehead, A. N. (1925/ 1997). Science and the modern world. Free Press.
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Acknowledgment
The editors wish to thank the team at IGI Global for their continued assistance and support in the preparation of this book.
Section I
Moving through Space
Chapter I
Paths and Patches:
Patterns of Geognosy and Gnosis Alan Dix Lancaster University, UK
A bst ract Map, mazes, myths, magic, and mathematics, computation, cognition, community, and the constructed environment, all reveal something of our internal models of space. Whilst the spaces we inhabit have many objective properties, we only perceive and process certain of these, and add many social and subjective qualities of our own. In fairy tales and science .ction, some of the “real” properties are let slip, yet the worlds remain comprehensible. Studying the essential and nonessential qualities of space can guide the construction and navigation of information spaces. However, the very idea of information spaces, and indeed cyberspace, presupposes that spatial metaphors can make sense of information. This chapter explores the relationships between our understandings of physical space and conceptual spaces; from childhood memories, to transarticulation, the way words shape our conceptual and physical landscape, we will see that our understandings of space and of knowledge itself are similarly shaped.
Int roduction In previous talks and papers, I have explored the way we as humans understand the physical world (Dix, 2000; Dix 2001; Dix, Friday, Koleva, Rodden, Muller, Randell, & Steed, 2005). Artefacts, words, and abstractions, such as maps, mazes, myths, magic, and mathematics, computation, cognition, community identity, and the constructed environment, all reveal something of
our internal models of space. Whilst the space in which we live has many objective properties, we only perceive and process certain of these, and add many social and subjective qualities of our own. In fairy tales and science . ction, some of the “real” properties are let slip, yet the worlds remain comprehensible. By observing which properties can be lost, we understand more clearly what is essential.
Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Paths and Patches
My own reason for studying the essential and nonessential qualities of space has been to understand the construction and navigation of information spaces. Others have had similar motivation; for example, the Tower project used theories of space syntax to lay out information objects in virtual spaces (Prinz, Pankoke-Babatz, Graethe, Gross, Kolvenbach, & Schäfer, 2004). However, the very idea of information spaces, and indeed cyberspace, presupposes that spatial metaphors can make sense of information. In this chapter, we will explore the relationships between our understandings of physical space and conceptual spaces. From childhood memories of the back lanes on the way to school, to transarticulation, the way words shape our conceptual and physical landscape, we will see that our understandings of space and of knowledge itself are similarly shaped.
O f Maps and Map make rs C artographic Journey Whilst I have always loved maps, I recall first being prompted to look at the history of maps by someone who was describing the way maps had “developed” towards the “true” maps we have today. The idea that the Cartesian bird’s-eye view is categorically “true” piqued me somewhat and, as we shall see, it is not even modern. In fact, mapmaking is an ancient art. A clay tablet, discovered in 1930 at Ga-Sur at Nuzi (in modern Iraq), is often described as “the earliest known map.” It is dated at about 2,200 BC, and depicts a river running between two hill ranges and dividing into several channels with named places. Given it is incised into clay, the lines and location lack precision, but ignoring this, it takes a surprisingly “modern” bird’s-eye perspective. Whilst this is perhaps the oldest known map of a region, mapping goes further back still. In 1963, excavations at the ancient town of Catal Hyuk (now in modern Turkey) found a wall painting
depicting what is believed to be the township itself, dated at 6,200 BC. The painting is also surprisingly “modern,” a bird’s-eye view of the streets and houses. Nearly a thousand years later than the Ga-Sur map, the Egyptian mayor of Thebes, Sennefur, made himself a tomb that Victorian Egyptologists called the “Tomb of the Vineyards” because of the garden painting on its ceiling. Yet again this garden plan is amazingly “modern,” very similar to the slightly too tidy plan views of 18th century grand gardens. The garden extends from a riverside with several walled enclosures and different areas, all viewed clearly from above. Except the trees. In the garden, trees are depicted in orchard areas and alongside the river and paths; clearly not one-to-one with real trees, there are too few, more to give an impression. However, the trees are not shown from above, but side-on iconic images, just like in a children’s cartoon story. Strangely though, look at a forested area on a modern UK Ordnance Survey map. To distinguish coniferous and deciduous woodland we find small iconic trees, just like those in Sennefur’s garden plan more than 3,000 years before. Jumping forward another few thousand years to the early 17th century, John Speed produced some of the most accurate and popular maps of his day. The coastlines of these probably differ little from those drawn today, and on many of his maps, there are town plans for major centres, again very similar to those you might find in a current road atlas. However, his 1610 map of Wales is particularly interesting. Its coastline is cartographically highly precise; but, look inland and things are far more vague. Mountains are drawn as small conic side views, symbolic of mountainous country, but clearly bearing no relation to the actual panorama or plan. Rivers also are drawn, yet do not appear to have any of the precision of the coastline. On reflection, the reason for this difference is obvious. The precise Cartesian location of the coastline was of the utmost importance for
Paths and Patches
mariners, who use compass bearings (imaginary straight lines) to coastal landmarks to locate themselves1. Furthermore, the same imaginary straight lines and compass bearings make it (relatively) easy to map the coastlines; the sea gives you distance and long sight. In contrast, travelling inland, especially in the wild mountains of Wales, was a process of following rivers and valleys. What is important is not the precise location of these rivers, or even their lengths; travel time is only loosely correlated with metric distance. Instead, it is the topological connectivity of river valley and town that is critical. Furthermore, hillsides were more wooded than now, and mountaineering as a sport and leisure pastime still several hundred years to come, hence there is no viewpoint to see these valleys and rivers at distance; instead they created their own views following along themselves, in mathematical terms, an intrinsic coordinate system. Indeed, it was not until the early years of the 20th century that these hills were mapped with the same accuracy as the coastline (and recently this became the backbone of the plot for “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain”2).
Looking again at John Speed’s Wales map, the inset town plans are perhaps more interesting still. Instead of plan views, they are sort of half plan, half side view. The buildings are drawn in side elevation and the pattern of streets is as if from the air, but looking obliquely at the town, perhaps at an angle of 30 degrees to the horizontal. This at first looks primitive compared to the more “modern” town plans in the English counties of his 1612 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. Yet these side-view plans are more human in their perspective, looking almost as the towns would do as you approached them from a close hillside. Indeed, this is exactly the perspective chosen for many modern tourist town plans, and my own University has just such an alternative view for its campus map.
Words of Worlds There is an evening hymn “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended” that is often used at funerals. The funeral association is because the words talk about the falling of darkness and the ensuing rest as all part of God’s plan; as fitting for the laying down of life as the laying down to sleep. Moreover, the
Figure 1. Lancaster interactive campus map – note semi-side view http://www.lancs.ac.uk/travel/maps. htm
Paths and Patches
words go on to describe the way in which prayer and praise never stop: with nightfall here, somewhere else a new day begins: “While earth rolls onwards into light.” John Ellerton is writing this in the midst of the 19th century, and maybe he was influenced by American millennial movements of the time that saw the colonization of the West as completing an earthly circle of prayer that would herald a heavenly second coming. However, whatever the details of the theology, there is no denying the passion of the words: As o’er each continent and island The dawn leads on another day, The voice of prayer is never silent, Nor dies the strain of praise away.3 Whilst the fact that the world is spherical was known by the Greeks and the rotation of the earth accepted many centuries before Ellerton wrote, still there is a difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge, and clearly at some point Ellerton was caught by the wonder of the ever-flowing dawn. For those brought up in the 20th and 21st centuries, the different times of daytime and night are constantly reinforced by live television and long-distance phone calls in a way that Ellerton could never know (although the first transatlantic telegraph was laid in 1858, 10 years before the hymn was written in 1870). However, even in our generation, for many, this was perhaps head knowledge, known but not understood until the rolling 24-hour televised dawn of the 3rd millennium. For the children of the late 20th century, this was as defining as those 1960s images of earthrise on the moon were for their parents. Both, like the mariner’s view of the 16th century Welsh coastline, gave a perspective and distance and a different view of space and time. Going back to the 15th century, we can catch another glimpse of this intimate intertwining of perception and conception of space in the journals of a Venetian monk, Fra Mauro (Cowan, 1998). Mauro lived all his life in an island monastery in
the Venetian lagoon. Whilst Mauro never ventured from his own island, he was a mapmaker, and created one of the most detailed mappamundi of his generation. He created his map not from personal observations, but from the reports of explorers, traders, and others who came through Venice and from whom he obtained not just details of cities, rivers, and mountains, but also stories of people and culture. For him the map was not just lines drawn on the page, but also ideas and imagination. His map is as densely annotated with words as it is with topographic features; lived essence rather than cartographic distance.
O f Me mo ries and Minds C hildhood A ssociations When I was a tiny child, we used to visit my half niece (who was my age) in the next street. I was not really aware it was the next street, I guess, because I was in the pushchair most of the time. I do remember the image of the house and its doorway as we approached, and going up the side stairs, as she lived in a first-floor flat. Later, when I went to nursery and then infant school, I recalled the route we took. Initially in a pushchair as we took my sister to nursery, then walking together with my mum, and later my sister and I on our own, down three lanes to the school. The lanes were places of backdoors and rubbish bins, safer than roads. Not for us the sense of dark alleys with used hypodermics, or lurking muggers. (Although clearly the world was not entirely “safe,” as the lamppost behind our own house, which shone on our garden and the lane behind, had been placed there after my own half sister had been attacked in the dark long before I was born.) From the house I also learned early the way to the park at one end of the street and the church at the other, going “round the block” to the shops with the corner newsagent that sold sweets, the greengrocer with its fresh fish counter, and the
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bigger newsagent with plastic soldiers; then further round past the church to the even bigger shopping street with Woolworths and Littlewoods. I knew early on about the link between the park at the end of the street and the parallel route along the lanes to the school and nursery. At nursery school, after orange squash and (an enforced but sleepless) “nap,” on sunny days we would walk snake fashion across the road to the flower park. Even at that age I knew how the vast green expanse of the “Rec,” the park closest to our house, led in a series of linked spaces to the flower garden and then further to the magical lake park beyond with its playground and lighthouse. But it was only years later I realised that the roads that led off the big shopping street came to the back of the school, and that the alleys and back roads all linked together, and later still that I realised that the street we crossed when going from lane to lane on the route to school was the same street where we had visited my half niece when I was a toddler. Different understandings of my space: round the block, two ways to the flower garden, the open pathless grass of the “Rec,” and disconnected patches and paths branching starlike from my home.
My knowledge of town was even more patchy. We drove and there were a number of car parks. Each car park had an hour’s free parking before paying and so, on occasional Saturdays we would visit town starting at one car park, visit the shops nearby, bring back bags of things, then move to the next car park. Cardiff town centre was for me a series of isolated patches: big Littlewoods, WH Smith, and Marks and Spencer in one area; move to another car park for Howells (the posh shop) and David Morgan’s with its toy department and different ground floor departments dissected by dark arcades, yet mysteriously linking above ground; then further on another patch with more shop-filled arcades and the café, opposite the castle, where we sometimes had a cup of tea. It was after even more years, I think possibly not until after my dad died and we had to walk the streets, that I began to link the various parts. In fact, it was not only proximity of car parks that marked these patches, but there are natural breaks: a big churchyard and public library between the Howells/Morgan’s block and M&S/Littlewoods, for example. Gradually I learnt ways between these: the large roads crossing near the castle, the Victorian glass-covered arcades, and the
Figure 2. My childhood neighbourhood
Paths and Patches
department stores with multiple entrance ways. However, it was years more still before I knew about other back ways beyond the web of main shopping streets and even on my most recent visit, I was surprised to find new interconnections.
L earning and T hinking These childhood memories and growing understanding of physical space mirror the growth and patternings of our internal conceptual space. In constructive learning theory, linking new knowledge to the student’s existing understanding is critical. Just like my childhood knowledge of areas growing out from my home, our intellectual understanding grows from the familiar to the unknown. Educationalists talk about the “zone of proximal development” (note the word “zone”): those things at the edge of existing skills and understanding, which we can only accomplish with help, yet are ripe for learning because they are those things that can be interpreted by and connected into our existing mental schemata (Vygotsky, 1978). Where knowledge is patchy and disconnected, as often happens with “school learning,” it may have its own internal coherence; yet there is always a thrill when we find two apparently disconnected ideas are, in fact, linked, or two things that are linked one way are also linked in others (like visiting the flower garden from nursery). However, whilst the linked-ness of those childhood patches of space was important in my developing understanding of my neighbourhood and city, so also their definedness was critical. My house, my street, the shops around the block, the “Rec,” the flower gardens, the area near the school, by being separate although linked, these gave my infant geography an intelligibility sometimes nameable, “Wellfield Road,” sometimes not, like the parts of town around the car park known only by the shops they contain. As an adult I now know much of the web of interconnections and back routes between these childhood areas, yet still
my intellectual landscape of Cardiff city centre is shaped by these childhood patches.4 Just as routes and paths are important in our understanding of the physical world, so also are stories and sequential events critical to our thought processes and memories. In both working memory and long-term memory, we often encode information in sequences and find it hard to recall it out of sequence. Beginnings are easiest to remember, followed by endings, and middles hardest: try remembering the middle verse of a poem or song you know well without starting at the beginning. The paths themselves are not uniform, but have landmarks to find the way, and perhaps more importantly, points of significance, so that the story or route becomes a sequence of episodes: down the road then turn into the lane, along the first lane then cross the street, into the next ... Just as the patches retain their intelligibility through a combination of distinctness and interconnectedness, so also our stories in the intellectual landscape have phases and key points: the princess is kidnapped by the dragon, the people fail to save her, she discovers the dragon is really a pussycat under the scales, befriends it, and returns home with a new pet. And finally, notice how each area or landmark was invested with emotional responses: memories, feelings. The warmth of the house where I went to play with my niece, the memory of buying honeycomb bars at Marks and Spencer, or seeing the large stuffed monkey in David Morgan toy department and never guessing it would be there with my presents on Christmas Day. Whilst we all know the way emotionally significant events burn themselves on our memory, and educationalists understand the importance of motivation in learning, it is relatively recently that the rich interconnections between emotion, memory, and thinking have begin to emerge.5
Paths and Patches
Figure 3. The Christmas present monkey
The Mind of a Mathematician
O f L ines on the L andscape
Returning to that idea of a “zone”; it is interesting how the words we use about ideas and concepts are often spatial: “that’s nearly right” we say to a child, we may feel close to finding a solution to a problem or, if faced with an impasse, we may try another way. In the political sphere we may choose to follow our leaders, and Margaret Thatcher, in the 1980s, declared there would be no U-turns (although later was willing to accept sea change!). Mathematical thinking is often spatial too in its use of metaphor. Whilst some mathematicians (especially logicians) clearly use more linguistic ways of reasoning, most use some form of internal visualisation, supported and communicated using diagrams and pictures. Recent brain-mapping technologies have corroborated these more anecdotal and subjective reports and shown that mathematical (as opposed to arithmetic) thinking is usually co-opting the parts of the brain related to spatial tasks (Dehaene, Spelke, Pinel, Stanescu, & Tsivkin, 1999). Even whilst writing this chapter I spent some time in a mindless task and during this time, the outline became clear; my wife remarked that I had needed space to think; we constantly paint our intellectual landscape with spatial words.
Journeys and S tories Often when I give talks on space, I ask people to draw their journey to the meeting. I try to phrase this as ambiguously as possible to allow people to frame their own interpretation. The resulting drawings fall into a number of broad categories, or perhaps, to be more precise, embody elements of a number of categories. •
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Cartographic (isomorphic) – Bird’s eye maps attempting an Ordnance Survey accuracy of location. These are often also oriented to the North, but not always. Cartographic (homomorphic) – Still bird’seye view, but not rigidly Cartesian, instead morphing space so that areas of interest, typically near the beginning and end of the journey, are shown expanded. There is some attempt to maintain the relative locations of places, roads, and so forth. Schematic – Bird’s eye but with little regard for the locations in space, and instead based on connectivity. Roads with many bends and curves may become straight lines. The London Underground map follows this principle.
Paths and Patches
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Linear – In all the previous, the land away from the route of the journey is shown with less detail or perhaps left blank. However, with linear drawings, the focus is entirely on the route. The turnings may be shown schematically, so the line on the paper may not be entirely straight, but the emphasis is on the line of the route. Again “real” maps often use this, for example, maps of motorways showing the road as a straight line with junctions along its length. Episodic – Again, in all the previous, one sees an episodic element: the greatest detail where there are significant landmarks, or where significant events occurred on the journey. In strongly episodic drawings, these dominate the image so that there is no attempt at an “objective” or external viewpoint. In one case I have seen an extreme version of this, a “time tunnel,” where the journey was drawn as if one could see from end to end with significant features, like stage scenery, either side.
This sequence of drawing kinds is deliberately chosen to emphasise the move from more Figure 4. From Pincio to San Pietro
Cartesian, external views of the world to more personal views, and also the corresponding move from more 2-D representations of space to more 1-D linear ones of journeys. Indeed, as Tim Ingold (Ingold, 2008) has argued very cogently, our own experience is always linear, driven by time not space.6 The linear and episodic representations are reminiscent of the rivers and even town plans on John Swift’s Wales map, linear paths and human perspectives, whereas the cartographic drawings reflect the mariner’s long sight over trackless waters and almost God-like view of the land. However, even on sea voyages, when the distances extend beyond the horizon, the linear nature of lives and stories resurfaces. The Argosy, Odyssey, and Viking sagas are not map-drawn oceanographic surveys, but instead relate the events of successive landfalls, or even creatures emerging from the deep. On the sea, lines of movement may curve with the tide, but sight lines extend to the horizon. In constructed landscapes, often themselves built where the land has least intrinsic structure, long vistas are the exception and hold special significance: the Champs Elysées or the view from
Paths and Patches
Figure 5. A simple maze
Pincio to San Pietro. The importance of these lines of sight is central to space syntax, where the intelligibility and human movement patterns in constructed environments and urban spaces are analysed in terms of turnings and sight lines (Hillier, 1996). This intelligibility is critically challenged in mazes, which take a linear temporal path and convolute it over space. The earliest mazes are, literally, single lines wrapped and curled around themselves (Fisher, 1990), and it seems likely that the Minotaur’s labyrinth was a simple spiral: in a related story, Daedalus threads a snail shell by tying a thread to an ant’s leg, just as Theseus uses Ariadne’s thread to find his way out of the labyrinth.
B oundaries and T hresholds Whilst the wild interior of Swift’s Wales map is drawn rough, the English counties are more precisely circumscribed in Swift’s 1612 Theatre. In comparison to the wild Welsh mountains, the southern counties are tamed and claimed. Precise boundaries mark the end of one man’s land and the beginning of another’s. For tribes who counted wealth in horses and gold, precise boundaries were not so important, but when wealth comes from taxes, it is of the utmost importance to know who lies in or out of your domain. Older boundaries normally follow the features of the land: rivers or ridges, drawn by the land itself. The Northern extent of the stable Roman
occupation of Britain was marked by Hadrian’s Wall, running from the Solway Firth in the west and extending to the Tyne in the east, following a rugged natural escarpment between. But where the land is more open, or where boundaries are defined from a distance, we see straight lines drawn across the map. Compare the state outlines of the eastern United States with those of Colorado or Wyoming. Of course, it is the 2-D spatial extent of the land that gives crops, grazing, and wealth, but it is the line of the boundary that defines it! Perhaps this is most clearly seen at Rogationtide in an English church parish, when the parishioners “beat the bounds” of the parish, walking round its borders, reminding themselves of the boundary stones and markers that say where the extent of their land ends and that of their neighbours begins. This dual nature of boundaries, as things drawn from the land or drawn on the land, accounts for some of the fluidity of boundaries over time. Near my current home, the border between Scotland and England has moved back and forth over the years, and within my own lifetime the Welsh maps of Wales had a different border to the English ones (until local government reorganization in the 1970s, when the Welsh border won!). The borderlands are always places of outlawry, trade, and adventure; dangerous yet exciting, and often creative. The one-street town in the Wild West, sea ports, and the interstitial community on the Golden Gate Bridge in Gibson’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (Gibson, 1999). Lines themselves are ambiguous, joining from end to end and separating from side to side, and where the joining line of a path intersects the separating line of a boundary, there is the threshold. Thresholds are magical places in older cultures, where this world and the other meet, often the site for liminal experiences, themselves thresholds between life stages where the stability of role and place is breached. Even today, thresholds have a certain power over the imagination, whether it is Checkpoint Charlie or Ellis Island. During his
Paths and Patches
enthronement as the new Archbishop of York in 2005, as is customary, John Sentamu struck a staff against the doors of York Minster until he was let in7. Whilst in biology “interstice” is the name for the gap or boundary between tissues, in ecclesiastical terms it is the liminal moment when, like the Archbishop, a minister being ordained to new office is momentarily between orders and so in none8. And in Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World,” the doorway is an image for letting Christ enter your heart9.
O f L andscapes
of the Mind
i dizionari vanno continuamente corretti, come le carte geografiche dictionaries need to be corrected continually, like maps -Carlo Dossi
A rticulation and T ransarticulation It was on a journey, along roads through mountains, and a conversation about words got intertwined with the flow of landscape. It started with computation and a passage about ubiquitous computation that read “the world is suffused with computation.” Such a statement makes “sense” because computation is being used in this context to mean an “essence” of the act of computation rather than the act itself. This led to a discussion about “essence” words, ones that you could say, whether truly or not, that something was suffused with. Many of these essence words end “-tion,” but not all -tion words are essence words, for example, articulation. Of course, ever up for a challenge, whereas articulation is normally act not essence, we began to wonder, what would articulation mean if it were an essence word? Articulation as an act is either movement or speaking. As we considered this, we realized we could see meanings for an essence
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of both. Articulation (in the movement sense) is surely of the essence of a Victorian cotton mill, and as a tree moves (articulation), it also tells us (articulation) something about itself, its own properties, and of the wind and air. Scientists may talk of the way nature speaks to them, and certainly poets often feel the same. It may be a human projection, but it is not so strange after all to speak of a world suffused with articulation. However, note that the word “articulation” does not have this essence meaning in a standard dictionary; it was a meaning we were creating based on our conversation. Nothing unusual here; neologism is common, especially in academic circles. However, normally a neologism is an articulation, a coining of a word to describe some concept or thing that was already “there” in our heads. Here instead we took a word and forged a meaning for it, the opposite of articulation … transarticulation (Dix, 2003a). When we articulate we give name to an idea that we already have, like a cartographer naming an island or mountain. When we transarticulate, the word, by its naming, creates and delineates the idea, like Dido stretching ox thong to mark out Carthage.10 Articulation goes from meanings to words, whereas transarticulation makes meanings from words. Of course, transarticulation is a neologism in the standard sense: we had a concept “forging meanings from words” and gave it a name. That is, whilst our formation of an essence meaning for “articulation” was an act of transarticulation, our coining of “transarticulation” to express that act was just common or garden articulation! Now, just as the Scottish–English border is not arbitrary, but is shaped by the underlying landscape, so also transarticulation is not an arbitrary affair. In establishing the essence meaning for articulation, we could not choose anything we wanted, but were constrained partly by the existing meaning of the word, and partly by the physical and mental nature of the phenomena we saw around us and our own modes of thought.
Paths and Patches
However, just as the Scottish–English border is not entirely governed by landscape, and indeed does not currently lie east–west along the line of Hadrian’s Wall, so also the process of transarticulation, and the natural evolution of words, is not fully constrained by the world.
E xploring the B orderlands As a mathematician, it is normal to see the world of abstractions and concepts flattened onto the canvas of the page. Indeed, the Venn diagram is iconic of the discipline. We can see articulation and transarticulation clearly in this model. Articulation sees a coloured region and names it; transarticulation takes a name and chooses a region. The mathematical space is more like the English counties of Swift’s Theatre and less like the wild Welsh hills. Our conceptual landscapes are more ambiguous, more like the territories of the pre-Roman Celts, who certainly cared about the land they controlled, but were more likely to mark their centres than their boundaries. In words and concepts, centres are also perhaps most important. If I say “chair” it does not matter too much that there are some things that are only questionably chairs (stools, low tables),
you know what I mean. Certainly one of the ways in which it is assumed we codify concepts like “chair” is through prototypes, specific examples, centre stones not boundary stones. This can be verified by reaction-time tests, where the further an example is away from an archetype the longer it takes to say “yes”; it would take longer to say “yes it is a bird” when shown a penguin than it would if shown a robin (Rosch, 1978). However, although the centres are important, it is often in the borderland where the excitement lies; the domain of the bureaucrat and the outlaw. In academia and especially science, it is often the bureaucrat that wins. You may recall school discussions of whether a platypus is a mammal or a bird: it has mammary glands and feeds its young, it has fur and four legs, just like a mammal, but it has a beak, webbed feet and lays eggs, just like a bird11. If you are a curator and want to know whether to put the platypus in the room with the mammals or the room with the birds, this is an important question, but the issue hits at philosophical as well as pragmatic considerations. Linnaeus’ Classes are a way to describe and group creatures; the problem of the platypus is not that it does not fit cleanly into a class, but that one feels
Figure 6. Stone at Tara – marks the heart, not the boundary of the land
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Paths and Patches
it should. That is, there seems to be an urge to either define the concepts we use to classify the world so that they fit exactly, or alternatively, to force the world so that it fits our classes. The idea that a platypus could simply be neither or both seems deeply troubling to many; the boundaries need to be drawn precisely with no gaps.12 There are good reasons for this desire to define; the semiotics of the abstract is far more problematic than the semiotics of the concrete. If I say “that sheep,” you may be looking in a different direction and get the wrong sheep, that is, our interpretations of the terms may differ, but in the end, the concept of the sheep that I am referring to is one we could both share as there is a real sheep to see. However, if I say “all sheep,” then the concept is generic and it is far less clear, not just because our interpretation of the term may differ (I mean white woolly sheep, you mean Genus Ovis), but because the concept I have in my mind may have no precise equivalent in yours. There is no shared object for our words to denote. The clarification of the meaning of a word, often through exploring and drawing the boundaries of the word’s scope, is not just about agreeing an interpretation, but also about creating the interpreted concept. This may allow us to agree and even to differ in our interpretation (just as the maps of Wales differed in my childhood schoolroom), but we know what we are disagreeing about (Monmouth!). But of course this is our intellectual
landscape that is being scoped and bounded, not the world; the Severn happily meanders across the Welsh borders without hesitation as it breaches Offa’s Dyke. This defining of conceptual boundaries can be useful, but the full power of intellectual borderlands comes when you accept their nuanced nature and see boundary drawing as exploration, not definition. By attempting to establish boundaries, whilst knowing that these boundaries are artificial, it is often possible to understand better the nature of the centre.13
T he Physical E cology of S emiotic D ynamics As noted, our mental landscape itself shifts with the words we use. Occasionally new words create their meanings (transarticulation), and sometimes we create words to name things we already know (articulation). However, always there is an element of both at play, and our vocabularies constantly shift as words change their meaning. Our thoughts are partly channelled by our named categories, and partly when the tension between what we can say and what we want to say surfaces and we are forced to create or modify the words, and both happen soundlessly and effortlessly day to day.14 So, there is a constant cycle. There are the intrinsic things that we wish to deal with and talk about. Our words name these and group these and
Figure 7. Naming and physicality
intrins ics
naming &
phys icality
intellectual lands cape
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Paths and Patches
in so doing, establish an intellectual landscape. However, this changes the way we see the world, and so the nature of the intrinsics themselves. Of course, the objects of our thought and communication cannot be arbitrary, but are influenced by the physical world and the fact that we must interact with the world. There is much academic discussion about the socially constructed nature of science, but whilst many aspects of the way we choose what to do and how to represent it are about disciplinary culture, still, when we get into a plane we expect it to fly. The knowledge of aeronautic engineers must, in the end, respect the physicality of air and aircraft. The tale does not quite stop there. The physical properties of the world are fixed, and indeed so are many other things, such as the passage of the sun across the sky. However, other aspects of the physical world, such as existence of aircraft, are constructed by us … and what we construct depends on what we can think about. Because there are the words chair and table, it is hard to sell an item of furniture that does not neatly fall into one of the named furniture categories. If we have something that can be used as either, where do we put it in the catalogue? Although unnamed things do get constructed, there is a tendency to create things that fall into categories and hence, for those categories to harden and crystallise through positive feedback.15 If it had been left up to people, the problematic platypus would probably never have been made! Finally, returning to the parallels between the intellectual and spatial, we find they have come intimately together. Not only do we draw borders on maps, but we name countries, regions, and localities, and the naming changes the ways we conceive of ourselves. In 2004, Danielle Beccan was gunned down simply because she lived in the St Ann’s area of Nottingham, whereas her killers came from the Meadows. Borders are often drawn where natural physical features lie, or where there are linguistic, ethnic, or cultural divides. However, once drawn on the map those human
distinctions tend to crystallise, and the landscape itself may reflect this in changes in architecture (crossing the Scottish border), in varying land usage (Israel and Jordan), or artificial barriers (Hadrian’s Wall, Offa’s Dyke, or the concrete barrier on the West Bank). The physical world reflects the intellectual.
Refe rences Asimov, I. (1972). The left hand of the electron. New York: Doubleday & Co. Cowan, J. (1998). A mapmaker’s dream: The meditations of Fra Mauro, cartographer to the court of Venice. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Crystal, D. (1997). The Cambridge encylopedia of language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putman. Dehaene, S. Spelke, E., Pinel, P., Stanescu, R., & Tsivkin, S. (1999). Sources of mathematical thinking: Behavioral and brain-imaging evidence. Science, 284(5416), 970–974. Dix, A. (2000). Welsh mathematician walks in cyberspace (the cartography of cyberspace). In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Collaborative Virtual Environments – CVE2000 (pp. 3-7). ACM Press. Dix, A. (2001). In a strange land: Modelling and understanding cyberspace. In Symposium on “Human–Computer Interaction in the 21st Century”. OCG, Graz, Austria, 13th January 2001 (published in “Mensch–Computer-Interaktion im 21. Jahrhundert / Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) in the 21st Century,” Band 151) Dix, A. (2003a). Articulation and trans-articulation (unpublished essay). Retrieved from http:// www.hcibook.com/alan /essays/
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Dix, A. (2003b). Being playful – learning from children (keynote). In S. MacFarlane, T. Nicol, J. Read, & L. Snape (Eds.), Small Users - Big Ideas: Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children 2003 (IDC2003) (pp. 3-9).. ACM Press. Retrieved from http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/IDC2003 Dix, A., Friday, A., Koleva, B., Rodden, T., Muller, H., Randell, C., & Steed, A. (2005). Managing multiple spaces. In P. Turner, & E. Davenport (Eds.), Space, spatiality and technologies. Kluwer. Fisher, A. (1990). Labyrinth - solving the riddle of the maze. New York: Harmony Books. Gibson, W. (1999). All tomorrow’s parties. Penguin. Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine. Cambridge University Press. Ingold, T. (2008). Against space: Place, movement, knowledge. In P. W. Kirby (Ed), Boundless worlds. Oxford: Berghahn.
as a Research Activity, Penn State, 25 June 2006. Retrieved from http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/DIS2006-designwkshp/ Tooley, R. (1949). Maps and map-makers. London: Batsford. Turner, P. (2005). Affordance as context. Interacting with Computers, 17, 787-800. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
E ndnotes
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Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge: MIT Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage. Prinz, W., Pankoke-Babatz, U., Graethe, W., Gross, T., Kolvenbach, S., & Schäfer, L. (2004). Presenting activity information in an inhabited information space. In D. Snowdon (Ed), Inhabited information spaces. Living with your data. Berlin: Springer (Computer supported cooperative work series) (pp.181-208). Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In A. Collins & E. Smith (Eds.), Readings in cognitive science, a perspective from psychology and artificial intelligence (pp 312-322). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Retrieved from http://originresearch.com/documents/rosch1b.cfm Sas, C., & Dix, A. (2006). Exploring the design space. In DIS 2006 Workshop: Exploring Design
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Detailed coastal charts, called portolano, date back to the 13th and 14th century, but in Maps and Map-Makers (1949), Tooley suggests that this form of cartography may date back as far as the 2nd century Marinus of Tyre. Produced by Miramax Films, Parallax Pictures, 1995. Words from Hymns and Psalms, Methodist Publishing House, London, 1983. Some readers may notice similarities with Lynch’s paths, districts, edges, landmarks, and nodes (Lynch, 1960). In his empirical research into the intelligibility of the city, these came out as key elements in people’s mental maps. However, in his work, the paths, districts, and so forth, are features of the city that are likely to be shared by many people (e.g., Champs Elysées or Times Square). My childhood paths and patches are very personal (as will be yours). However, now as an adult … not least because I know names of places and roads, my model is more normalised. This relation between
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individual and shared conceptualisations is important, but not one I will pick up fully in this chapter. Notably in the works of Damasio (Damasio, 1994). While Ingold argues for the primacy of paths over places (or certainly Cartesian space), in this chapter I argue that both are critical. In fact, in these images that people draw, the episodic nature focuses on events; locations at particular times with meaning. The childhood patches are in fact more like his helicopter stops; as a child, the travelling between, in push chair or car, left the world disconnected, yet these childhood patches were places of meaning: not just a room in a house, but the place where I played. Ingold cites Massey (2005), who similarly argues for alternative conceptualisations of space in terms of trajectories, and for both the inhabited nature of places and spaces is central. Later in this chapter, when I look at physical and semiotic dynamics, we will come to a place that perhaps both would recognize even though our paths there have been different. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/ north_yorkshire/4481796.stm Victor Turner (1982) coined the term liminal to cover various rituals of passage or other inbetween times, when social norms are often ignored or even systematically violated. The word liminal comes from the Latin limen – a threshold. Often these rituals include a literal move across a threshold, or in and out of a sacred space. Not explicit in Turner’s writing is the way in which the liminal period, by being not a part-way point, but a totally other place, allows the distinctiveness of either side to be preserved, with no hint of ambiguity. This partly explains why, in an age where all distinctions are lost, we have only what Turner calls liminoid experiences; the elements of the ritual, but without the
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threshold passing, for there are no boundaries. See http://www.explore-stpauls.net/oct03/ textMM/LightWorldN.htm The story goes (in Virgil’s Aeneid) that Dido was allowed as much land as she could enclose with an ox hide. She cleverly cuts the hide into thin strips and uses these to surround a hill that then became the city of Carthage. Mathematicians regard this as the forerunner to the theorem that a circle is the shape that encloses the maximum area for a given perimeter, which itself is a classic problem in the Calculus of Variations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido and http://courses.washington.edu/hum523/ dido/ Indeed in “Left Hand of the Electron,” Asimov (1972) suggests that the question should even be mammal or reptile, as the bones in the platypus’ jaw are characteristically reptilian. Casey (1997) notes that in the Mesopotamian cosmology, Anshar and Kishar are the gods of the horizons of sky and earth, that is, the horizon is not the boundary itself. This actually accords with a mathematical view of the horizon, which is a limit point from either side, but itself a singularity. It has definable things above and below, but it is not so clearly meaningful to ask what is actually at the horizon itself. There is no gap, but neither is there an actual point between; those who use liminal experiences to transition but not bridge discrete social structures would surely approve. We have used the exploration of boundaries extensively as a technique to explore difficult areas and, in fact, once you recognise this is what is being done, you start to see it elsewhere. One form of this is seeking critical points. You choose examples that are central to two categories, and then try to find intermediate examples and ask which
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Paths and Patches
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category they fall into. At some critical point a small change shifts the examples from one side to another, and you can then ask “what attribute(s) have changed,” and in so doing discover one attribute (usually of many) that is critical for the core concepts. (Sas & Dix, 2006) This account, to some extent, follows and yet also opposes the Shapir-Whorf Hypothesis that thought is conditioned by our native tongue (Crystal, 1997). While accepting the influence, and to some extent determining force of language on thought, I am presenting this as part of a more dialectic or dynamic canvas. Indeed, Whorf’s own (much
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debated) example of 15 words for snow in Eskimo illustrates this; it is no accident that the language has words for snow; this must have come, albeit maybe over a long period, as the result of a cultural and linguistic dynamic, giving words to concepts necessitated by the constraints of the environment. Indeed the Soviet philosopher Ilyenkov regards nonmaterial “ideal” phenomena, such as goodness, as not merely being embodied in, but actually having their existence within constructed cultural practices and created artifacts (Turner, 2005).
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Chapter II
Let’s Meander Through a Measured Space Jon Kerridge Napier University, UK
A bst ract This chapter concerns the question of how people navigate through a space in which other people are also present. Issues addressed include how the space itself affects the way people navigate, how this is changed by the presence of others in the space on a collective or individual basis, and how navigational abilities and behaviour can be measured. Such measurements can then be used, for example, to identify aberrant behaviour in public spaces. The state-of-the-art and current challenges in this domain are discussed. A new empirical approach to the tracking of pedestrians who are navigating populated spaces is then described, and its verification, validation, and further extension discussed.
int roduction Regardless of our ability, most of us have had to navigate through a space in which other people are also present. For most, this is simply achieved by walking through the space. For others, with some form of movement disability, this may be achieved with the help of others, who may undertake the navigation. Thus, we can argue that the vast majority of people have had some experience of
navigating a space. This then leads to the simple question; how do we navigate through a space? In attempting an answer, we actually find ourselves posing yet further, more complex questions. • •
How does the space affect the way people navigate? How do other people in a space change the way they individually and collectively navigate a space?
Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Let’s Meander Through a Measured Space
• •
How do individuals and groups mitigate the effect of others in a space? Finally, perhaps most importantly, can our learnt navigational ability be measured in some way so we can better understand the mechanisms involved in navigating a space and if so, will it help us answer the preceding questions? If we are able to undertake this measurement then perhaps we might be able to design better spaces.
The underlying premise is that navigational skill is a learnt capability, developed over many years from our initial faltering steps as a toddler, through childhood and into adulthood. We can also reflect that even parents have to develop new navigational skills as they seek a path through a space that is more appropriate for any child for whom they are responsible, especially if that child is in pram or buggy.
Wha t C an B e Measu red? We have to be realistic as to what can be measured, and not attempt to measure aspects that are innate to an individual. Thus, we can measure instantaneous speed and average speed over some observed path, but we cannot measure the speed at which a person would like to walk. We can measure the distance at which a person deviates from a given path to avoid another stationary or moving obstruction to their progress, but not the distance at which they become aware of the obstruction. We cannot measure a person’s desired personal space, but we can measure the gap they keep to anybody they are following, also known as their headway. We can also measure the distance between the shoulders of two people either as one overtakes the other or when they are moving towards each other. When avoiding an obstruction, we can see if a person deviates to the left or right, but we cannot measure their propensity to move to the left or right when avoiding an ob-
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struction. We could measure acceleration but is that critical, given that most people appear to be able to go from rest to a normal walking speed or vice-versa in one step. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of measurement is to ensure the process itself does not perturb the space in any way. If it does, then the measurements themselves will be unrepresentative, and it will be very difficult to obtain any valid results and then infer any conclusions from the measurements. The aim of the measurement process should be to determine the distribution of each possible measurement across the population and to understand how these distributions vary with different types of people and space.
Previous Measu re ment Atte mpts Much of the previous research applicable to pedestrian movement attempted to determine the factors that affect movement of crowds. Typically, this was aimed at commuters or people in an evacuation situation. Much of this work was carried out some time ago and perhaps we have now started to realise that even in such situations, some of the exhibited behaviours result from peoples’ innate notion about walking in general rather than in a specific crowded situation. Very little research has been undertaken to determine how these microscopic effects influence the emergent behaviour of larger collections of pedestrians. Furthermore, research into pedestrian movement patterns in non-crowded situations where, for example, people are meandering as a result of shopping within and outwith shops, a tourist, walking in an enjoyable environment and the specific effects that pedestrian space furniture has upon overall movement has not been widely undertaken. In this latter category, we could include automatic ticket-machine barriers in transport facilities and how easy they are to negotiate with a variety of hindrances such as children, luggage, and the other
Let’s Meander Through a Measured Space
people around them. Much of the literature assumes that a person walks in a straight line unless they are forced to deviate round an obstruction. Is this true for someone who is meandering or for people walking in a group?
Measurements at the Macroscopic S cale The bulk of the early workers engaged in observations of large-scale crowd movements that typically occur in commuter movements. Researchers include Fruin (1971), Hankins and Wright (1958), and Predtechenskii and Milinskii (1969), and they all discovered similar basic flow, density, and speed relationships. Perhaps of interest is that the latter measured a slightly reduced density, perhaps resulting from the fact that Russians wear bulkier clothing in winter and thus cannot stand as close to each. The resulting concept was that of a level of service, which has an analogy with vehicular measurement techniques. A level of service effectively categorises the amount of discomfort a pedestrian will perceive as they walk in a space. Thus, level of service A is basically a person walking by themselves and Level F is as congested as it gets and everyone can only walk in the same direction en masse. More recent researchers have noticed that lanes or streams of people walking behind each other are spontaneously formed and destroyed in highly congested situations. It is much easier to follow someone than create ones own path in a congested situation. This has then been used to justify the construction of models based upon fluid flow (Hoogendoorn & Bovy, 2000) or gravitational forces (Helbing & Molnar, 1995). It is hard to see how such models can be then applied to less congested environments, even though they make valiant attempts. Other workers, such as Kessel et al. (2001) and Blue and Adler (2001), have promoted the use of cellular automata (CA) as the basis for pedestrian flow. These models were developed from vehicular traffic flow where
the movement is essentially one-dimensional. A driver has to obey a large number of rules, backed up by the law, that restrict the legal movements a driver can make. Unlike a pedestrian, a driver cannot undertake an instantaneous 360º turn nor stop without reference to those around them. Typically, many of these CA models employ a grid size of 40cm or less, which is unrealistic, given that most adults are wider, closer to 65cm. While theses models may be realistic in predicting evacuation movements, they are not representative of more normal movements. Increasingly, researchers, particularly in the USA, are trying to obtain level of service measures that can be derived by measuring the space in terms of its geometry and the adjacency and levels of vehicular traffic (Landis et al., 2001). This results from a desire to determine a measure for the pedestrian movements without having to actually measure the real movements because such measurements are time consuming, expensive, and error prone.
Messoscopic S cale The messoscopic level corresponds to aspects of pedestrian movement that can be related to route choice, for example, in a transport infrastructure concourse such as a railway station (Hoogendoorn and Bovy, 2004) or by evaluating line-of-sight distances as a proxy for the ease with which a person can navigate through a space (Hillier, 1996). Timmermans et al. (1992) have investigated this route choice aspect further in an attempt to develop models of route choice based upon the facilities that are available to a person as they move in a space occupied by retail outlets, ticket machines and infrastructure associated with transport interchanges.
Measuring Microscopic Movements A small number of researchers have attempted to measure microscopic details associated with
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decisions taken by pedestrians as they move within a space. Typically, most of these have used video data collection that has then been analysed in various ways to extract whatever details were of interest. Dammen (1992) describes a novel set of experiments, used to determine the effect of bottlenecks on the free movement of pedestrians as they approach, for example, a ticket barrier. She also undertook experiments to determine the effect of people crossing each other’s path and discovered that a diagonal flow pattern emerged. She also suggested that as the width of a bottleneck is reduced, the flow rate decreases in a nonlinear manner contrary to current assumptions. This arises due to the so-called zipper effect where, in a narrow corridor, two people cannot walk sideby-side but have to interleave their movement so their shoulders do not come into contact. Most of the experiments were undertaken with people moving in the same general direction, and used student volunteers to carry out the investigation. Image processing techniques were used (Hoogendoorn & Daamen, 2002) to track the people in the field of view, but detection of each individual was problematic and it was easier to do this by eye and hence, was time consuming. Miyazaki et al. (2003) undertook experiments to determine the effect of a wheelchair user on flow in a corridor. Yet again, the flow was unidirectional both in terms of the wheelchair user and the other pedestrians involved in the experiment. The experimental subjects were made to walk through a specially constructed corridor that permitted easier viewing by a video camera. A transparent grid was placed on the display monitor and used to extract measurements from which flow rates, densities, and speeds could be determined. This is also a time consuming activity, which results in a technician spending 1 week for every hour of recorded footage to extract all the data. Willis et al. (Willis, Kukla, Kerridge, & Hine, 2001) and Kukla et al. (Kukla, Kerridge, Willis, & Hine, 2001) describe a system called PEDFLOW that also uses video footage, but for which a set
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of tools was developed so that the trajectories taken by different pedestrians can be extracted more easily. Data from some 4,500 observations is described, Willis et al. (Willis, Gjersoe, Harvard, Kerridge, & Kukla, 2004), and these give distributions for some key parameters such as walking speed, distance at which people deviate to miss an obstruction, and the effect of groups. This is one of the few systems that determined this level of detail from video taken in ordinary city streets. A disadvantage of the PEDFLOW approach was that each pedestrian’s trajectory had to be followed individually by the tracking tools, and both the person’s head and feet had to be visible at all times. It was thus difficult to capture data for complex scenarios involving many people who occluded each other at different times.
A N e w A pp roach Our current research into tracking the movement of pedestrians has focussed on the use of low-cost infrared sensors. These sensors (Mansi, Porter, Galloway, J&. Sumpter 2001) can be mounted above a pedestrian space and can be used to collect the trajectories of pedestrians as they move through the space. These trajectories can then be analysed to determine how the pedestrian navigated their way through the space. This capability is not without problem because we have to use a large number of such sensors if we are to cover a significant area. The field of view of each sensor is a square with sides between 3 and 4 meters. We thus have to track people as they move from the field of view of one sensor to an adjacent one. The underlying software system has to be inherently scalable and thus, a parallel processing methodology has been adopted. Each sensor outputs data about each of the pedestrians in its field of view every 30msecs. The primary data returned from the sensor is the [x, y] pixel location of a target in the field of view. This is returned with sub-pixel accuracy due to
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the processing that takes place in the sensor’s embedded digital signal processor (DSP). The sensor contains an array of 16 x 16 pyroelectric ceramic detectors that measure changes in temperature. Each array element senses the change of temperature as a person walks through the field of view. The DSP then fits an ellipse to the image of each target and then returns the centre of the ellipse as the [x, y] coordinates, together with the major and minor axes of the ellipse. The underlying software system then collects the data from each of the sensors and this is recorded, together with the standard macroscopic statistics such as density, flow-rate, mean, maximum, and minimum walking speeds, together with the number of people entering and leaving each edge of the sensor’s square field of view (Kerridge, Armitage, Binnie, Lei, & Sumpter, 2004; Kerridge, Keller, Chamberlain, & Sumpter, 2005). In addition, a unified view of the whole observed space is constructed that monitors the movement of a person from one sensor’s field of view to that of another. From this unified view, we also get similar statistics, for the whole space, as well as the complete trajectory of each person as they move through the observed space. The trajectory is recorded every 30ms, and each point contains all the data the sensor generates for each target person. The great advantage of this approach is that once the trajectory data has been captured, it is immediately ready for analysis. This is far more effective than video data collection, whereby the very time consuming transcription of the video footage into trajectories has to be undertaken before analysis can commence.
U nde rst anding Measu re ments in a Sm all S pace We have only just started to collect trajectories of people moving in a space, but it is already obvious that we will be able to collect a vast number of trajectories. The space comprises a corridor between a reception area and some student open
access computer laboratories. Additionally, a student café has its entrance off the corridor. Hence, we are able to collect data for people moving straight through, and also from people who are providing a crossing movement as they enter or leave the café. There is also a great deal of conflicted movement. The observed area is 6m long and is 4m wide. The entrance to the café is about 1m from the end of the space and 1.4m wide. Four sensors, set towards the edge of the space, observe the space. The approach we intend to take to analyse the trajectory data is to use agent-based technology. Each trajectory that has been recovered will be allocated its own agent. The agents will simultaneously “walk” along their trajectory according to the time-stamp data saved in the trajectory data. When an agent deviates from a relatively straight path, it will “look around” itself to determine what other pedestrians were doing at that time and hence, learn the decisions that the real people took in the situation they found themselves. Thus, over time, each agent will observe many different behaviours from each of the trajectories it follows. In this manner, the agents will be able to build up a set of distributions for each of the parameters we choose to categorise microscopic movement. Verification of the technique will be achieved by taking a scene that agents have not yet analysed. Replacing one of the pedestrians by an agent, and then making the agent undertake the necessary decisions to reach the goal in the time taken by the real pedestrian. We can then compare the path taken by the agent with that taken by the real person. Over sufficient tests, we should be able to determine the ability of the agents to mimic real pedestrians.
Meande ring in L a rge r S paces Validation The verification of the technique in a single space is only the first stage in the refinement and sub21
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sequent application of the basic methodology. It now has to be validated in a number of different situations, starting with similar locations to those that are far removed from the original experimental environment. Initial validation attempts will be found that provide a similar space as the original, but in which the people are noticeably different. Anecdotally, it is known that students are not typical of the normal population in that they tend to walk in groups of more than two, and they also walk substantially slower than the normal population. Thus, a location that contains people walking with more purpose needs to be found and analysed. We can expect the basic technology to work, but the question will be to determine the variation in the derived parameters to see whether the distributions are similar but skewed by a constant amount or whether the distributions are completely different. In particular, do we obtain a bimodal distribution showing a variation between people with an immediate goal and those for whom time pressures are not so great? Most researchers recognise there are gender, mobility factors, and trip purpose requirements that will modify walking behaviour. The basic infrared setup does not allow us to assess these factors because we only obtain [x,y] location data. To obtain this other data, we will need to use some for video-based recording system. This video data will be collected in an integrated manner with the coordinate data so that researchers can identify other salient factors both of the environment and of the individual pedestrians. Environmental factors include aspects such as time of day, weather conditions, the categorisation of the space into confined, open, indoors, and outdoors. The prevailing transit conditions, such as congested free-flowing and nearly empty, also need to be recorded. These conditions will vary throughout a data collection exercise, and it is important to record a subjective feeling of the conditions at the time the particular individual was moving through the scene.
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Techniques for highlighting a particular trajectory, in the infrared display, have already been developed (Wilkinson, 2005), and this could then be used to control the video playback so that individual pedestrian characteristics can be more easily recorded. Aspects that could be captured include gender, mobility, walking in a group of a particular size, restriction due to the carrying of any bags and other luggage, and the observed need of the person to move faster, slower, or at the same speed as the people around them. The collection of this other additional data means that we will be able to analyse all the scenes over a wide variety of situations in many different ways, thereby obtaining a better understanding of the basic rules that people apply when walking in any scenario. All this data will need to be stored in a database that would permit searching for examples of a particular set of such properties so that agents could be used to learn the behaviour associated with a particular set of environmental characteristics. Thus, the same agent could be made to traverse many different paths from examples of the same set of characteristics taken from different situations. The fundamental hypothesis to be tested is to determine whether people apply the same basic rules regardless of the situation, modifying them only to deal with the specific requirements of the prevailing conditions. Conversely, do we have many different sets of rules that we apply, as required, to a specific situation? If it is the former, then we only have to collect the underlying data once, and then understand how the rules are varied to cope with a specific situation. This would make model building much easier and quicker because the basic rules would be understood and could be applied to many different situations. The goal of any model building would be to analyse how a new space, or modifications to an existing space, would improve the pedestrian experience. This could be achieved by populating the space, at design stage, with agents representing the anticipated population of users to determine
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those parts of the space that become congested and those that are underutilised. Thereby, the space could be redesigned before it was actually built with a degree of confidence that it will be fit for purpose. It is well known that level-changing elements in a space’s design can have a major effect on the ability of people to move easily (Chen, 2005). Such elements include stairs and escalators and in periods of heavy use, the ingress becomes hard to navigate. Can we develop additional structures in the vicinity of stairs and escalators that promote the easier movement of pedestrians at times of heavy use?
S paces U sed for D ifferent A ctivities So far, the analysis has been concerned with the collection of individual movements at the microscopic level. It can now be broadened to larger spaces that have some well-defined primary utility, such as shopping malls and transport infrastructure concourses provided in large railway stations and airports. The latter are increasingly becoming examples of the former. Models have been developed (Daamen, 2004; Landis et al., 2001) that permit the knowledge that at this messoscopic level, people do have the ability to change their behaviour depending on external factors and in particular, this affects their route choice. It is, however, very difficult to follow people in such spaces for the whole of their transit through the infrastructure. The use of the infrared sensor technology, combined with video recording might permit the gathering of this data, but would require a very large number of these sensors to cover the size of space being considered. It may only be possible to follow people while they are walking from one part of the infrastructure to another. At some points, it will be obvious that they are buying a ticket. At some types of retail outlet it would be obvious the type of purchase that was being made, especially if they did not have to enter the facility and thus, be obscured from the infrared sensors.
In other situations, where people leave the public area to move into other facilities, such as shops in a shopping mall, then it would be very difficult to follow the people as they moved into that space. However, we could track people as they moved around the public space to determine particular patterns of footfall into the facilities. This would provide useful data for managers of such spaces, and also for the construction of new facilities, as they could be better designed to promote a more effective pedestrian experience. Of course, this could only be achieved with some form of questionnaire survey to determine qualitative aspects of the pedestrian experience.
Identifying A berrant B ehaviour in a S pace Increasingly, public spaces are monitored by CCTV cameras that are used to observe aberrant behaviour and guide the use of security personnel to deal with the situation. In other spaces, such as customs halls and passport control areas, there is a need to observe behaviour that is abnormal. Given the increase in security alerts in public spaces, such as railway stations, there is a need to monitor behaviour, both for the purposes of identification of a security issue, and also to record the scene for evidential purposes. CCTV camera operators are confronted by a large bank of monitors, and they have to then move the cameras in such a way so they can observe the scene as it unfolds, which could be very fast, requiring a large number of movements to many cameras. Needless to say, this is very difficult because the orientation of each camera has to be retained in the operator’s memory, and then the correct control instructions have to be sent to the cameras, using a joystick controller instructing them to move to the required scene. A covered space that provides a means of mounting the infrared sensors in the ceiling can be used to provide the required level of feedback to the CCTV control system such that the cameras
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can automatically follow the developing situation. The CCTV controller could identify, in the trajectory display, the person or people that need to be followed. The control system would then ensure that the identified individuals were kept in the field of view of at least one of the cameras at all times, assuming the whole space can be observed by the collection of cameras. At any time, the controller could identify further individuals that need to be tracked as they move around the space. A particular benefit of the approach is that we have all the trajectories of the people in the environment from the point they moved into the observed space. Thus, if a person being tracked interacts with another person, perhaps surreptitiously, then we can identify where that other person entered the environment by backtracking along their stored trajectory. In particular, we can see if the person’s image had been recorded on any of the CCTV cameras that were just observing the scene rather than tracking a specific individual. The longer-term benefit is that we can collect large amounts of trajectory data for people in that space. The vast majority will be normal behaviour. This means we will, perhaps, be able to define aberrant behaviour for that space. Hence, the control system could be configured to identify instances of such behaviour that might not currently be observed by any camera, and move the cameras to that area for interpretation by the controller, who can then decide what action to undertake, if any. Thus, the CCTV monitoring system becomes much more focussed in its use by identifying abnormal behaviour for a space and focussing the operator’s attention on the event.
C onclusion Once the technique has been verified and validated, it might be possible to use the concepts in analogous situations. For example, we could follow the path taken by a person as they navigate their computer’s file store so that over a sufficient time,
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we can predict where they are likely to access in the near future. In a library, we could track the movement of users and see if there are any common patterns, which could result in a better layout of the library. New techniques have been developed that allow the collection of vast amounts of microscopic pedestrian trajectory data in real time. The challenge now is to find ways of analysing this data in as automatic a manner as possible to determine the parameter distributions associated with microscopic pedestrian movement. This, of course, has to be undertaken in a variety of pedestrian scenarios to see if there are some fundamental values that do not vary with situation, or whether the environment in which a pedestrian is walking has a significant effect on their behaviour. If we are able to collect data over a sufficiently large space, then we might be able to verify some of the current theories of messoscopic route choice. Hence, we might be able to determine the walking behaviour of a person as they meander through a space.
Refe rences Blue. V. J., & Adler, J. L. (2001). Flow capacities from cellular automata modeling of proportional splits of pedestrians by direction, In M. Schreckenberg & S. Sharma (Eds.), Pedestrian evacuation and dynamics. Springer. Chen, Y. (2005). MSc dissertation, Department of Transport and Planning, Technical University of Delft. Daamen, W. (2004). Modelling passenger flows in public transport facilities. Delft University Press. Fruin, J. J. (1971). Pedestrian planning and design. New York: Metropolitan Association of Urban Designers and Environmental Planners.
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Hankin, B. D., & Wright, R. A. (1958). Passenger flows in subways. Operational Research Quarterly, 9, 81-88. Helbing, D., & Molnar, P. (1995). Social force model for pedestrian dynamics.= Physical Review E, 51(5), 4282-4286. Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine. Cambridge University Press. Hoogendoorn, S. P., & Bovy, P. H. L. (2000). Gas kinetic modelling and simulation of pedestrian flows. Transportation Research Record, 1710, 28-36. Hoogendoorn, S. P., & Bovy, P. H. L. (2004). Pedestrian route choice and activity scheduling, theory and models. Transportation Research B, 38, 169-190 Hoogendoorn, S. P., & Daamen, W. (2002). Extracting microscopic pedestrian characteristics from video data. In CD-ROM Proceedings of Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. Kerridge, J., Armitage, A., Binnie, D., Lei, L., & Sumpter, N. (2004). Monitoring the movement of pedestrians using low-cost infrared detectors: Initial findings. TRB Washington, CD-ROM, paper 2004-000185. Kerridge, J., Keller, S., Chamberlain, T., & Sumpter, N. (2005). Collecting, processing and calculating pedestrian flow data in real-time. Submitted to Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2005. Kessel, A. et al. (2001). Microscopic simulation of pedestrian crowd motion, In M. Schreckenberg & S. Sharma (Eds.), Pedestrian evacuation and dynamics (pp. 193-202).. Springer.
Kukla, R., Kerridge, J., Willis, A., & Hine, J. (2001). PEDFLOW: Development of an autonomous agent model of pedestrian flow. Transportation Research Record, 1774, 11-17. Landis, B. W. et al. (2001). Modelling the roadside walking environment: Pedestrian level of service. Transportation Research Record, 1773, 82-88. Mansi, M. V., Porter, S. G., Galloway, J. L., &. Sumpter, N. (2001). Very low cost infrared array based detection and imaging systems (SPIE). Aerosense 2001. Orlando, FL, 17-19 April 2001. Miyazaki, K. et al. (2003). Behaviours of pedestrian groups overtaking wheel chair user. In E.Galea (Ed.), Pedestrian and evacuation dynamics 2003 (pp. 267-278). CMS Press, University of Greenwich. Predtechenskii, V M., & Milinskii, A. I (1969). Planning for foot traffic flow in buildings. New Delhi: Amerind Publishing Co. Timmermans, H. J. P. et al. (1992). Transportation systems, retail environments and pedestrian trip chaining: Modelling issues and applications. Transportation Research B, 26(1), 45-59. Wilkinson, G. (2005).Undergraduate dissertation, School of Computing, Napier University. Willis, A. Gjersoe, N., Harvard, C,. Kerridge, J., & Kukla, R. (2004). Human movement behaviour in urban spaces: Implications for the design and modelling of effective pedestrian environments. Environment & Planning B. Willis, A., Kukla, R., Kerridge, J., & Hine, J. (2001). Laying the foundations: The use of video footage to explore pedestrian dynamics in PEDFLOW. In M. Shreckenbers et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (pp. 181-186). Berlin: Springer.
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Chapter III
Navigating a Speckled World: Interacting with Wireless Sensor Networks Matthew Leach Napier University, UK David Benyon Napier University, UK
A bst ract The Speckled Computing project is a large multisite research project based in Scotland, UK. The aim of the project is to investigate, prototype, and produce tiny (1mm3) computational devices, called Specks, that can be configured into wireless sensor networks, called SpeckNets. Our particular interest is in how people might interact in such environments, what interaction tools they require, and what characteristics are required to be provided by the operating system of the Specks. Interaction in these environments places the human physically inside an information space. At one time, the human may be interacting with one Speck, at another with a hundred, and at another with several thousand. Moreover, the Specks themselves have no input method, apart from their sensors, and no output display. We explore these issues through taking some theories of distributed information spaces, some design principles from information visualization, and report on some empirical studies of prototypes and simulations that have been developed.
Int roduction We are interested in human interaction with a new type of information space, one that involves computer miniaturisation, sensors, wireless com-
munication, and networking. Devices are on the verge of reaching a critical point of size and affordability that will allow them to be embedded in our environment in their thousands, sensing their surroundings and opening up a broad range
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of new applications. They will also be embedded in clothing and jewellery, truly becoming part of the fabric of the world. It is a vision that was foreseen by Mark Weiser (2002), who coined the term “ubiquitous computing”; but it is likely that even he would be astounded at the miniaturisation of technology that has made his prediction possible, in projects such as SmartDust (Hoffman, 2003), and more recently the Speckled Computing Consortium (2006). The vision of Speckled Computing is the development of miniature 1mm3 computational devices (Specks), which will be simple, small, and cheap enough to be distributed in their thousands (Arvind, 2005). They will combine wirelessly to form a unique class of wireless sensor networks (WSN), called SpeckNets. Some SpeckNets will be embedded in the fabric of buildings, but others will be spontaneously created by scattering Specks over an area or even spraying them onto surfaces. The combined storage and processing of the microchip revolutionised computing in the late 20th century. Specks, offering combined processing, storage, sensing, and communications, are expected to revolutionise computing in the 21st. The characteristics of SpeckNets give rise to some specific requirements for human-SpeckNet interaction. First, the invisibility of the Specks and the lack of any perceptible output mechanism means the human-Speck interface must be provided through some other mechanism. Second, people may literally be immersed in the network surrounded by Specks, of various types in various configurations, in three dimensions; they are not interacting with a device, they are inside an information space. Third, the SpeckNet may not know about the physical characteristics of the real world. In stable SpeckNets, it would be possible for the network to develop a model of the world and relate this to its own configuration. However, in recently created or in movable SpeckNets, the human will have to supply information about the physical world. Finally, there is the issue of
scaling interaction from individual Specks to potentially thousands. Previous work on WSNs and human interaction with these networks identifies a number of different types, depending on the method of deployment of the nodes, their size, the communication mechanism, and the network’s topology (Romer & Mattern, 2004). There have been many WSN applications, each with its own interaction methods and techniques. For example, a sensor network has been embedded within a vineyard. The system would automatically trigger an event, such as turning on sprinklers when soil moisture is low or firing air cannons when birds were detected (Burrell, Broke, & Beckwith, 2004). Another example is the self-healing minefield (SHM), a minefield that can reorganise itself (through mobile mines) to cover gaps that appear (Meriall, Newberg, Sohrabi, Kaiser, & Pottie, 2003). ARGO is a global network with an intended 3,000 sensors that will monitor salinity, temperature, fresh water storage, and so forth, of the upper layers of the oceans, and transmit results via satellite. Deployment began in 2000, and as of February 2006, 2,385 floats were in operation (Argo Project Office, 2006). In most of these applications, data was sent from the network to a remote database. In contrast, we are interested in WSNs where the person is inside and interacting with the network directly; SpeckNets. We describe a generic tool-kit for humans interacting with SpeckNets, focusing specifically on the unique characteristics that separate them from other WSNs. In the next section, we elaborate on the requirements that this interaction demands. This is followed by some background theories that have helped to shape the tools. Some studies of alternative designs are described that help to evaluate the effectiveness of both theory and tools. The chapter closes with some conclusions and indications concerning the future of interaction in WSNs.
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Requi re ments The aim of our work in the Speckled computing consortium is to explore the requirements of human-SpeckNet interaction (HSI). One reason for doing this is to inform the design of the operating system that will be developed for the Specks. Another is to elaborate on possible scenarios and applications. A typical scenario of HSI could be a surveyor performing an inspection on a domestic building. The surveyor would arrive at the house and be alerted that he or she has entered a SpeckNet. As part of the initial detection, the interaction tool will have initiated a harvest of top-level information, such as the types of sensors in the network, date of installation, and so forth. The surveyor would be presented with this information and then make a decision as to whether or not this information is valuable. The surveyor may be interested in the SpeckNet’s ability to supply moisture information, and initiate a harvest for values from moisture sensors over a certain threshold. This information would be retrieved and presented along with metadata (e.g., time of last reading) and new options (e.g., hourly readings available for last three weeks). Having identified an area in the network that is of interest, the surveyor would be guided to the appropriate room to view the information. At this point the surveyor may interact with the representation to gain a better understanding (e.g., rate of spread, severity, etc.). This investigation may initiate a new search for more information. This scenario captures many of the characteristics of HSI. The network will initially require detection. The user will not necessarily know the location extent or other characteristics of the network. Detection is concerned with ensuring people know that they are in an information space, and how they know what is connected to what. The user will also be concerned with finding out what information is available from the information space, how it is distributed, and how to
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control the harvesting of the content. As a realtime system, it would be infeasible to work with all of the data. Instead, the user will control the nature of the data harvested, making it dynamic and user-driven. The user needs to know what types of Specks there are in the SpeckNet, what attributes they have, and what the values of those attributes are and can be. Whilst this data is of a limited range (since Specks have a limited number of sensors), the data may have other attributes, such as when it was collected. One consideration is the best way to present information. A visualisation is one way, but auralisation is another. Since the user may be fully immersed in the network in three dimensions, the presentation needs to make them aware of the scope of the network. Presentation of the details of the individual Specks and groups of Specks is also needed. The relative position of the user to any particular piece of data is required so people can find their way to a specific physical location. As they are so small, Specks cannot have their own display other than perhaps a light. This is clearly inadequate to provide details of the sensor states and readings over a period of time, and so we must find an alternative. Increasingly developers of WSN applications are beginning to understand the benefit of displaying sensor readings in a real-world context. Although due to the tradition of viewing data remotely, a virtual environment is often used to represent the real world with the sensor data overlaid. An early example was the fire alert system reported by Boone (2004), where sensors attached to trees in a forest could detect fires, and display the location in a 3-D GIS-based virtual environment. The benefit of the system was the ability to use the map to coordinate fire crews tackling the fire. A more recent system combines real-time sensor data (including meteorological readings as well as live audio and video) with the Google Earth application to allow an environment to be monitored remotely by anyone with
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an Internet connection (University of California, 2006). The ARGO project now also allows the tracking of its sensor buoys using Google Earth, but they are yet to integrate the sensor readings into the application. The intended miniature dimensions and large numbers of Specks mean that they will blend into our surroundings to the point where they are indistinguishable from it; floors will store data on human traffic, machines will store data on their operational performance, buildings will store data on conditions, such as dampness within their walls. Our physical environment will be coated with a layer of data, with no fixed point of interaction; instead, a person will interact directly with the object they want to gain information about. The combined requirement for possibly complex information tied to devices too small and numerous for individual interfaces makes the use of augmented reality (AR) a natural choice for HSI. A live video stream can be enhanced with computer-generated objects (rendered so that they appear to be within the actual scene) and then presented to the user. We have not explored immersive displays in our work, preferring to use non-immersive displays, as have been tried elsewhere, including computer monitors (Belcher, Bilinghurst, Hayes, & Stiles, 2003), PDAs (Wagner & Schmalstieg, 2003), and mobile phones (Moehring, Lessig, & Bimber, 2004). The single largest technical issue remaining in augmented reality is that of accurately aligning the real and virtual environments, a process called registration (Azuma, Baillot, Behringer, Feiner, Julier, & MacIntyre, 2001). A number of systems allow the technology used for performing this registration to also offer 3-D input. A notable example is the ARToolkit (HitLab-Washington, 2006); a software library that includes facilities required to optically track images placed in the real world, and align computer-generated graphics based on their position and orientation. Figure 1 shows how ARToolkit has been used in our previous work to both allow the alignment
of 3-D geometry with real objects (in this case playing cards), as well as tools for interacting with the AR representations (in this case a proximity selection paddle). Like many researchers, we continue to use ARToolkit to allow us to focus on issues of interaction, rather than the technical issues of implementing a working AR system.
N aviga ting Info rmation S pace There are a number of conceptualisations of human-computer interaction that foreground the distributed nature of information spaces. Benyon (2001; 2005) highlights how information is distributed both physically and conceptually, and this leads to the need for people to navigate the information space. These ideas have been applied to Web site design (Benyon, 2006). Wright, Fields, and Harrison (2000) present a model of distributed information spaces, called the resources model, in which they focus on information structures and interaction strategies. Distributed cognition (DC) similarly argues that people make use of resources in the world as a central part of their cognitive activities (Perry, 2003), as does situated cognition (Lave, 1988). There are also similarities with Pirolli’s “information scent,” where people
Figure 1. Paddle selection in Yu-Gi-AR
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Navigating a Speckled World
are seen as “informavores”; utilising our evolved food-foraging mechanisms for information gathering (Pirolli, 2003). In information foraging theory, people shape their behaviours according to the information ecology. Information foraging theory shows how cognitive and perceptual abilities lead to information finding. Information scent (e.g., good labelling) is concerned with proximal cues by which to judge distant information sources. Optimal foraging is the trade-off between finding, choosing, and handling information DC foregrounds the importance of cognitive artefacts such as checklists, books, and diaries, and how they are distributed across an environment and are fundamental to cognition (Perry, 2003). DC is concerned with knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world (Zhang, 1997). The resources model (Wright et al., 2000) identifies some specific type of knowledge that designers can place in the world such as plans, histories, and action prompts. In the navigation of information space approach (Benyon, 2001; Benyon, 2005; Benyon, 2006; Benyon & Höök, 1997), lessons from environmental psychology and urban design are used to inform the design of information spaces. Techniques, such as developing maps, guides, signposts, and landmarks, help people to develop both survey knowledge of the space and route knowledge to help them move through the space. Three activities are highlighted by the approach. Wayfinding is concerned with how people reach a known destination. Exploration is concerned with finding out about the size and topology of a space. It is concerned with establishing a horizon, and how one part of the environment relates to others A third activity that is undertaken in information space is object identification. Here people are less interested in the location of objects, or finding a path, or reaching a goal. Object identification is concerned with finding categories and clusters of objects spread across environments, with finding
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interesting configurations of objects, and finding out details about the objects. The human interacting with a SpeckNet is physically inside both an information space and a physical space. People have to physically move through the physical space in order to select the part that interests them. They must also understand the information that is available in the SpeckNet and how it is distributed. We frame our discussion in terms of object identification, exploration, and wayfinding in information spaces. Figure 2 shows the sequence of these activities in the context of human-SpeckNet interaction. The process begins at the exploration stage, gaining an understanding of the data distributed through the SpeckNet. Having chosen sensor readings of interest, the user moves (wayfinding) to reach the real-world location where they were generated. At the object identification stage, the user attempts to make sense of the data in the context of the environment. If satisfied, then the user can move onto other tasks; but if more information is required, then the process is repeated, leading to a spiralling pattern as they drill-down into the information space. The actual tasks at each stage of the model could range widely, from complex to trivial. ExFigure 2. Model of Human-SpeckNet Interaction
Navigating a Speckled World
ploration may require the comparison of thousands of data values, or a single one; wayfinding could require crossing a city, or simply turning around to deal with data behind you; object identification could require a user to cross-reference information from several different regions, taking into account the context of the environment and decades of professional experience, or simply being shown which switch to flick. However, despite the huge range of scenarios, the sequence is seen as fundamental to human-SpeckNet interaction. Three main studies have been undertaken that explored principles of supporting users in HSI. The Specktator investigation explored user interaction issues within a small-scale SpeckNet, using hardware prototypes. A group of users carried custom-built Speck devices (a Specktator) that monitored their level of activity (through a pedometer) and visits to designated locations (via Specks distributed in the environment). Two groups of four people took part in the investigation, carrying the Specktator devices for a period of 3 hours. At the end of each trial, the participants regrouped and were presented with visualisations of the data collected. The AR HomeFinder investigation explored information visualisation techniques in an augmented reality setting. A tablet PC (in essence, a 10.4” flat panel screen with a computer built into it) was used in conjunction with a Web cam to produce a handheld AR window. This allowed a virtual representation of houses to appear on a tabletop, which 20 participants (12 male, 8 female) then explored in three tasks. The focus of this work was on the selection of objects via a pen on the screen, or by targeting the camera (gaze method) and on adjusting parameters again via the pen and then by using the motion of the camera to interact. The study also explored providing an overview of the data through glyphs. The virtual warehouse investigation explored the requirements for wayfinding tools (as well as the requirements for a SpeckNet to support them), using a virtual environment. Two wayfinding
tools were compared (using waypoint markers and using relative positioning), and presented to the participants in a random order.
O b ject Identifica
tion
In an information space, people need to find out what objects exist, their attributes, and what the values of these attributes are. Our experience with the object identification issues in SpeckNets comes from the Specktator and AR HomeFinder investigations. For the Specktator, the chosen scenario was for each Speck device to function as a virtual pet, where its appearance would reflect the underlying data (see Figure 3). A semantic relationship was chosen where, for example, encounters with a Speck placed in a kitchen area would affect the appearance of the character’s torso (from thin to fat), walking activity would affect limb size, and visits to a print room would affect head size (which assumed printed documents would be of an intelligent nature). The decision to convey context via a feature and representation of a data value via the appearance of that feature is based on the work of Chernhoff, who used faces to represent chemical samples (Chernoff, 1973), and Spence, who used glyphs for both house and ship representations (Spence, 2001). The aim is to present a recognisable link between appearance and underlying data. Figure 3. Specktator character representation
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Although the study was small in scale, the results were promising, in that the semantic relationship proved easily understandable. Although perceived accuracy of the representations was low, and indeed it would have been impossible to view a character and determine, for example, how many trips had been made to the kitchen, the purpose was for comparison and for this, the visualisation seemed appropriate. The AR HomeFinder investigation also explored the use of glyphs. Two types of glyphs were used as shown in Figure 4; simulating the potential for different types of Specks. House glyphs represented three values (number of bedrooms, size of garden, and cost of property), and school glyphs represented two values (number of students and pass rate). In the representation, there were 18 houses and 4 schools shown in an area approximately 25cm x 25cm. Part of a questionnaire, presented during the trial, asked participants what they expected the components of each glyph to represent. Results show that a literal mapping, such as tree size conveying size of garden, could be intrinsically understood (chosen by 19 out of 20); but an abstract mapping, such as platform height for price, was less obvious (correctly chosen by 12 out of 20). Participants were capable of identifying extreme values (e.g., most expensive house) almost immediately; even if a subsequent search was
Figure 4. Example glyphs from AR HomeFinder
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performed to confirm their initial choice. However, identifying actual values was still problematic, and so it is clear that some method of obtaining detailed values must accompany a glyph system; the most obvious of which is to allow selection of a glyph and present its values. The selection task in the AR HomeFinder application required participants to find a house of a given price from the 18 presented. Two types of interaction were explored. A gaze interaction required the user to centre the camera on an object. After a few moments, the camera would zoom in to provide details. A pen interface required the user to tap on the object to initiate the zoom function. The task was performed twice using a pen (or stylus) to select objects on the tablet PC, and then twice more using the camera to target the AR houses (termed gaze selection). Figure 5 shows the task completion times for the four repetitions, and it is clear that although initially poor performance (Gaze1), the gaze selection method quickly improved. However, despite promising results, the gaze interaction was not well received, being reported as both harder to select buildings, and harder to remember which buildings had been checked. In addition, 14 participants preferred the pen method against 4 that preferred gazing.
Navigating a Speckled World
Figure 5. Comparison of selection methods 180 160 T im e ( sec o n ds)
140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Pen1
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E xplo ration In some SpeckNet applications requiring human intervention, the data interpretation phase may be trivial, in that the network need only identify the point of intervention (e.g., directing firefighters to a fire). In other applications, the user may need to perform some exploratory analysis (e.g., the ALife system described by Holmquist, Gellersen, Kortuem, Schmidt, Strohbach, Antifakos, Michahelles, Schiele, Beigl, & Mazé, 2004, where the user must prioritise trapped avalanche victims). While the results reported for object identification show how individual Speck values can be interpreted; they do not address the large potential scale of data that may be presented. The problem is, in essence, one of applying information visualisation principles to an AR environment. Specifically, the principles of overview, zoom, and filter, which were proposed as fundamental by Shneiderman (Card, MacKinlay, & Shneiderman, 1999). The second part of Shneiderman’s mantra, details on demand, is covered by our category of object identification. These issues were considered in the second and third stages of the AR Homefinder investigation. Creating a semantic relationship between the underlying data and the glyph representa-
tion is particularly important in enabling users to develop an overview of the data. Lee, Reilly, and Butavicius (2003) report that glyphs perform poorly when compared to spatial visualisations, which they attribute to the glyphs being read sequentially (that is, each consulted in turn until the required one is found). Our contention is that a semantic link creates visual cues or, following the metaphor of information scent, an aroma that can be recognised much more easily. Some support for this position was presented in the object identification section, where we reported that participants in the third stage of the AR HomeFinder investigation could identify extreme values almost immediately (i.e., not sequentially searching to find them). In addition, participants were given additional tasks of identifying trends (similarities) and exceptions to those trends, and again it was observed that the majority were initially drawn to the correct objects. An interesting observation relating to identifying trends is that, for example, the question “Identify a group of 1 bedroom houses” is open to interpretation as to what constitutes a group. Figure 6 shows the layout of houses on the map used, and circles with letters are one-bedroom houses. Five participants only identified the A’s as constituting a group, while the remainder
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Navigating a Speckled World
Figure 6. Clustering map
included B, with the exception of one individual who marked all. The second stage in the AR HomeFinder study explored another tool in exploration, the use of dynamic filtering to focus attention. Participants were given a range of prices and asked to report the number of houses that were within this range. First, they used a standard dynamic filter scroll bar using the pen, and then a novel method of using the camera to interact. The inspiration for the second method came from Beardsley, Van Baar, Raskar, and Forlines (2005), who used the tilting of a projector to control scaling of an image. The principle of the interface is shown in Figure 7, and consists of two components on the tablet PC screen; the selection rings and dynamic filter range bar (left). The image on the right shows the interface in use. The selection rings are fixed in 3-D space, and so, movement of the camera allows Figure 7. AR HomeFinder tilt interface
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the user to left or right rings, to adjust lower or upper boundaries respectively. Actual adjustment of the value is achieved by tilting the tablet PC to the left or right, moving the parameter range to the left or right in turn. Tilting to a more extreme angle causes the parameter to adjust at a more extreme rate. Participants were comfortable using the pointclick method and were both fast and accurate in completing tasks (only one participant gave an incorrect answer, which was due to mishearing the range values). In contrast, the tilt interaction method performed very poorly, taking over twice as long to use, had three non-completions and three incorrect responses. Many design lessons were learnt that could improve the tilt interaction method, but it is unlikely to match the ease of use found from point-click interaction.
Wayfinding While the previous sections lay out a foundation for interacting with SpeckNet data from a region directly in front of the user, they may not always begin adjacent to it. Since the points of interest are generated from sensor readings, they could occur anywhere within the SpeckNet; and since we are interested in individuals interacting with these points directly, additional tools are required to guide them to the locations. The majority of our understanding in this area comes from the Virtual Warehouse investigation (shown in Figure 8).
Navigating a Speckled World
Figure 8. Screenshot from Virtual Warehouse
Directing someone to a particular area of interest within the SpeckNet is problematic since we cannot assume that they have previous knowledge of the environment. As such, some sort of navigational aide is required to direct them towards the destination. In contrast to the majority of existing guidance applications (e.g., GPS road guides), a SpeckNet is not expected to easily have access to global environment information. It is expected that the network will be able to generate knowledge of its own distribution, but will have limited knowledge of non-Speckled entities, and also limited knowledge of an environment’s permeability to humans (i.e., the paths by which a person can move through the environment). The first guidance tool tested was the familiar waypoint system used in the majority of navigational systems (in one form or another), where the user is given a sequence of points to pass through. The second method provided the user solely with relative information of direction and distance, which is the minimum information expected to be available from the SpeckNet (see Figure 9). Figure 9 shows a comparison of the wayfinding times (i.e., from starting point to goal) for each of the collection conditions (W for waypoint, R for relative). The six paths are arranged from the most simplistic on the left (a short distance with one wall obstructing), through to the most complex on the right (longer distance with several
Figure 9. Guidance methods (left: waypoint; right: relative)
intervening walls and different vertical level). In each pair, the result from using the relative system is shaded to aid comprehension. The most noticeable result is that use of the relative system always resulted in a wider range of collection times than the waypoint system. In runs 1, 2, and 3, for example, the times were found to not be significantly different statistically, but it is clear that some individuals performed significantly worse using the relative system. And indeed, the average standard deviation for the relative system over the six runs was twice that of the waypoint system. Runs 2 and 3 included unexpected blockages, which led to the increased collection times, and also less difference between the waypoint and relative systems. This is to be expected, since the waypoints did not take into account the blocked paths (simulating the intrusion of an object that the SpeckNet is not aware of), participants were forced to deviate from the path and find their own route, as with the relative system. This shows that although substantially superior, the benefits of the waypoint system could easily be compromised if the paths that it believes exist become blocked. Table 1 shows the results of T-Tests comparing the waypoint and relative collection times for each run. Note that generally speaking, the difference becomes more significant (closer to zero) as the paths become more complex. The notable exceptions are runs 2 and 3, which as mentioned previously, is attributed to the inclusion of blockages removing the benefits of waypoints.
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Navigating a Speckled World
Table 1. Statistical comparison of waypoint and relative system collection times. A value of less than 0.05 is considered to be significant
Run 1 2 3 4 5 6
Exploration is supported by providing an overview of the whole space, and the distribution of different types of Specks and different values for the attributes of Specks. Object identification is supported by having clear, semantic representation of attributes and their values. The recommendation for waypoints in SpeckNet applications is not necessarily straightforward. Ideally, all applications would use them because of the proven benefits they offer, but there is the issue that their implementation has a cost. Either the SpeckNet itself must generate paths or they must be set manually by an operator, which has processing or manpower costs, respectively. As shown in the Virtual Warehouse study, if there are unexpected barriers, then this cost could be paid with no benefit. As such, the recommendation is dependent on the application. If there are substantial horizontal and vertical barriers (such as in a building) then waypoints are almost certainly required, but if not (as an extreme example, a SpeckNet embedded in a sports field to monitor the turf) then a relative system could suffice. The huge difference for split levels suggests that performance gains could be achieved by using floor level indicators. Obviously, this would be an added feature, requiring additional resources, but offering rough location information could be a compromise between the two tested systems.
T-Test probability 0.2434 0.6003 0.6576 0.0675 0.0012 0.0005
However, despite the better performance of the waypoint system, we should not forget that the participants did still manage to reach the goal using the relative system. Therefore, the main conclusion from these results should be that it is possible to navigate using only relative information, but with penalty increasing over distance.
C onclusion Our work on human-SpeckNet interaction has answered several specific questions about this particular type of HCI, and has raised some more for future forms of interaction. Wayfinding in SpeckNets is assisted by providing waypoints. Figure 11. Collection times in Virtual Warehouse 450 400
T im e ( sec o n ds)
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The results also confirmed the use of glyph representations as an ideal solution for SpeckNet data (encoding both data type and value, easy interpretation through use of semantic links, etc.), and so the general tools for querying an environmentally distributed database were identified. However, some shortcomings were also identified, namely, that data outside of the field of view was often overlooked. It is likely that the poor feedback on the gaze selection was due to participant’s overall perceived performance and unfamiliarity. The results indicate that it is a promising method, and it is hoped that users would become more comfortable with it through use. In contrast, attempts to adjust parameter bounds using camera interaction were largely unsuccessful. Gazing may have performed better because it is a natural Human activity in the real world; looking at something you are interested in. Adjusting values is a less natural task, and so better suited to other form of interaction (either screen based or physical widgets). Of course, there will be many novel devices, visualisations, and other displays designed to optimise performance in particular types of environment. However, we are seeking something more generic; the types of tools and widgets needed to support basic human-SpeckNet interaction. Primarily, this will be implemented on some personal device that mediates interaction with the SpeckNet, but the design principles also need to be supported by the operating system and data structure of Specks themselves. A number of features of Specks and SpeckNets have been identified. Specks need to be able to identify their structure and attribute values in some accessible way, such as an XML description. Specks need some distance measure so that the SpeckNet can generate an overview of the mesh and indicate the network’s horizon. Specks need a way of propagating the relationships between two
locations in the SpeckNet, dependent on specific attribute values, so that the person can navigate from one location to another. Interacting with SpeckNets provides an insight into the range of interaction issues that will arise in the future of pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Firstly, unlike most other forms of HCI, interacting with SpeckNets separates device and display. This issue generalises to other areas, such as context aware applications and other forms of ambient computing, where the smooth transition of an interaction from one device to another is a key requirement. SpeckNets are also examples of interaction with multiple processors, another departure from traditional HCI. There are potentially multiple levels of interaction as the user interacts with different numbers of processors. We think that our too -kit will generalise to operate up and down through levels of abstraction. We have begun to investigate issues of immersion in the 3-D of the SpeckNet, but more has to be done. There are also issues concerned with probing the SpeckNet in different ways. Currently, we just retrieve data from the SpeckNet, zoom, and filter based on attribute values. It would be interesting to explore other methods of probing that depend on the sensors the Specks have. For example, in a Specknet with light sensors, one could probe using a torch, but it is not clear what the functionality of such interactions might be. Human-SpeckNet interaction is just one of the many new forms of interaction that will become familiar over the coming decades. There are clearly some significant new challenges for HCI, but it is also encouraging to see some of the principles that have evolved over the last 30 years do generalise to the new forms. More natural forms of interaction, such as the gaze zoom, will be developed that emphasise an appropriate “human scale” to the interaction.
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Refe rences Argo. (2006). Five years of progress, five decades of potential. Retrieved September 26, 2006, from http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/FrAbout_Articles. html Arvind, D. K., (2005). Speckled computing. In Proc. Nanotech 2005, 3, 351-354. Azuma, R., Baillot, Y., Behringer, R., Feiner, S., Julier, S., & MacIntyre, B. (2001). Recent advances in augmented reality. IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 21(6), 34-47. Beardsley, P., Van Baar, J., Raskar, R., & Forlines, C. (2005). Interaction using a handheld projector. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 25(1), 39-43. Belcher, D., Bilinghurst, M., Hayes, S. E., & Stiles, R. (2003). Using augmented reality for visualising complex graphs in three dimensions. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2003) (pp. 84-92). Benyon, D., & Höök, K. (1997). Navigation in information spaces: Supporting the individual. In S. Howard, J. Hammond, & G. Lindgaard (Eds.), Human-computer interaction: INTERACT’97, (pp. 39-46). UK: Chapman & Hall. Benyon, D. R. (2001). The new HCI? Navigation of information space. Knowledge-based Systems, 14(8) 425-430. Benyon, D. R. (2005). Information space. In C. Ghaoul (Ed.), The encyclopedia of humancomputer interaction. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference.
Retrieved September 25, 2006, from http://www. sensorsmag.com/articles/0904/14/main.shtml Burrell, J., Broke, T., & Beckwith, R. (2004). Vineyard computing: Sensor networks in agricultural production. IEE Pervasive Computing, 3(1), 38-45. Card, S. K., MacKinlay, J. D., & Shneiderman, B. (1999). Readings in information visualisation: Using vision to think. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Chernoff, H. (1973). The use of faces to represent points in k-dimensional space graphically. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 68(342), 361-368. HitLab-Washington. (2006). ARToolkit Homepage. Retrieved September 24, 2006, from http:// www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/ Hoffman, T. (2003). Smart dust: Mighty motes for medicine, manufacturing, the military and more. Computer World: Mobile/Wireless. Retrieved September 24, 2007, from http://www.computerworld. com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,79572,00. html Holmquist, L. E., Gellersen, H-W, Kortuem, G., Schmidt, A., Strohbach, M., Antifakos, S., Michahelles, F., Schiele, B., Beigl, M., & Mazé, R. (2004). Building intelligent environments with Smart-Its. IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 24(1), 56-64. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice, mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge, UK: CUP
Benyon, D. R. (2006). Navigating information space: Web site design and lessons from the built environment. Psychnology, 4(1), 7-24.
Lee, M. D., Reilly, R. E., & Butavicius, M. A. (2003). An empirical evaluation of Chernoff faces, start glyphs, and spatial visualizations for binary data. In Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific symposium on Information Visualisation, 24, 1-10.
Boone, G. (2004). Reality mining: Browsing reality with sensor networks. Sensors Mag, 21(9).
Meriall, W. M., Newberg, F., Sohrabi, K., Kaiser, W., & Pottie, G. (2003). Collaborative networking
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requirements for unattended ground sensor systems. In Proc. IEEE Aerospace Conference, 5. Moehring, M., Lessig, C., & Bimber, O. (2004). Optical tracking and video see-rhrough AR on consumer cell phones. In Proceedings of Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality of the GI-Fachgruppe AR/VR (pp. 193-204). Perry, M. (2003). Distributed cognition. In J. Carroll (Ed.), HCI models, theories and frameworks. Boston, MA: Morgan Kaufman. Pirolli, P. (2003). Exploring and finding information. In J. Carroll (Ed.), HCI models, theories and frameworks. Boston, MA: Morgan Kaufman, Romer, K., & Mattern, F. (2004). The design space of wireless sensor networks. IEEE Wireless Communications, 11(6), 54-61. Schmidt, A. (2005). Interactive context-aware systems interacting with ambient intelligence. In G. Riva, F. Vatalaro, F. Davide, & M. Alcañiz (Eds.), Ambient intelligence: The evolution of technology, communication and cognition towards the future of human-computer interaction. IOS Press. Shneiderman, (1988). Designing the user interface (3rd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
SpeckNet (2006). Speckled Computing Consortium. Retrieved April 28, 2006, from http://www. specknet.org/ Spence, R. (2001). Information visualization. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. University of California. (2006). James Reserve: Data management systems. Retrieved September 21, 2006, from http://dms.jamesreserve.edu/ Wagner, D., & Schmalstieg, D. (2003). First steps towards handheld augmented reality. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Wearable Computers (p 127). Weiser, M. (2002). Mark Weiser (1952-1999), The founder of Ubiquitous Computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 1(1). Wright, P. Fields, R., & Harrison, M. (2000). Aanalyzing human-computer interaction as distributed cognition: the resources model. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(1), 1 – 4. Zhang, J. (1997). The nature of external representation in problem solving. Cognitive Science, 18, 271 – 295.
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Section II
Social and Organisational Space
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Chapter IV
Contested Terrain:
Place, Work, and Organizational Identities John Willy Bakke Telenor Research and Innovation, Norway Tom Erik Julsrud Telenor Research and Innovation, Norway
A bst ract Workplaces are key loci for expressing and studying organizational identity, even in distributed work. In organization studies, there is a growing recognition of the importance of spatial processes, and workplace design has become an instrument for organizational change. This chapter explores organizational identity through a change process where the office layout was redesigned to strengthen organizational identity and increase productivity. The study shows that identity processes get shaped by the material environment and by technologies enabling distributed and mobile work. It also shows that previous events frame the interpretation of current processes. The chapter is based on a qualitative and quantitative study of the national branch of an international oil company.
Int roduction [T]he physical setting is not a naked container for organizational action […], but a context that selectively solicits – and hence, so to speak, ‘cultivates’ – all our senses
- Gagliardi (1996, p. 565)
The goal of this chapter is to strengthen the understanding of workplaces as key loci for expressing and studying organizational processes, even in distributed and “location-independent” work. A starting point for this chapter is the observation that there has been a change of focus in organization studies, where place has strengthened its explanatory role in discourses of
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Contested Terrain
organizational processes during the past decade. The interest in organizational space and place is expressed in the growing interest in workplace design as a source for understanding and shaping organizational processes, and the incorporation of spatiality and corporeality in social science studies (cf. Benko & Strohmayer, 1997; Bourdieu, 2000). The argument is substantiated through a qualitative and quantitative study of the national branch of an international oil company. This case study explored identity processes where workplace design and technologies entered the discourses on organizational identity and other organizational processes. The interest in space planning and placemaking is a practical concern in enterprises, of which the growing number of handbooks and consultancy offers is an indication (cf. Duffy, 1997). The case company informing this chapter was about to go through a process of workplace restructuring when the authors were contacted in order to make a study. Through the case study, it turned out that in addition to the current changes, a previous restructuring made more than 10 years ago was still seen as an important event in the corporate history, and an issue for discussions about organizational identity. This interest in place, space, and spatiality may be seen as a puzzle, since it emerged in the aftermath of the “digital revolution,” where information and communication technologies (ICT) were seen to supersede a number of traditional social categories, promising an annihilation of the role of locality and distance, whereby a frictionfree society will be achieved. This perspective is expressed in a series of titles in popular writing, such as The death of distance, The weightless economy, and The digital nomad (Cairncross, 1997; Coyle, 1998; Makimoto & Manners, 1997), and is also found in the emergent literature on the networked society (cf. Castells, 1996). In the area of workplace studies, one can find similar expressions: In a pioneering study of teleworking, it was argued that: “The office
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– the site where information is generated, processed and exchanged – has ceased to have any fixed geographical boundaries. It exists only as a network – the ‘elusive office’ has arrived” (Huws, Korte, & Robinson, 1990: 220). Nevertheless, companies are still interested in architecture and space solutions, and workplace policies seem to uphold the importance of “coming to work” in a literal sense, although workplace practices have become more complex than the choice between the main office and the home-based workplace, as depicted in the early telework studies. This development makes it even more important to address the role of place for mobile, flexible, and “location-independent” work.
S pace and Or ganiza tional Processes The growing interest in space and spatiality has been termed a “spatial turn” in the social sciences (cf. Benko & Strohmayer, 1997). This spatial turn represents a reaction to a dominant orientation in the social sciences, where “the social” is interpreted in immaterial terms: [M]ost of the research and analysis published in the arena of organizational theories and management studies describe the following, somewhat bizarre phenomenon: as soon as the human person crosses virtual or physical threshold of an organization, s/he is purged of corporeality, so only his or her mind remains (Strati, 1999, p. 3).
O rganizations as S patial and Material S ystems Space and spatiality, as well as the closely related concepts materiality and corporeality, do not have a well-established position in sociology and organization studies. Instead, these concepts have been relegated to neighbouring fields, in the ever more-fragmented social sciences. In sociol-
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ogy and organization studies, there has been a methodological abstraction from spatiality and materiality that have been seen as accidental qualities of social systems. In the field of organization studies, the process of abstraction, or “de-materialization,” has been part of an elaborate strategy of establishing organization studies as a distinctive and influential field (cf. Bakke, 2005; Røvik, 1998). This is seen explicitly in the works of Chester Barnard, an influential author in the establishment of organization studies. He developed the very concept of “organization” through an abstraction from the physical: The term “organization” is reserved for “that part of the cooperative system from which physical environment has been abstracted” (Barnard, 1968: 67). Barnard also argued for a “de-personalization” of organization studies: “[I]f persons are to be included within the concept of ‘organization’, its general significance will be quite limited” (Barnard, 1968: 72). The emergent field of organization studies chose to describe organizations in terms of status, power, and (formal) communications channels (also known as organizational charts); or of recruitment, rewards, and promotions. The recent advent of postmodern studies may be seen to continue this dematerialized approach to organization studies through the weight on narratives, interpretations, and sensemaking; all approaches where the material and spatial are neglected or (at best) tacitly implied. Spatiality and materiality have a central position within human geography and urban studies, where it is argued that place is a “meaningful location” (Cresswell, 2004: 7), and where there is a core interest in the spatial ordering of social processes: “The ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people” (Hillier & Hanson, 1984: 2). Insights from geography, architecture, and urban studies have (re-)entered the field of organization studies, and of social theory in general, where location, distance, and spatial configurations enter the vocabulary.
Similarly, insights are drawn from studies of the corporeality of organization members, acknowledging the importance of the “human embodiment as a multidimensional medium for the constitution of society” (Shilling, 2005: 24, italics in original). Corporeality can be seen as a main approach encompassing quite diverse themes, such as the gendering of organizational processes, disciplinary processes, emotion work, and studies of face work, and the presentation of self in organizations (cf. Alvesson & Billing, 1997; Goffman, 1971). A spatial understanding of organizations is also able to give a richer understanding of organizational processes, processes that, to a large extent, deploy spatial metaphors, such as organizational boundaries, front stage and back stage, globalisation, positioning, and “moving up the corporate ladder” to get a “corner office.” For instance, the discussion of organizational boundaries can draw insights from urban studies, where the notion of “place” has been given a meaning beyond just a designated set of square kilometres; place has been described through the activities of members, acting, and enacting over larger territories in “networks of social relations and understandings, […] where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself” (Massey, 1997: 322), a perspective that is equally fruitful for understanding organizations. There is a growing number of contributions trying to address the spatiality and materiality of organizations, acknowledging that organizational activities are located in space and place, and including the impact of architecture, technologies, and other artefacts. Gagliardi argues that artefacts “make materially possible, help, hinder, or even prescribe organizational action,” and they “influence our perception of reality, to the point of subtly shaping beliefs, norms, and cultural values” (1996, p. 568, italics in original).
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Technology studies have also been influential, although in an ambiguous way, for reassessing the role of spatiality and materiality in organizations. As indicated in the beginning of the chapter, there is a widespread assumption that communication technologies will make distance and location irrelevant, whereas detailed studies of work processes clearly demonstrate that technology, as an integral part of the organizational functioning, is situated in an organizational context, is structuring interaction, and is giving selective access to services (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Luff & Heath, 2000). An influential, synthetic perspective on the role of the “physical structures in the organization” is developed by Mary Jo Hatch (1997), who has developed a conceptual framework identifying geography, layout, and design as three main dimensions of physical structures, where these dimensions are seen to influence key aspects of organizational functioning, such as communication, interaction, and status (cf. Figure 1). This conceptual framework is a fruitful starting point for an elaboration of how the concepts shall be defined, for studies exploring the mechanisms connecting the concepts, and for an identification of areas not well elaborated by the model. The framework developed by Hatch is challenged by the phenomena of distributed and
technology-augmented work, modes of work that contest any logical, clear-cut distinction between location, layout, and design. Hence, there is a need to incorporate technologies into this framework, and the ability of technologies for interconnecting places. One analytical approach for elaborating the mechanisms whereby the “physical structures in the organization” are relevant for organization processes is through the concept of affordances, a concept introduced by the psychologist J. J. Gibson in a study of visual perception, where he argued that “[t]he affordances of the environment are what it offers to an animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (1979, p. 127, italics in original). The concept has been brought to popularity in studies of design, human-computer interaction (HCI), and organization studies (cf. Gaver, 1991; Norman, 1989; Sellen & Harper, 2001). Gaver deploys the term as a way of “focussing on the strengths and weaknesses of technologies with respect to the possibilities they offer the people that might use them” (1991: 79). According to Gaver, “[a]n affordance of an object […] refers to attributes of both the object and the actor. This makes the concept a powerful one for thinking about technologies because it focuses on the interaction between technologies and the people who will use them” (1991: 79-80), thereby
Figure 1. Physical structures in the organization (Adapted from Hatch, 1997)
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representing a way of avoiding technological and architectural determinism. Similarly, Gibson’s “ecological” focus on the “complementarity of the animal and the environment” (ibid.) serves as a criticism of the ideas of technology as neutral instruments, and architecture as neutral containers for activities. The concept of affordances introduces a unifying perspective on how characteristics of technologies and the physical environment together can provide an environment for working. This has motivated the establishment of a framework, encompassing technologies as well as architecture and other artefacts, describing workplaces as hybrid infrastructures for work (Bakke & Yttri, 2003), drawing on studies identifying an infrastructure as being a common base for diverse activities, without determining them (quite similar to the discussion of affordances); being embedded into other structures; and being transparent and taken-for-granted; while becoming visible upon breakdown (cf. Star & Ruhleder 2001). The notion of infrastructures for work represents a selective focus on the work-related characteristics of the material environment. In spite of the increased interest in the materiality, spatiality, and corporeality of organizations in the last decade (cf Gagliardi, 1996; Hassard, Holliday, & Willmott, 2000; Strati, 1999), Pfeffer’s comment that “[t]he effects of physical design on social behavior remain relatively unexplored in the organizations literature and in related social sciences”, still seems valid (Pfeffer, 1997, p. 198).
Workplaces and O rganizational Identities Organizational identity has emerged as an important theme in recent studies of work. Together with related concepts, such as trust, social capital, and organisational culture, organizational identity is assumed to play an important role for the development of knowledge in modern organisations, thereby establishing ties to the fields of knowledge management, and workplace loyalty.
One reason for the interest in organizational identities is the increasing flexibility and mobility in working life, and the quest for something stable in all the changes, although flexibility and change have also been seen as arguments against an essentialist understanding of identity: The meaning of identity (...) refers to both persons and things. Both have lost their solidity in modern society, their definiteness and continuity. The world constructed of durable objects has been replaced with disposable products designed for immediate obsolescence. In such a world identities can be adopted and discarded like a costume (Bauman, 1997, p. 88). Instead of seeing organizational identity as part of the unchangeable in organizations, organizational identity can be seen as a self-reflective process going on in organizations that are “… formed by a process of ordered inter-organizational comparison and reflections upon them over time” (Albert & Whetten, 2004, p. 98). This position refers to what has been called a relational view on identity (with references to Mead, 1934 and Goffman, 1971), seeing identity as a product of ongoing social and symbolic interaction. The physical environment of the workplace is, to a large extent, involved in the ongoing process of identity construction. This is seen through corporate expressions of architecture and design, (internal) workplace design, and artefacts, as well as the employees’ actions, such as territorial behaviour and workplace personalization (see Gagliardi, 1990; Jones, 1996).
A C ase S tudy of Place, Wo rk, and Or ganiza tional Identities Place and organizational identities were explored through a case study in one branch office of an international company in the petroleum sector. The background for the case study was that
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the authors were invited to follow a process of workplace reorganization, primarily to explore job satisfaction with the new environment, where the issue of workplace identities soon became the focal centre of the study. The case study organization is the Norwegian sales and marketing department of a large European (actually international) company in the petroleum sector. Our study of the branch office was conducted in 2003-2004, and was initiated since the company had planned to change the physical working environment, and wanted an outsider’s view on the change process.
T he C ase S tudy Methodology The methodological approach chosen was to conduct semistructured group interviews with managers and employees respectively. The group interviews were conducted in two instances: before and after the changes of the workplace, covering a time span of 9-10 months. In total, six managers and eight employees were interviewed, although not all of them were present in both group interviews. We also conducted a survey of employees and managers within the department, providing information about daily use, and general satisfaction with the new office solution. In addition to the interviews and the survey, we conducted observations within one zone within the branch office, being the primary workplace for ca 25 people; we had a number of informal conversations; we also had the pleasure of participating in a marketing event. Through the combination of approaches, we performed a methodological triangulation in the study of the department, with an ethnomethodological perspective (cf. Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000) as the primary approach. Throughout the study, we tried to capture and understand how people talked about the new workplace, but also what the workplace meant to them, and how it was included in their everyday actions and behaviour.
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Workplace C hanges We were invited to study one set of workplace changes to take place in the end of 2003. The changes involved the sales and marketing department, one out of several collocated departments. The entire unit of the case company rented two floors in a shared office building, with the sales and marketing department located on one floor (ca. 55 persons), with other organizational units on both floors. During the interviews, it proved difficult to get even a simple description of their current workplace without invoking numerous references to a previous change process, more than a decade ago, when the entire unit had moved to the current site. Narrations of this first move were still present in the office discourses; hence, there is a need to give a brief description of events from the early 1990s. At that time, the several hundred employees moved from a downtown landmark building with a clear corporate profile, into an anonymous, shared office building in a less central part of the city. This move also involved the change from individual offices into open-plan offices for the majority of the employees. This first move and accompanying changes were motivated by the need for cost reduction, as the company suffered from the then low oil prices. The current change involved a series of physical changes, although the overall design of large, open-plan offices remained unchanged. The most visible change was the establishment of an informal meeting place with a coffee machine, newspapers, and resting chairs for informal meetings, socializing, and informal communication. Further, a large meeting room was established. All the employees had a locker and shelves for their belongings. There had been attempts to establish a clear-desk policy for nonterritorial working, but eventually most of the employees had individual desks that were personalized with professional and personal artefacts. The menu of workplaces also included “booths” for phone conversations,
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and a number of smaller rooms for meetings and project work. The employees had developed a set of “house rules,” emphasizing peace and quiet in the work zones, and low ring tones on the mobile phone, among other issues. At our first visit, when they were planning the change process, the house rules had a prominent place at the entrance of the zone; at the second visit, we found the house rules tucked away under a staircase. An implication of the establishment of the new, informal meeting place was that the work areas had to be condensed. Another part of the new design was the reshuffling of employees’ primary location, in order to get tight “neighbourhoods” with close colleagues, and proximity to printer rooms and other facilities. For some of the employees, this represented a major change of office environment, since they were relocated from smaller, sometimes personal offices, into larger open-plan solutions. Some of the sales people were in a somewhat special situation, since they were expected to be out of the office most of the working day. Hence, it was assumed they did not need a fixed workplace. In the plans for the new workplace, there had been a pool of places for the salespeople, but these places had instead been allocated to those present. As it turned out, the salespeople developed the habit of using their home as their primary work base (aided by technology prepared for home-based work and mobile working), although they could reserve a project room or “borrow a workplace” from colleagues not present (as they expressed it), while at the department. A children’s “workplace” was created, allowing parents to bring their children to work if, for instance, school was closed. A final physical instalment was an internal staircase between the two storeys of the unit, to facilitate access between the different departments within the unit. An “environmental gardener” was also appointed, with the responsibility of keeping the workplace neat and tidy, and to provide fruit, flowers, and newspapers to their colleagues.
The employees were clustered in two major groups; one group that used most of their time on customer-related work on the telephone, handling incoming calls from business customers; the other working as a mobile customer support-team, visiting customers at their sites. Thus, a particular segment of the employees were spending much of their time outside the building as “mobile workers.” The department managers also spent time outside the building, mostly in meetings at other locations, or at customers’ sites. A survey of the managers’ and employees’ work practices showed that they spent most of their time doing individual work tasks, supplemented with informal and formal meetings (see Figure 2). The majority proved to be satisfied with the new workplace. About 75% of the managers and employees said the new office functioned well for them in their daily work, whereas a minority was not satisfied; 15 % said that they were somewhat dissatisfied, and 6% were highly dissatisfied with how the new workplace affected their work. The main reasons for the negative judgments were noise and visual distractions.
Motivations for the C hange Process The transformation process was initiated and managed by the human resources team, and the managers at the marketing department with a degree of employee participation. The interviews showed a multitude of motivations for the transformation process, relating to the expected new ways of working, to expected impacts on workplace culture and symbolism, and to facilities management issues, such as number of square meters per employee.
Globalization and Flexibility During the interviews, the strategic reasons behind the transformations and, in particular, the problem of being integrated in larger organizational units, were emphasized. One main driving
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Figure 2. Mean use of time for department managers, employees, and temporary employees
force for the workplace changes was a change in the organizational form of the entire company: Until now, each country had been a separate, and fairly self-administered unit, whereas after the change, there were instead cross-national units. This implied that executives and employees in the different functional units would be distributed, and dispersed all over Europe: The “command lines” would criss-cross the continent, instead of following national borders, as they were used to. This led to the wish to establish measures to maintain organizational identity in this process of globalization. As one manager said: “We used to be one department. Now everyone reports to different European managers. […] The workplace change was a reaction to these developments. We want to act as a [unified] team even though we report to different managers”. From the management’s point of view, there was an expressed wish of enacting a dynamic organization, in terms of flexibility, as well as ability and willingness to change: “We need to have an organization that is used to change, and that accepts that the world is not static”. Another manager commented on the on-going process of re-organizations: “Instead of having people complaining about the re-organizations, we have
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had an positive change process related to this [the workplace redesign]”, and the less courteous comment: “People are now so used to changes, they no longer complain.”
Interaction … and Control A main instrument for achieving the global, flexible organization was the change of the physical layout of the workplace. The open-plan solution was seen to facilitate interaction and in-group learning, and to promote a sense of identity and belonging to the workplace and to the company. The reshuffling of the employees’ workstations, to achieve closer proximity with the employees with whom one was working most closely, was seen as a major step towards this goal. The employees reported that the rearrangement had made it even easier to contact others, and that the workplace was a very social one. One manager said: “Even if the noise stresses others, there is a natural learning process. You hear what’s going on and that’s an advantage”. This is corroborated by our observations, where we frequently could see and hear interactions related to professional and personal issues. We also observed the ease of inviting colleagues to
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a spot outside the informal meeting place for a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a chat. There could, however, be too much interaction, both among colleagues, of which some said it was “too social here,” and between employees and managers, as expressed by one employee: “I could sometimes wish that the managers had offices.” The meeting place itself was not that much deployed, even some nine months after the change was completed. The coffee machine was frequently used, and newspapers were browsed, but few used the meeting place for informal conversations and meetings.
Culture and Symbolism Any office encompasses an abundance of cultural expressions and symbolism. Although the building of the case study company was an anonymous, shared office building (where it could be difficult to find the right entrance); once inside, the company’s imprint was found almost everywhere: we found a large number of corporate symbolic artefacts, from oil barrels to ballpoint pens, with the company logo imprinted, posters from advertisement campaigns, and copies of corporate publications. These expressions were, to a certain extent, aimed at visitors, in particular, those in the entrance area. One manager commented that the changes had made the workplace more presentable: “There has been a transformation from a production facility into a proper office.” The majority of changes were, however, primarily in the employees’ zones. These changes were accompanied by instances of decoration and personalization of the workplace. There was also an active arts and culture programme, with invitations to go to theatres and to art exhibits. Also in terms of workplace symbolism, the move, more than 10 years ago from a highly profiled building downtown, was still an active frame of interpretation for the current changes. This was perpetuated by the fact that one competing company happened to be located in a signature
building vis-à-vis. This made the anonymity of the company within a shared office building even harder to accept. The two most visible innovations in the workplace change project ,the informal meeting place and the stairs connecting employees in the two levels in the building, may of course be seen in functional terms, but the low usage rates, and the high level of associated or ascribed meanings, make the symbolism of these artefacts very powerful. For the day-to-day activities, the sales personnel in need of a temporary place read the territorial practice of personalizing the desks by leaving personal and professional items, and even having nametags on what might have been nonterritorial offices, as signs of exclusion. We were also told about a number of ad hoc events, some of a social character some aimed at the public as well as present and future customers. As one example of the latter, we were invited to a promotion campaign, where the company sought public visibility through a boat race, promoting the company’s petroleum products, as well as showing presence and coolness.
T he T ransformation Process The current transformation process invoked a series of physical changes of the workplace, and that was the reason we were invited. The motivation for these changes was on the organizational side, due to the stronger integration into the international working of the company, where the Norwegian unit in the entire company was replaced by Norwegian nodes in an international organizational network, and the acknowledged need for the company to be more responsive to market fluctuations. There was a degree of employee participation in the change processes, as changes were introduced through a series of workshops where different issues were discussed, such as the distribution of desks, the size of the different office areas, types of furniture, and so forth. During the interviews,
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it was interesting to learn that the managers’ and employees’ perspectives differed to a large extent, related both to the process, and to the resulting solution. One manager said: “There has been a broad involvement of the employees in the process where we decided what this workplace should look like. There has been no dictate”, whereas one employee said: “I have heard that those who disagreed strongly […] were squeezed out of the groups […]. Those who work in the service center have not been heard, and [they] are the ones who have to take the tough consequences.” In a harsh comment, another employee added: “The whole process has been a solo-play by the managers. The groups [for participation] have only been a spectacle or a cover-up”. Although the majority of answers were well between these extremes, and both employers and employees clearly saw positive and negative aspects of the process and the resulting solution, there were also several tensions between their perspectives and understanding of what had happened. Clearly, the meaning of the new workplace was, to a large degree, open for discussions and (re)negotiations.
D iscussion
and Implica tions
The case study clearly demonstrates that the corporate building, interior design, and organizational artefacts were central loci for organizational processes, even for this node in a multinational, networked organization, with a certain degree of mobile and location-independent work. To a large degree, processes shaping and changing organizational identification and organizational storytelling centred on the physical workplace. Materiality and physical structure did, however, get new implications when challenged by new distributed, mobile, and location-independent forms of work. Technologies for distributed work did by no means annihilate the meanings of space and distance; instead, both technologies for distributed work and the range of available workplaces 50
(with a centrality of the open-plan workplaces, in both literal and symbolic senses) did bring the multitude of choices on the agenda. The change process, being embedded in both a company-internal context, and a national context involving experiences from other companies, did demonstrate that choices were possible, making “office design” and “office work” even less a neutral, taken-for-granted fact, but a result of priorities, norms, and choices. Thereby, workplace design became one additional arena for office politics, and for renewed discussions and interpretations of what a “workplace” means and implies in both functional and symbolic terms. It is interesting to observe the relational character of the perception and interpretation of the material organization. Comparisons with “relevant others,” in particular, the neighbouring competitor, as well as previous history (both organizational and individual) proved influential. In particular, the process of moving from a large, centrally located “flagship building” (with cellular offices) to the current, more discreet location with open-plan offices, was still an active frame of reference for both managers and employees, more than 10 years later. This episode also demonstrates that not only the immediate presence, and associated qualities of material artefacts, are of importance; also, the remembrance and perceived absence of artefacts, such as the previous building and its cellular offices. The current transformation was interpreted through the previous change process: Where the previous process, to a large extent, was centred on the physical workplace, the current one focussed on the organizational side. The apparently more modest physical reorganization of the workplace, materialized through the office redesign and the recognition of mobile work within and outside the organization, did have the implication of being part of an organizational change; hence, the physical transformation was not purely physical, it had connotations to the organizational changes as well.
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The case study demonstrates how organizational processes, in casu the workplace changes, are grounded in storytelling, rhetoric, and symbolic aspects, where the somewhat different perspectives of the managers and the employees emphasized different aspects of the process. There is a need to incorporate technologies into the discourses on organizational identity, since technologies change the range of possibilities for action, interaction, and cooperation, thereby challenging the immediate conception of space and place, as seen through the most mobile employees and their troublesome allocation to a workplace (or rather, workplaces). It is also seen in the changed integration into the European organization. Here technologies help enact tensions between the local and the global/European. These tensions fit, by the way, well with the perspective from urban geography introduced previously, where place is seen as a relational term where “a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself” (Massey, 1997: 322). – There is more than one answer to what is “within” and “outside” an organization. Based on the case studies, it seem reasonable to say that dematerialization and location independence for corporations, vis-à-vis customers, does not imply location independence for corporations vis-à-vis their employees, neither is there an insurmountable tension between materiality and narrativity, since narrativity and sensemaking are anchored in material environments. According to Gieryn, buildings stabilize social life, although imperfectly: “Buildings don’t just sit there imposing themselves. They are forever objects of (re)interpretation, narration and representation – and meanings or stories are sometimes more pliable than the walls and floors they depict. We deconstruct buildings materially and semiotically, all the time” (Gieryn, 2002: 35). At the beginning of the chapter, a puzzle was presented by asking about the motivation for the
interest in place, space, and spatiality in a time when information and communication technologies (ICT) were seen to supersede a number of traditional social categories, promising an annihilation of the role of locality and distance. One counterargument against the alleged dematerialization of society is that there is still a need for accommodating employees, wherever they are, and that collocation of activities may be efficient for certain activities and operations. It is tempting to argue that with the facilitation by information and communication technologies to perform almost every activity from any chosen location, the activities that are not so easily de-located, the activities that, to a large extent, are supported by collocation may become the scarce resource for which physical planning must accommodate.
A ckno wledg ment The research was supported in part by the Research Council of Norway as a part of the I-TEMA project, and by the Nordic Innovation Center as part of the DEKAR-project. We are grateful for the employees and managers in our case study that generously shared their experiences with us.
Refe rences Albert, S., & Whetten, D. A. (2004). Organizational identity. In M. J. Hatch & M. Schultz (Eds.), Organizational identity: A reader (pp. 89-118). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alvesson, M., & Billing, Y. D. (1997). Understanding gender and organizations. London: Sage. Alvesson, M., & Sköldberg, K. (2000). Reflexive methodology. London: Sage. Bakke, J. W. (2005). The materiality of sensemaking. Paper presented at the 21st EGOS Colloquium, Berlin, June 30 – July 2, 2005.
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Bakke, J. W., & Yttri, B. (2003). Hybrid infrastructures for knowledge work. In Proceedings from the 4th International Space Syntax Symposium, London. Barnard, C. (1968). The function of the executive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bauman, Z. (1997). Postmodernity and its discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benko, G., & Strohmayer, U. (1997). Space and social theory: Interpreting modernity and postmodernity. London: Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cairncross, F. (1997). The death of distance: How the communications revolution will change our lives. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell. Coyle, D. (1998). The weightless world. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cresswell, T. (2004). Place. Oxford: Blackwell. Duffy, F. (1997). The new office. London: Conran Octopus. Gagliardi, P. (Ed.) (1990). Symbols and artifacts: Views of the corporate landscape. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Gagliardi, P. (1996). Exploring the aesthetic side of organizational life. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. R. Nord (Eds.): Handbook of organization studies (pp. 565-580). London: Sage. Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances. In Proceedings of CHI’91 (pp. 79-84). New York: ACM. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gieryn, T. F. (2002). What buildings do. Theory and Society, 31(1), 35-74.
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Goffman, E. (1971). The presentation of self in everyday life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism. London: Routledge. Hassard, J., Holliday, R., & Willmott, H. (Eds.)(2000). Body and organization. London: Sage. Hatch, M. J. (1997). Organization theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hillier, B., & Hanson, J. (1984). The social logic of space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huws, U., Korte, W. B., & Robinson, S. (1990). The elusive office. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Jones, M. O. (1996). Studying organizational symbolism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Keith, M., & Pile, S. (Eds) (1993). Place and the politics of identity. London: Routledge. Luff, P., & Heath, C. (2000). Workplace studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makimoto, T., & Manners, D. (1997). Digital nomad. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Massey, D. (1997). A global sense of place. In T. Barnes & D. Gregory (Eds.), Reading Human Geography (pp. 315-323). London: Arnold. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Norman, D. (1989). The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday. Pfeffer, J. (1997). New directions for organization theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Røvik, K. A. (1998). Moderne organisasjoner. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Sellen, A. J., & Harper, R. H. R. (2001). The myth of the paperless office. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
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Shilling, C. (2005). The body in culture, technology & society. London: Sage. Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (2001). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. In J. Yates & J. van Maanen (Eds.), Information technology and organizational transformation (pp. 305-345). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Strati, A. (1999). Organisation and aesthetics. London: Sage.
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Chapter V
Technosocial Space:
Connecting People and Places Anne Sofie Laegran Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway & Research Centre for Social Sciences, Edinburgh, UK
A bst ract The chapter is based on a study of Internet cafés in Norway, and interrogates the way space and place is produced in interconnections between people and technology in the Internet café. Drawing on actornetwork theory and practice-oriented theories of place and space, the Internet café is understood as technosocial spaces producing connections between people and places at different levels. Firstly, the Internet café can be understood as a hybrid, a site where users and technologies as well as space are coconstructed in entwined processes where gender, as well as other identity markers, are central in the way the technology, as well as the cafés, develop and are understood. The next level looks at the production of Internet cafés as technosocial spaces. Despite being perceived as an “urban” and “global” phenomenon, Internet cafés are configured based on local circumstances, in urban as well as rural communities. Differing images of what the cafés want to achieve, as well as material constrains, are at play in this process. Finally, the chapter shows how Internet cafés are places of connections, producing space beyond the walls of the café, linking the local into a translocal sphere.
Int roduction In recent years, we have seen several studies exploring the intersection of space and new information technology. Much of the early generation writings about the Internet suggested a placeless character in which electronic media implied a loss of sense of place (e.g., Meyrowitz, 1985), where
the online experience gave a feeling of being “nowhere” or “everywhere,” independent of the place you are located physically (Negroponte, 1995), and where you could live a “life on the screen” separated from “real life” (Turkle, 1995). Manuel Castells (1996) argued for an emergence of a network society structured around a bipolar opposition between the “Net” and the “Self,” and
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Technosocial Space
in which “spaces of flows” will replace “spaces of place.” These studies may serve as examples of what Daniel Miller and Don Slater (2000) call the “early generation” studies of the Internet, which talked of cyberspace and virtuality and how the Internet was built up by spatial metaphors. However, there was as Stephen Graham noted in 1998 (p167): “little conscious thought put [in]to thinking conceptually about how new information technologies actually relate to the spaces and places bound up with human territorial life.” Although recognizing that virtual communities may exist based on shared interests and feeling of community independent of geographical location, this chapter will argue against the placeless character of electronic communication. To understand the uptake and use of new technologies, it is important to study the variety of places and social circumstances in which it is used. Most studies on the use of ICTs in particular places have focused on computers in the home or office or among young people in schools. Few studies have gone out of the home and work spheres and looked at how computers and the Internet are integrated in public leisure places. This chapter takes us to the Internet café, a contemporary meeting place resembling any other café, where at the same time new forms of socialities develop in the intersection of the technology present and the clientele. The study is based on ethnographic studies of four Internet cafés in Norway conducted from 1999 to 2002. In line with other recent research on the Internet (e.g., Miller & Slater, 2000: Valentine & Holloway, 2002; Woolgar, 2002), I will show how the Internet, as well as Internet cafés, are integrated in practices taking place in the spaces of everyday life and thus must be understood according to local context. This is, however, not just a study about technology “in space.” Following Henri Lefebvre (1991), I shift the focus from things in space to the production of space, where the Internet café
is seen as a mediator in different ways within the local community, as well as reaching out of the local community through the Internet. To understand this process, a concept is required that sensitises us to the need to integrate space, social relations, and the materiality of technology, when studying phenomena like the Internet café. The point is to emphasise that technical or material, social, and spatial aspects need to be analysed, not as causal relationships, but as intersecting and transgressing moments. This will be developed in the following, drawing on theories from cultural and social geography and science and technology studies (STS), in particular, actor-network theory (Latour, 1987; 1999; Law & Hassard, 1999). STS is founded on the idea that the social and the technical/material must be seen as part of the same entity rather than as opposites in a causal relationship to each other. Social and cultural geography, on the other hand, challenges common conceptualisations of space as frame in which social practice occurs, but sees the social and spatial as integrated in practice. I take my point of departure from an understanding that merges all these elements together; technology, the social and the spatial are entwined or interwoven in a “seamless web.” From an STS point of view, this implies a greater awareness of the spatial aspect in the study of socio-technical relations, an awareness of how place and space matters in the design and use of technology, but also how design and use of technology do not just occur in space. In fact, technological artefacts and agents are forces or mobile actants that produce space. From the view of social and cultural geography, on the other hand, this approach implies a greater awareness of the role of technology in the production of space, not as a more or less determining structure, but as actants that, through relations to other human as well as nonhuman entities, are actively involved in the production of space.
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Technosocial Space
Producing S pace in the Inte rsection of the S ocial and Mate rial From the 1990s, there has been an increased focus on space in social theory. This is partly related to the increased focus on globalisation, but also prevalent in studies focusing on situatedness and the body. However, as Kirsten Simonsen (1996) noted in the mid-1990s, there is maybe less consciousness as to how space is conceptualised; what do we mean by the concept? This question is still highly relevant, in particular, when discussing space and spatiality in interdisciplinary contexts. Among works that do problematise space and place, Simonsen (1996) identifies three main conceptualisations that, put together, form a triangle implying they are all somewhat interrelated despite their difference. The probably most common understanding is to see space as material environment, the natural or culturally produced surroundings we all live in. This conceptualisation is common within architecture and traditional regional and landscape geography, but is also prevalent in some sociological studies, particularly those of urban space. It claims, to a greater or lesser degree, that physical surroundings have causal or conditional power on social phenomena. Space as difference is the second category that Simonsen identifies in postmodernist and poststructuralist thinking as well as in economic regional geography based on critical realism. This conceptualisation focuses on how places and localities are different in material as well as immaterial sense and thus, provide different conditions for social practice and processes. The problem, however, is that little is said about how these differences are produced. Space thus still becomes a background or a container in which social action takes place. Simonsen’s point is that although both these categories of space address important issues, within social theory, it is only by taking the start-
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ing point in social, or more specifically human, practice that the relation to material environment, as well as spatial differences, can be understood and explained (ibid.). She continues to say that in social theory, materiality has to be studied, as mediated through and subordinated to social practice. This can be done in three modes; as study of the production, the use of, or the ascription of meaning to the material environment. The differences that space makes are also created through social practice. This brings us to the third, and for Simonsen, the preferred conceptualisation of space; space as social spatiality. This is in line with much writing within human, particularly cultural and social geography in the last couple of decades, where practice or doing is seen as constitutive for, as well as constituting space (see for example Massey, Allen, & Sarre, 1999; Thrift, 1996). I take the point of departure in practice when I develop the concept technosocial space. However, in line with the thoughts of, amongst others, Nigel Thrift (1996), Nick Bingham (1996), and Sarah Whatmore (2002), I do not follow Simonsen’s ideas in the way she treats the material. To me the concept of practice does not only include interaction between human beings. Material objects are also included, not as frame or structure, and not as entities with causal power in themselves, but as actants that, through relations with other nonhuman as well as human entities, may have agency in the production of space.
T echnosocial S pace: T he Material and the S ocial In recent years, a few studies have merged insights from science and technology studies (STS), particularly actor-network theory, into social and cultural geography (e.g., Bingham, 1996; Graham, 1998; Kirch, 1995; Laurier & Philo, 2003; Murdoch, 1997; Thrift, 1996; Whatmore 2002). Common to these authors is an attempt to integrate material objects and other nonhuman entities into social theory, not as a determining
Technosocial Space
structure, but as actants that, through the way they relate to humans as well nonhuman entites, are active in the production of space. This builds on a relational understanding of agency as an effect distributed through a heterogenous arrangement of materials rather than as the intentional activity of human beings (Law & Hethrington, 2000). The main inspirations for this thinking are actor-network theory (Callon, 1987; Latour, 1987; 1999; Law & Hassard, 1999) and the cyborg metaphor as developed by Haraway (1991; 1997). Actor-network theory takes a rather pragmatic approach in its concern to describe how things occur; in particular how things are moving and are moved; how actants move each other. Imbued in this is a call for symmetry in the analytical treatment of nonhumans, including material technical objects, and humans; arguing that there is no a priori difference between the two when analysing socio-technical relations. The point is to identify properties borrowed from the social world to socialise nonhumans and likewise, properties from the nonhuman world in order to naturalise and expand the social realm (Latour, 1999). One of the main points is to deconstruct the dichotomies of the subject and object and the human and nonhuman, thus defining social in a very different way from the way it is traditionally perceived (ibid.). Nonhumans are, as Latour says, the “missing masses,” knocking on the door to be counted into the fabric of social theory (Latour, 1992). They participate in building heterogeneous networks that bring together actants of all types and sizes, and neither simple technological determinism nor social constructivism are sufficient to describe these networks (Akrich, 1992). Agency in this context is not defined as intentionality. The material-semiotic approach argues that entities like material objects take their form and acquire their meaning in relation to other entities (Law, 1999). Thus, entities have no inherently essential qualities. Following from this, agency is produced in the relation between actants, it is not a property imbued in the actants
(Thrift, 1996). Agency is understood as mediations where nonhumans and humans are interlinked in such a way that we can talk of transformations; as opposed to understanding the relation between human and nonhumans as intermediaries where the action can be identified by its input and output (Latour, 1999). As Callon (1987) says, this goes against mainstream sociology (and social science in general), where practices or intentions of human beings have priority in the analyses, and humans are the only ones to be counted as actors. The concept technosocial1 space helps to highlight the role of technology in the production of space without falling into technological or social determinist traps. Following from this, technosocial space is produced through technosocial practices involving humans as well as technological artifacts. Technosocial practice means that technology, as well as its users, are part of the mediation or transformation that practice implies. These practices are in themselves spatial, at the same time as they produce space. Technosocial practice embraces the material “doing,” the concrete movements of humans and nonhumans in space. In this “doing,” we make use of symbols as well as discourses related to technology as well as other aspects of society; symbols and discourses that simultaneously are produced through technosocial practice. In the Internet café, as we shall see, the artefacts of the computers, the Internet connection, as well as the décor and design of the café space, are of importance for the technosocial practises that develop.
Internet C afés as T echnosocial S paces Internet café or cyber café is a label used to describe many different settings providing Internet access in public space, and have in the last decade become a ubiquitous feature of urban and, to a lesser degree, also rural space all over the world. While some Internet cafés are analogous to provisions to make other technologies
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accessible in public, such as telephone booths, or laundrettes, where there may be some social interaction between the users as well, others put a lot of effort into developing a good ambience where the sociality around Internet usage, as much as access in itself is the attraction. While there were several attempts to provide telecommunications in public contexts from the 1980s, the opening of Cyberia in London in 1994 launched the wave of Internet or cyber cafés as we know them now. Cafés have always found new ways of being centres for communication, as newspapers as well as financial institutions have developed closely knitted to cafés (see e.g., Sennett, 1977). Thus, computers put together with nice coffee in a trendy café ambience was a novelty in terms of public access to the new technology, but part of a history with long roots. In the UK, although not providing financial support, the government saw commercial cyber cafés as one of many significant places for the distribution of access to the Internet (House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology 1996 cited in Liff, Steward, & Watts, 2002). The view of the UK government was that such cyber cafés would provide a supportive environment for new users, crossing boundaries between education and leisure through the café environment. They did, however, consider this as a transitory phenomenon and a means to achieve home access (ibid). Internet cafés have played a minor role in Norwegian policies on access to the Internet, and were not mentioned in the first significant policy report on Norway and the information society, published after the widespread utilisation of the Internet (Ministry of Transport and Communications, 1996). It seems that rather than developing new institutions, the idea has been to use existing infrastructure like work places, schools, and libraries in the strategies to include people to the Internet. Local governments have been involved in setting up Internet cafés in some places. Interestingly, however, this has not been linked to ICT policies, but to youth and rural development. 58
In 1998 and 1999, there was a heated debate on the future of the countryside in Norwegian newspapers, after statistics had shown the migration stream still going from rural to urban areas. A headline in Dagbladet suggested a simple prescription: “More Internet and cappuccino to the countryside,” following up in the same article by quoting one of the youth interviewed saying “An Internet café would have been fine. 2” This was before Internet cafés with cappuccino really had established themselves in the bigger cities, yet it was interpreted as an urban trend diffusing to the countryside. The Internet café, in this context, was not interpreted just as a place with Internet access, but with cappuccino and possibly other trendy features attached. Quite a few Internet cafés of this sort were opened in small towns and rural areas in Norway, and increasingly commercial Internet cafés have opened in the cities, some with cappuccino, some not. Most of the socially oriented commercial Internet cafés in Norway are based around gaming, and may be seen as an extension of another phenomenon linking computers to sociality: “computer parties.” These are noncommercial gatherings where youth meet in big sports halls and the like, bring their own computers, and link them together to socialize, play, and compete with programming and computer games (see Nordli, 2003). Internet cafés provide use of a local area network (LAN) as well as access to the Internet, and may thus work as a permanent mini-computer party. Some of the cafés also arrange organized events in LAN. The gaming community, in particular the enthusiastic players of a “first person shooter” game called Counter Strike, are, to a large extent, organized and identified through a network of game-oriented Internet cafés. Programming enthusiasts, however, would find the machines in an Internet café insufficient for their use. Many of these cafés put less effort into coffee and the like than the “trendy” version of the net café, and may be characterised as computer game centres or a modern version of pin-ball halls, as much as
Technosocial Space
cafés. In this study, only one of the cafés is run as a commercial business, and this is the one that is most strongly linked to the game culture, being open around the clock and providing space for enthusiasts playing several days in row. UK statistics from October 2001 showed that out of the 53% of the adult population that had accessed the Internet that month, 10% had done so from an Internet café or shop, the same figure as for libraries (Bowman, 2002 in Liff & Laegran, 2003). This shows that Internet cafés were significant as a point of accessing the technology. In Norway, monthly statistics on Internet access and use ask where access was reached, but the figure for other places than school, home, and work are too small to be presented in the statistics.3 Based on the numerous interviews and conversations I had with the users of the Internet cafés, I can say that most, if not all, the users in this study have access to the Internet in other places as well. When they go to the Internet café it is not because it is a “last resort access” (Liff & Lægran, 2003). Rather, it is a positive choice because the Internet café has other attractions, such as faster lines, games, and a gaming community (particularly for online based gaming), and because they provide a venue to meet friends. The Internet café thus complements or enhances the experience of Internet access they could have elsewhere (ibid.)
C ase S tudies: C afés
F ou r Inte rnet
The chapter is based on a larger study of young people and technologies in and around four Internet cafés in rural and urban spaces in Norway. The empirical fieldwork consisted of interviews and group interviews among users of the cafés, including people working there, in addition to participant observation during several visits from 1999 to 2002. Before analysing the different levels at which space is produced, I give a presentation of the cafés.
The first case is a trendy café located in Fjordvik , a beautiful village situated by the fiord, with a particular cultural profile comprising a fine art gallery, a jazz orchestra, and other features not necessarily mainstream in rural villages. The café was started by a group of students at the secondary school with support from enthusiastic adults. The local government, as well as local enterprises, provided financial support. The design of the Internet café was in line with the artistic orientation, using the trendy interior including fine art from local artists, as well as cappuccino, in promoting the café. Together with the Internet, this contributed to the café being seen as a new and cosmopolitan invention in the countryside. The target group was defined as “youth between 0 and 100,” and included pensioners who came to play bingo during daytime once a week. Quite a few adults would also drop by for a coffee, for instance, after a visit to the art gallery. Anyway, the main target group among the youth were those aged 16 to 20, mostly students at the upper secondary school. The Internet provided a new activity, but maybe more than that, it had significant symbolic meaning: 4
It’s really cool that we have Internet at the café. Internet is in a way something that goes along with this kind of café – like those in the cities. But I go there just to meet friends – to do nothing with somebody (Boy, 18). The Internet is important in constructing an “urban” atmosphere, but as this boy says, a lot of the clientele came to the café to have a meeting place to “do nothing” with mates. It soon became clear that there was a divide in interest among the clientele. Whereas young boys came to use the computers, most of the students (boys and girls) and adults (mainly women) came for the café atmosphere; the nice cappuccino and carrot cake. This actually created two different places within the café; the café, characterized by lowvoiced talking and discussions over coffee, and
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the computer corner, characterized by a noisier and more frantic way of showing enthusiasm and eagerness. Occasionally, the café guests would go to the computer corner and check their e-mail, but they would often find that part of the café less inviting. After a period with some tension between the two groups, a wall was actually built between the computer corner and the café itself to prevent the noise from the computer corner disturbing the other guests. The trendy café and the somewhat nerdy image of computing did not go together as an integrated entirety. The wall, however, made the two coexist in the same space although in different places. The use of the computers behind the walls consisted mainly of game play in networks for the younger boys, and surfing of the Internet for information, discussion groups, and keeping in touch with friends elsewhere for the older youth. The guidelines suggested the café provide a meeting place for all, possibly breaking down barriers between various groups of youth. However, the café seemed to communicate to few, in particular students at the branch for music dance and drama at the secondary school, whereas other groups felt excluded. This accounted in particular for a group of car enthusiastic young men who hung out with their cars at the petrol station. This group were sceptical to the cultural profile of the village as a whole, and saw the new café as yet another sign of artistic-interested youth “getting everything” whereas they themselves “got nothing.” In this way, the Internet café, though meant to be a measure for young people as a whole, became an actant in a power struggle between youth groups and cultural profiles in the village (see Laegran, 2003a). The Internet café in Fjordvik got a lot of positive attention in the media, and soon delegations from other villages in the region came to have a look and get inspiration. One group of young people and representatives from the municipality came from Fjelldal, a village in a mountainous valley in the same region. Inspired by what they saw, they
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went home and made plans to start a café after similar guidelines. The local government was more involved in Fjelldal. From the start, the idea was that this would be a café for everyone, not a youth centre, although young people as a target group were strongly manifested in the guidelines. Being located 45 minutes from the nearest town, the café would be a long-desired urban spot in the rural community. However, despite being initially built on the same idea, the Internet cafés in Fjordvik and Fjelldal evolved to be quite different from one another, as the implementation process and integration of the cafés took place within the respective local contexts. The trendy interior, including a fancy Italian coffee machine required to make urban cappuccino, turned out to be too challenging to accommodate for the local government. Arguably, it was hard to find money within tight budgets, but it also seemed like bureaucrats and politicians were quite ignorant or indifferent to the importance of design and trendy features, illustrated by this quote from one of the managers in the administration: “We already have enough cafeterias.” Thus, the café atmosphere vanished before it was established, and the place became an indoor shelter for young people who had little to do in the evenings than hanging out in the centre of the village. Some of them came for the computers, whereas others came to hang out with friends and saw little point in the Internet. Unlike in Fjordvik, the Internet did not have a symbolic meaning as being cool and linking the local to an outside world; it was seen merely as a toy or game along with other activities. The next café is in Landby, a town that constitutes the administrative centre for this mainly rural-based region. This café was also government funded and worked as an information centre for youth, with several government-funded youth projects having offices within the premises. The initiative takers knew that young people in this town, with their particular tastes, required more than a shelter, and thus insisted on funding for proper redecoration. The café section had a
Technosocial Space
modern design, comprising cappuccino and the like, with four computers with Internet access. The café was open to everybody, but contrary to the previous two, it was never an aim to attract a cross generational clientele. Being located in a town where there were already other, also “trendy,” alternatives for an older age group, what was needed was a place for the youth. Being run by two male youth workers and a number of conscious objectors, by definition men, the place got a certain masculine dominance. A few girls would drop in to check the Internet, but the community created at the café comprised mainly of boys and young men. Some of the boys were game enthusiasts, playing “first person shot” games such as Counter Strike. Most of the regulars, however, did not really use the computer, but came to meet friends to chat, and listen to the music played rather loudly from the sound system at the café. Interestingly, the few girls who came spent most of their time on the computers, playing quiz-games, chatting, and using e-mail. At the time I did the fieldwork, a separate room was about to be built for a Linux-programming club in the basement of the café. Programming requires better machines than the Internet café can provide, the room was, therefore, facilitated so the programmers could bring their own computers, but be together in a social environment. The last case is the “City Internet café,” which provided 30 computers spread over two floors and a limited kiosk service including filtered coffee. It is a franchise of a chain that was started by students and graduates who wanted to create their own business based on their interest in computers. Whereas the other cafés featured in this study have varied functions in the local community in addition to computer services, this was a more specialized café where the computers, in particular gaming, were in focus. It was open from 10 AM to 4 AM, and 24 hours on weekends. During the day, a varied clientele came to check e-mail and search the net, while the game enthusiasts dominated the place during afternoon and evening hours. They
played online games such as Counter Strike and Ever Quest; linking up with other players around the world. The online links to the rest of the world are common to all the Internet cafés, but the City café is, to larger extent than the others, integrated in a national as well as global network of gamebased cafés. Being, in fact, pretty much a game centre, the label Internet café attracted a more varied crowd during the days. However, some of the nongame customers did not really approve of the activities at this café: It is an OK place to be during the day and in the afternoon, but in the night the “coke bottoms”5 take over and the place changes (Girl, 20). Rather than having different rooms, the technosocial practices at this place changed during the day; a business-oriented Internet-based sociality with little interaction between the clientele during the day, and a boy’s room gaming community during the night. As we shall see later, however, the gaming community also produced different technosocial spaces. In the following, we are going to look further into the coproduction of sociality, technology, and space in the Internet cafés.
H ybrids: C oC onstruction of U sers, T echnology, and S paces Technosocial practice builds on the conception of the user and technology as part of a seamless web, where the user and the technology are mutually constituted or coconstructed. As space is integrated in, and produced through, these technosocial practices, space also becomes entwined in this coconstruction process. This implies that use of the Internet, despite the rhetoric of its “placeless” character, is influenced by the kind of place in which the activity occurs. This applies to space on various geographical scales: from the Internet café as a site in everyday life in contrast to home and school, to various local communities in urban and
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rural spaces. The very idea of putting computers in a public place illustrates that the café setting adds value to the experience of computing, be it using the Internet or playing games. The installation of a room, where people can bring their own computers in Landby, illustrates this further; it is not just the access in itself, but the technosociality of the Internet café that attracts a lot of people to these places. Playing with the computer is simply different according to where it takes place. One of the gamers illustrated it this way: It is like playing football on the fields with friends or playing “keepie uppie” by yourself at home. It is more fun to play with friends in a café. (Boy, 19) The particular technosociality that develops plays back on the space, as we see in the next section. The Internet as technology was coconstructed with the users of the Internet cafés, and something to identify with or against, accordingly. This was particularly true in Fjordvik, where the position of the Internet café in a power struggle between different youth groups, in fact, made resisters of the Internet café also reticent, if not totally opposed to the idea of using the Internet (Laegran, 2003a; forthcoming). The technology was coconstructed with its perceived users and their culture, and rejected on that basis. Similarly, various constructions of “same” and “others” occurred in the other cafés, in Fjelldal, between the users and nonusers of the Internet within the café; in Landby between the gamers and the Linux programmers; and in the City café between those who dropped in to use the Internet during the day and the gamers at night. A further distinction was developed here between the calm Ever Quest players who could be in their online dream world several days in a row, and the more frantic and excited Counter Strike players. According to the players, which game you preferred reflected your personality, and continuing playing would reinforce certain
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aspects at the cost of others. The difference of the technosocial practices are illustrated by this quote from two Ever Quest enthusiasts: Boy 19: The CS people are different – they shout – oh my god. Boy 20: Yeah, they are really troublesome – like if somebody has luck, they jump around in a corner and shout – you hear them screaming. Splints in the table – and the neighbours… If you play EQ you just sit still and write in a chatbox, whereas a CS player beats the table so that you leap into the air! Although playing with the same artefact, the computer, we see that the identification with the respective games is significant for how not just the game, but also the gamers are perceived. In this quote, the spatial and material aspects of the difference are striking. Although the game is online, the differences in game socialities have offline implications; Counter Strike players use the materiality of the place in a more explicit way than the Ever Quest players, as we shall look further into in the next section. Technologies and spaces are also gendered through this coconstruction. In studies of young people and use of computers, the boy’s room metaphor has been used to describe the particular competence boys gain through their play with computers in the bedroom (Gansmo, Lagesen, & Sørensen, 2003). Is the café, as a public place often with feminine connotations, an alternative to the boy’s room, where also girls may take part in this competence building? In Fjordvik, the café had what we could say was a feminine-connoted design and was used by a majority of girls and women, but the computers were still largely the domain of the boys. The same tendency was seen in the other cafés as well, where girls were in minority also among users of the space as a whole. This is true in particular for games and extended use. This does not, however, imply that the Internet cafés live up to stereotypical notions
Technosocial Space
of “nerdy” places; rather than one dominant form of masculinity, the computers, as well as the places, provide space for performing and negotiating a large variety of different masculine identities related to the café community as well as the technologies (Laegran, 2003b).
C onnected S paces of C onnections: T he Production of Internet C afés Despite being perceived as an “urban” and “global” phenomenon, the findings showed that Internet cafés are configured based on local circumstances, in urban as well as rural communities. Concepts and ideas that, at the start, were quite similar got different manifestations in different local contexts. The “trendy,” “nerdy,” and “healthy” are three images that the cafés consciously and unconsciously use in their configurations, both in their strategies to attract the desired clientele, setting up the computers, and with regard to the interior design of the place (Laegran & Stewart, 2003). Through the way different actors play with these dimensions, different places with different technosocial practices are developed, yet with some recognizable features. Although the idea of the Internet and coffee represents something new and possibly trendy, the actual use of the computers consisted of largely mundane activities resembling reading a paper or playing a table game. Just like sending e-mails from an Internet café, writing cards or letters has always been a common activity to do from a café. The difference is, of course, that in the case of the Internet café, the communication may occur synchronically with people located at different places. The computer and the Internet represent interactivity both related to the machine directly, and to the machine as mediator between people behind their respective screens. This makes the technosocial practice in an Internet café different from in any other café or similar locality. The computers, as well as other material objects, are significant in the way the spaces
are produced. In particular, in the trendy café in Fjordvik, a lot of emphasis was put on configuring the interior, the computers, as well as the clientele, into creating a specific form of technosociality, although the trendy idea of computers and coffee, as integrated, failed. The way the computers are set up influences the character of the place; computers without the most popular first person shoot games, like in Fjordvik, created a different atmosphere in the café than those with these games. From the City café, we saw, in the previous section, the two dominant games also created different technosocialities. Whereas Ever Quest players preferred sitting calmly with coffee and a smoke in front of the screen several hours if not days in row, Counter Strike players got excited by the game, shouting around and beating the table. There was a tendency to spatial differentiation between the group as the consists of two floor levels. The Ever Quest players kept mostly to the second level, where they could look down at the Counter Strike players on the first floor. There were two simple material reasons for this: The machines on the first floor were faster and thus better for Counter Strike play. Furthermore, the second floor was a smoking area, so Ever Quest players could have their smoke whilst sitting down calmly with their coffee, playing the game. The City café, and the one in Landby were the only ones with broadband, and in particular, the City café was dependent on stable high-speed connections to facilitate their gaming community. This was a constant issue, a slight panic occurred several times when the connection broke down. The café in Landby actually saw the limitations of what a publicly funded place could offer in terms of computers and facilitated space where Linux enthusiasts could bring their own machines for their programming. However, not only the Internet, the defining technology of the Internet café, is of importance. As the development of the café in Fjelldal showed, the coffee machine, or the absence of one, was
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seen as significant for why the café failed to gain a clientele beyond that of a youth centre. However, although coffee makers are seen as something that belongs to the Internet café, it seems to be hard to integrate the café culture with cappuccino, and the like, with the actual practice of using computers. It seems more typical that two separate spaces are developed; one café and one computer-oriented space. In Fjordvik we saw that a wall was installed to divide the two spaces. The interior and wall decorations are also important in the production of the Internet cafés as technosocial spaces. In Fjelldal the budget did not allow for decoration other than posters of pop and rock-stars brought by the regulars. The interior of the City Café, on the other hand, was strictly neutral and streamlined in order not to put off nonregular customers. Three of the cafés were part of a strategy for rural development or youth policy, developed by the initiative takers with support from municipalities. In these cases, the Internet café is used as an agent to modernise the countryside, building on the idea that an informal meeting place with a touch of something modern may do something to and for the community. However, it seems that the presence of an Internet café maintains or reinforces the already dominant trend rather than creates something new. In Fjordvik, the Internet café was welcomed among people who already knew the concept; it fitted well with the art gallery and other features not necessarily associated with the rural. In this way, the coconstruction of the Internet café and the community reinforces a modern or “urban–like” feature of the community, but maintains the divide between those who subscribe to this perception of what the place should be like and those who stand for possibly more “traditional” practices, like car enthusiastic boys at the petrol station (Laegran, 2002; 2003a; forthcoming). In Fjelldal the Internet café, rather than being an agent of change, as intended by the original initiative takers, became domesticated and appropriated into the local community so that it became a popular place to hang out for some of
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the young people, but it did not really represent anything new or alternative culturally.
C onnecting Places: T he Production of S pace from the Internet C afés Internet cafés are places with blurred boundaries; the Internet transgresses boundaries both locally and globally. The Internet café community consists not only of those who are there at the time, but also of the more or less identified persons behind the machines that are linked up through the Internet. While many of these identify themselves and take active part as social persons, others are anonymous game or chat partners whereby the computer, more than the person on the “other side,” is the actual opponent in the game or the chat. Thus, the Internet café is a space where the clientele interact not just with each other, but also with the machines. The technical artefacts take part as actants in the production of space inside the café as well as linked outwards through the Internet. In addition to being a node in a local technosocial space, the Internet café thus provides a road to the “information superhighway,” connecting to translocal communities in a “virtual” world. However, the technology is used to transgress spatial barriers in different ways. In Valentine and Holloway’s (2001) study of young people’s use of the Internet in the countryside, parents were concerned that what they perceived as positive aspects of growing up in the countryside may actually encourage the kids to be too inward looking when they grow up. The Internet, they perceived, could compensate for this by providing access to a new world that could increase the kids’ cultural competence and make them more prepared for the world outside the village. I did not make formal interviews with parents, but talked to several who expressed similar views. However, there was also a concern about what this may lead to in terms of the future of the rural, as this father expressed:
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When I look at how my daughter uses the Internet, she seems to become more global and urban. And if this continues, then this region will be no alternative for her. However, Valentine and Holloway (ibid.) found that there was a gap between the parent’s ambitions and the actual practices of Internet use. Rather than useful activities linked to future prospects, they were looking up Web pages of pop and film stars, and having rather casual chats with peers online. In my findings, with slightly older youth, I found that the Internet was used both for “useful” and more entertaining purposes. Linking this to spatial aspects, however, the question of usefulness or entertainment is not really interesting. Studying the practices in the Internet cafés, it was clear that the Internet expands the radius of activity and the range of experiences. Those who used the Internet experienced it as a medium without borders, where it was possible to get impulses as well as contacts and friends from all over the world. The gamers in the City café, for instance, expressed that the sociality with people around the world were maybe as attractive as the games themselves. Several of the informants had made close friends, even boyfriends and girlfriends with people in other countries, and a former member of the Ever Quest community had found love in Australia through the game and moved there. She still kept in touch with the EQ community in the café though, through her character in the game as well as in real person through the chat room. I also found that the youth were keen on expanding their space locally through the net. The Internet café, as well as the Internet, was important in maintaining links between peers and friends, but it was also used to get new friends locally. Like this girl from Fjelldal says: Girl, 17: Yes – this friend of mine, she had met this guy on the net – he is from the neighbour village. And they became friends, and she gave me his mobile number so I just texted him – and
now we text several times a day. And I sometimes talk to him on the net. Interviewer: Have you met him in real life? Girl, 17: No – not yet. But I know who he is. I have seen him in town and all that. These boys show a similar example in a discussion about the excitement of a local chatroom,just for the village Fjelldal: Boy, 19: We may meet just occasionally, so it is fun to meet on the IRC too. Boy, 17: And you do sometimes talk to people there, who you may not talk to generally. Boy 19: Yeah, I actually talk to a lot of people on the IRC-channel Fjelldal who I do not talk to at all. We know about them, but there are like groupings and so even at this small place. So you do not talk to them in reality. Interviewer: So what about when you meet after you have met on the Net? Boy, 19: I have experienced that a couple of times. But the feeling was not so mutual from my side. (…) You have another identity on the IRC. It is not really like the real world. (…) You are hidden. So you can be anyone. It is easier to say things. (…) But I never cheat; say I am somebody who I am not. Interviewer: So you are just yourself, but still different? Boy, 19: I won’t say different. Just that I dare to say things I won’t normally say. And take contact with people who I won’t have talked to elsewhere. These are examples of how the community increases in local rural areas where the number of youth in the same age may be limited. As we see, part of the excitement is that it is a non-faceto-face contact, even though they know who the other person is. In this way, technology provides a new form for sociality, where the technology actually plays an important part not only in mediating contact, but in defining the character of the practice and sociality in itself.
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The importance of the Internet and the café as arena for expanded sociality was particularly important for people with what may be seen as special interests within the community. One of the regulars at the café in Landby identified herself as a “gother.” With the black hair, white skin, heavy makeup, and jewelry, she was definitely “different” in the community, and it was hard sometimes, she said. By going to the Internet café and being on the net, however, she met a lot of people from the same subculture with which to identify. Having that contact increased confidence that made it easier to be confident enough to be different in the rural community as well. Technology connects people and places through the Internet café, and we see the production of space extends beyond the walls of the café and the borders of the village. It also has the potential to transgress less tangible borders that are to do with cultural and social aspects of being youth, including the constructions of self and other in communities, as people who would most likely not meet face-to-face can do so through technology.
C onclusion Castells (1996) argues that while media have become globally interconnected, “we are not living in a global village, but in customised cottages that are globally produced and locally distributed” (p341). Following this thought, Internet cafés would be a good example of global cottages distributed locally. However, as we have seen in this chapter, the Internet café, as any other place, is not global, nor is it local. The Internet café is a place produced in the intersection of the activities within the four walls, the village or city where it is located, national and transnational discourses and structures, as well as through the way the Internet connection links it with the “other side” of the computer screens.
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The understanding of Internet cafés as hybrids emphasises the entwined coconstruction of users and technologies, as well as space, where gender, as well as other identity markers, are central in the way the technology, as well as the cafés, develop and are understood. The next level focused on the production of Internet cafés as technosocial spaces, where materiality, including technological artefacts as well as images, are used in the local configuration of the Internet café as space. Finally, we saw how Internet cafés can be understood as places of connections, where technologies are actants in the production of space as well as new technosocialities, linking the local to the global, as well as expanding the range and radius of activities within the local. By using the Internet café as an example, I hope to have shown how the Internet, in particular, but also other technologies and materialities, are integrated in technosocial practices producing spaces in the local, as well as reaching into the translocal. While the Internet may be seen merely as a mediator connecting people, it is important to stress that the presence of the technology taking part in the practice makes a difference. The Internet café, however, is just used as an example. When it comes to connecting people, the mobile phone is probably the most significant technology, a technology that has changed technosocial practices and the way people interact in many different ways in recent years. In order to understand this phenomenon, it is important to look at technology, as well as the social, as integrated in the production of technosocial spaces.
Refe rences Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technological objects. In W. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology, building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 205-224). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
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Bijker W. E., Hughes, T. P & Pinch, T. (Eds.). (1987). The social construction of technological systems. New directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge MA; London: MIT Press. Bingham, N. (1996). Object-ions: From technological determinism towards geographies of relations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14, 635-657. Bingham, N. (1999). Unthinkable complexity? Cyberspace otherwise. In M. Crang, P. Crang, & J. May (Eds.), Virtual geographies. Bodies spaces and relations (pp. 244-260). London: Routledge. Callon, M. (1987). Society in the making: The study of technology as a tool for sociological analysis. In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. J. Pinch (Eds.), The scial construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology (pp. 83-103). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Malden MA: Blackwell. Castells, M. (2001). The Internet galaxy. Reflections on the Internet, business, and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Escobar, A. (1996). Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture. In Z. Sardar & J. Ravetz, (Eds.), Cyberfutures: Culture and politics on the information highway (pp. 111-137). London: Pluto Press. Gansmo, H. J., Lagesen, V.A., & Sørensen, K. (2003), Forget the hacker? A critical re-appraisal of Norwegian studies of gender and ICT. In M. Lie (Ed.), He she and IT revisited. New perspectives on gender in the information society (pp. 34-69). Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Graham, S. (1998). The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place,
and information technology. Progress in Human Geography, 22, 165-85. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free association books. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Female Manc _meets _ OncoMousetm. London: Routledge. Hughes, T. (1986). The seamless Web: Technology, science, etcetera, etcetera. Social Studies of Science, 16, 281-292. Kirch, S. (1995). The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13, 529-55. Laegran, A. S. (2002). The petrol station and the Internet café: Rural technospaces for youth. Journal of Rural Studies, 18, 157-168. Laegran, A. S. (2003a). Escape vehicles? The Internet and the automobile in a global/local intersection. In N. Oudshoorn & T. Pinch (Eds.), How users matter, the coconstruction of technology and the users (pp. 81-100). MA: MIT Press. Laegran, A. S. (2003b). Just another boys’ room? Internet cafés as gendered technosocial spaces. In M. Lie (Ed.), He, she and IT revisited. New perspectives on gender in the information society (pp.198-227). Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk Forlag, Laegran, A.S . (2007). Exploring masculinity, technology, and identity in rural Norway. In R. Panelli, S. Punch, & E. Robson (Eds.), Young rural lives (pp.29-40). London: Routledge. Laegran, A. S., & Stewart, J. (2003). Nerdy, trendy or healthy? Configuring the Internet café. New Media and Society, 5, 357-377. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
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Latour B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology, building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 205-224). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Laurier, E., & Philo, C. (2003). The region in the boot: Mobilising lone subjects and multiple objects. Environment and Planning D, 11, 85-106. Law, J. (1999). After ANT: Complexity, naming, and topology. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell. Law, J., & Hassard, J. (Eds.). (1999). Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell publisher. Law, J., & Hethrington, K. (2000). After networks. Guest editorial. Environment and planning D: Society and space, 18. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford UK; Cambridge USA: Blackwell. Liff, S., & Laegran, A. S. (2003). Cybercafés: Debating the meaning and significance of Internet access in a café environment. New Media and Society, 5, 307-312. Liff S., Steward, F., & Watts, P. (2002), New public places for Internet access: Networks for practice-based learning and social inclusion. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Virtual society? Technology, cyberbole, reality (pp 61-77). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massey D., Allen, J., & Sarre, P. (Eds.). (1999). Human geography today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No sense of place. The impact of electronic media on social behaviour. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). The Internet. An ethnographic approach. Oxford, New York: Berg. 68
Ministry for Transport and Communication. (1996). Den Norske IT-veien bit for bit. Statssekretærutvalget for ITs utredning om norsk IT politikk (The Norwegian way to the information society. Bit by Bit. The report from the State Secretary committee on IT). Retrieved from http:// odin.dep.no/sd/norsk/publ/rapporter/028005990193/index-dok000-b-n-a.html Murdoch, J. (1997). Inhuman/nonhuman/human: Actor-network theory and the potential for a nondualistic and symmetrical perspective on nature and society. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15, 731-756. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Nordli, H. (2003). The net is not enough: Searching for the female hacker. STS-report no 6. Trondheim: Centre for Technology and Society, NTNU. Oudshoorn, N. (2003). The male pill. Designing technology and masculinity. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simonsen, K. (1996). What kind of space in what kind of social theory? Progress in Human Geography 20, 494-512. Stortingsmelding 31. (1996-1997). Om distrikts og regionalpolitikken (Report to the Storting(white paper): About the regional policy). Stortingsmelding 34. (2000-2001),: Om distrikts og regionalpolitikken (Report to the Storting (white paper): About the regional policy). Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial formations. London: Sage. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of Internet. New York: Simon and Shuster.
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Valentine, G., & Holloway, S. L (2001). A window to the wider world? Rural children’s use of information and communication technologies. Journal of Rural Studies, 17, 383-394. Valentine, G., &. Holloway, S. L. (2002). Cyberkids? Exploring childrens identities and social networks in online and off-line worlds. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 302-319. Wakeford, N. (1999). Gender in the landscape of computing. In M. Crang, P. Crang, & J. May (Eds.), Virtual geographies (pp. 178-201). London: Routledge. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies. Natures cultures spaces. London: Sage. Woolgar, S. (Ed.) (2002). Virtual society? Technology, cyberbole, reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
E ndnotes
1
Twenty years ago, Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch (1987) presented several approaches highlighting the seamless web of the social and technical, coining the term sociotechnical. These approaches had a starting point in studying large (socio)technological systems
2
3
4
5
(ibid.). In this study, the starting point is not technological systems, but social practice, where findings show how integrated technology is in the actual practice. Hence, technosocial seems like a more precise concept. It also highlights the transformation of socialities that new technologies may imbue, which is indicated by the fact that the previous use of the term technosocial has been linked to new technologies like ICTs (Bingham, 1999; Escobar, 1996) and biotechnology (Oudshoorn, 2003). Dagbladet (1999): ”Mer cappuccino til bygda” and ”-En internetkafé hadde vært fint.” Feature written by Mari K. Bye Rise. 20th July. Dan Andersen, departmental manager Gallup Intertrack (personal communication April 2001). This, as well as the other place names, are fictionalised, in order to secure anonymity. Indicating the thickness of the glasses of a stereotypical nerd. A statement meant more symbolically than actual, at least I did not see a “coke bottom” during my hours at the café.
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Chapter VI
Reconfiguring the Rose:
An Exploration of the Use of Virtual Space by Artists Collaboratively Creating Digital Stained Glass Lynne Hall University of Sunderland, UK Delia A. Whitbread University of Sunderland, UK
A bst ract This chapter discusses artists’ use of virtual space to collaboratively create a digital stained-glass rose window. It explores the use of virtual space to provide a working environment for artists, the Wombrose workspace, using the design metaphor provided by the rose window to create a collaborative space. This space focused at supporting practice-based artists in a democratic and effective negotiation process with the aim of developing a potentially monumental artwork to be installed as a digital projection in a real architectural space.
Int roduction Contemporary stained-glass artists have embraced the net, although more for promotion (British Society of Master Glass Painters, 2007), networking (Gateway to Glass, 2007; H-Stainedglass Network, 2007), and archival (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA), 2007) purposes than
creation of work. However, virtual space and the use of computing technology offer considerable potential for stained-glass artists. Screen-based technology is particularly suited to the development of stained glass, resulting in on-screen images more closely reminiscent of glass than any other medium can allow. With the relative lack of potential opportunities for stained-glass
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artists to create real installations, technology offers artists an alternative approach to displaying their art. Thus, rather than the installation of actual glass, it provides the possibility to create large-scale projections, provided as digital images or acetates (for external spaces) projected onto real-world architectural or physical surfaces (see Figure 11). Rose windows, such as those of Chartres, were created by large teams of stained-glass artists, involved in both design and production (Cowen, 1979; Favier, 1990). Attempting to produce contemporary artworks of similar scale also requires a team-based approach. However, few artists are geographically colocated. Even in academic establishments and studios, where groups of glass artists do congregate, there are rarely sufficient artists for the creation of a window as sophisticated as those produced in medieval times. The net offers considerable potential to provide a workspace for stained-glass artists to collaboratively work together to create a significant stained-glass installation. This chapter discusses the design and development of a digital rose window, “In the Womb of the Rose,” see Figure 1. This was developed for full-scale digital projection, as in Figure 11, and both the artwork and its individual components are also displayed as virtual designs online. “In the Womb of the Rose” was developed in the Wombrose project, which explored whether a collective of artists working independently, over distance, and communicating and collaborating in virtual space, could create a significant monumental artwork. The project investigated whether such collaboration could result in a successful, online, artistic community with a shared commitment to a designated goal. Section 2 places the Wombrose project in context and practice, outlining the interconnected disciplines that underpin the project. Section 3 outlines the artists’ virtual working space. Section 4 discusses participants’ experiences of creating a collaborative rose window using the Wombrose
workspace. Section 5 discusses the feedback received from viewers of the artwork. Finally, we discuss key findings and briefly outline our future intentions for the Wombrose project.
Placing C ontext
the Wo mb rose in and Practice
Our aims in reconfiguring the rose were to create a monumental artwork, designed and developed collaboratively by artists working in a virtual work space. The Wombrose project aimed to benefit artists, stained-glass practitioners, researchers, and other interested parties by connecting art, knowledge, and practice, as outlined in Figure 2. “In the Womb of the Rose” is a feminist artwork, as reflected in both its content and production, focusing on women artists involved in craftbased practice to create female images. Feminist historians have identified that traditional crafts provided expressive creative territory for women, with such skills being thought to enhance the value of their feminine worth for the home (Chadwick, 1990). Since the 1960s and 1970s, there has not Figure 1. In the Womb of the Rose
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Figure 2. The context of the Wombrose project
only been a greater focus on female subject matter, but also of using traditional crafts (e.g., Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (Chicago, 1986), textile artists (Nelson, LaBat, & Williams, 2005)) with a prominence of women as stained-glass artists (Callender, 1997). Underpinning “In the Womb of the Rose” is the artistic framework of sacred art, particularly centred on medieval Christian architecture and the original meaning of the geometric symbolism that was used in designing all aspects of the religious building from the layout of the ground plan to the patterns in the windows (Erlande-Brandenburg, 1993). This contextualization provides the basis for the design brief that incorporates traditional stylistic conventions used for medieval iconography in relation to the narrative purpose of the work in context (Kemp, 1997). The design requirements of medieval glass (Lawlor, 1982), with its team-based approach, bright colour, luminous imagery, and particular stylization, provides an innovative collaborative opportunity for virtual space. Although informa-
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tion technology offers particular opportunities for stained glass, it is still not commonly used in traditional glass designs (Harries & Hickes, 1996; Petrie, 2006), even though it provides an ideal presentation and manipulation tool. Graphics software tools offer particular benefits for rescaling, recolouring, retouching, and reorganization of elements, all of which are time-consuming and labour intensive activities within stained-glass design. There has been relatively little interest in the use of computers by practicing stained-glass artists, partly reflecting the lack of technological expertise in new media of the older experts currently prominent in the field. Collaborative working is a feature of both traditional and current art practice . In the Middle Ages, it was based on a studio system with a master and apprentices carrying out the bulk of the work. In the contemporary art world, the system still exists; many artists engaged in large-scale work employ teams of technical support to create their work. However, although there are many successful collaborative virtual environments for creative
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and design activities (Farooq, Carroll, & Ganoe, 2005; Ignat & Norrie, 2006; Tay & Roy, 2003; van Joolingen, de Jong, Lazonder, Savelsbergh, & Manlove, 2005; Zha & Du, 2007), when the intention is to produce an artwork rather than a design, there are still considerable challenges to overcome in making effective artistic design decisions in an efficient and enjoyable way (Maher, Simmoff, & Cicognani, 2000). The Internet sustains all sorts of art practice without discrimination and is a democratic arena for new ways of working (Constanzo, 2000). For the professional artist, or those aspiring, the World Wide Web is a perfect playground and also a creative medium for new forms of artistic expression that can find a worldwide audience as well as international participants. A number of existing art-projects (Communimage, 2004; Glover, 2006; Hypart-Hybrid Project, 2007; The Art Miles Mural Project, 2007; Women Beyond Borders, 2007) have focused on creating collaborative artworks and supporting artists in collaboratively producing artwork. However, such projects rarely involve curators, with a resultant lack of documentation and art critic input. This lack will eventually relegate even successful projects, such as Women beyond Borders (Richards, 1999; Women Beyond Borders, 2007), to an interesting example of community art rather than a fine art collective installation. Many projects involve amateur artists, with the aim of the projects often being shared group participation rather than artistic excellence. The ability to construct huge databases of images, such as in The Sheep Market (Glover, 2006) or Gridcosm (Gridcosm, 2004), and use accompanying software to display the resultant images is impressive, but this does not necessarily result in the creation of an aesthetic and meaningful artwork. Grid–based, participatory, 2-D, graphical sites allow for the more controlled formation of a connected art work, but in an ever-expanding field that cannot result in anything but a fragmentary map of images without clear form when viewed
from a distance. Crowd-sourcing from amateurs, such as in The Sheep Market, is a novel process, but the results do not necessarily have intrinsic value as individual artifacts in themselves (Davis, 2006) Sites like the award-winning Gridcosm (Gridcosm, 2004), a graphical interface that allows users to book sections of a grid in order to create an ever-expanding field of collaged graphic art, can boast over 20,000 contributors sending them over 25,000 images since 1995. Such sites are generally more interested in the quantity of user numbers than the quality of the input. Lianne Mueller, Programme Director of The Fusion Project, notes that: Soup tastes better when you add more ingredients so why shouldn’t art be the same? This is not only a false premise about soup, but it is also not representative of the understanding a professional artist would bring to their practice. Creating a resource for interaction and collaboration that has a more exacting aim and demanding brief would result in a more interesting and sophisticated outcome; a “soup” with a specific identification rather than a pot of undistinguished colour and taste. Whilst such collaborative artwork sites are very popular, they are limited in the success of their outputted artwork, as the collaboration process is more akin to a creative game than a negotiated design process. Several factors contribute to the limitation of the final artistic output, namely unspecific brief without structured goals, indeterminate overall structure for the collage (expanding fields with no defined end), limited expertise of the participants (i.e., few are professional artists), no communication between contributors to adjacent sections, and an indiscriminate selection procedure. Most of the discussion in such collaborative artwork sites is social rather than critical dialogue. It is not possible to assess these works in any of the traditional modes of critical theory and so, their novelty appears to be the guiding principle of their success.
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Reconfigu ring the Rose: T he V irtual Wo rksp ace “In the Womb of the Rose” was based on a traditional rose window design, by Delia Whitbread, that won Joint First Prize (Student category) in the National Eidographics/R.C.A. Computer Graphics Competition in 1989. This divided the window into three circles composed of a number of discrete panels, see Figure 3. The inner circle (7 panels) represents Archetypes/goddesses, the middle circle (7 panels) represents Heroines, and the outer circle, composed of 14 panels, represents Women’s Work. Pilot studies in the Wombrose project (Hall & Whitbread, 2005) highlighted that for a feminist artwork predicated on principles of equality, it was vital to create a collaborative space that allows for democratic discussion. Participants in the pilot study had identified their need to develop a working and social relationship with
each other, basically the need to communicate and collaborate. In 2005-2006, through adding a number of interactive features, including an online workspace where participants could upload their artwork for the rose window panels and chat room facilities to enable discussion in controlled small groups, we aimed to facilitate the design and negotiation process, as discussed in the following sections.
Workspace F eatures: S upporting Practice-B ased A rtists In reconfiguring the rose, the aim was to provide a model for online collaborative design work more sophisticated than that of collaborations such as The Sheep Market (Glover, 2006) or Gridcosm (Gridcosm, 2004). A significant issue related to the need to reflect the practice-based approach of stained glass, involving both real and virtual workspace and their relationship to each other,
Figure 3. Layout and design of “In the Womb of the Rose”
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see Figure 4 and (Hall & Whibread, 2005), where this approach is further described. This workspace has the following aspects: •
•
•
Offline representing the personal studio space where designs are created asynchronously with the medium of the participants choice. This aspect of the workspace was the artist’s normal working environment. Designs were developed using a range of media, including watercolour, collage, digital images, and so forth. All of the artists produced at least some physical artifacts on paper, ranging from initial sketches to partial and complete designs, with most artists uploading complete designs. Web site is the computer workspace where the artist uses digital tools and facilities to make their work available to the other collaborators, that is, by scanning and uploading the images. This reflects the practice within stained-glass development, of contributors viewing the whole window as well as individual panels to enable them to critique and improve the artwork. Workshops are the virtual workspace that provides an area for the artists to discuss designs together and collaborate. This attempts to mirror the studio environment, with artists able to comment and respond to other’s views of their artwork, as well as contributing to the overall design of the window.
Initially, artists registered with the Curator (second author) for the process, and they were allocated a panel in the section of their choosing. The Curator arranged the first meeting for the group and the participants send an initial sketch prior to that meeting. New sketches were uploaded in the course of negotiation until the group agreed to the final compilation. The final amalgamation of the completed window design was to be discussed by all the participants in ev-
ery group. This configuration of the workspace gave participants control over their own artistic contribution within the guidelines and design brief given, and allows them to engage in a process of negotiation with the other participants and the Curator. Figure 4 also identifies the design, negotiation, and collaboration process followed in the project, placing this in the context of the real and virtual workspaces.
Workspace F eatures: S patial O rganisation Matching F unction and F orm We decided to adopt the spatial organi window as the basis of supporting collaborative activity, see Figure 5. Circles are, by nature, non-hierarchical, as they do not have a beginning nor end, or a defined top and bottom. It was envisaged that the circular nature of the design might encourage a sense of equality and order, but without overt authority. This design aimed at allowing us to create a structure based on democratic collaboration that would facilitate equal discussion between participants without requiring the involvement of the curator. Chat room conversations aimed at solving problems and/or creating joint work rather than a social experience, are often hard to sustain and have limited success with a large number of participants (Van Ryneveld, 2005). The rose window’s 28 panels were used to categorise participants into smaller discrete groups, reflecting both the window’s geometry, with dedicated collaborative work spaces for Archetypes, Heroines, Women’s Work 1, and Women’s Work 2; and resulting in an appropriate group size for supporting effective, enjoyable, small group communication (Samovar, Henman, & King, 1996). Each of the participants owned their own panel and had collaborative ownership of both their circle and the overall rose window. Figure 5 is of the Archetypes circle, showing the presence of three artists and their panels in the workspace.
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Figure 4. The artists’ real and virtual workspace
Figure 5. Archetype workspace
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Figure 6. A fragment of the design brief
This approach enables the participants to identify their place with the virtual space and thereby be able to place themselves in relation to the whole project. Each of the workspaces were locked and password protected for private discussion, only permitting access to the group members and the Curator. In addition, a general Rose Room was provided for general access, and all participants were able to access this space.
Workspace F eatures: D esign B rief The Wombrose project aimed to facilitate a higher level of participation and communication with a clearly defined brief aimed at a specific outcome. The design specifications in the brief for the panels were specific to the style of 12th-century medieval stained glass, with a range of discrete tasks that provided essential requirements to be considered in the design of images, see Figure 7. The Web site designed to support the project contained a clearly defined brief with supportive, pedagogical pages on stained glass, both historically and in the context of virtual space.
Working to a shared design brief is a common experience for practicing stained-glass artists. Designs are subject to rigorous scrutiny at committee stages by the client, and often subject to reworking in the process. As in the real production of stained glass, the artists enter the shared workshop ready to modify their designs in relation to the suggestions and decisions of the work group. They were to come ready to make suggestions, defend their own decisions, and ensure that they thoroughly understand any design decisions and the implications these have for their individual panels.
Workspace F eatures: S upporting C ommunication and C ollaboration The workshops included a number of user tools for the participants, allowing them to select font size and colour; to send and receive files whilst talking online; to communicate with the whole group and to create private conversation spaces if desired; to enrich textual communication using animated emoticons available for indicating
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mood and enlivening the text; and to save the text of their conversation. The artists were provided with communication guidelines based on best practice (Geser (Editor), 2004; Geser, 2004; Palloff & Pratt, 2001) to facilitate interaction within the workspaces. These included speaking in turn, making constructive criticism, informing group members if unable to attend meetings, and trying to reach a consensus by the end of the meeting. Design decisions relating to “In the Womb of the Rose” needed to be discussed and agreed at group level to ensure the collective coherence of individual designs in each section. These included decisions related to background, narrative information, consistent borders that framed the designs but did not detract from the main images, and the use of similar approaches to lead lines to frame the main elements, as detailed in the design brief. In each workshop, there was a central panel marked M for Moderator, occupied either by a group member or the Curator. The moderator function was used to chair discussions in the event that the communication process proved difficult to control or should the group feel they require someone to help focus their discussion. Moderators were expected to set time limits, Figure 7. Archetype workshop album page
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ensure everyone had a chance to speak, to focus the conversation if it wandered, and make sure there was a time and date agreed for the next meeting. Typically, however, this role (and space on the screen) was occupied by the Curator if she was present. When the Curator was absent, the participants took turns at leading the activities, with moderation being a collective task.
Workspace F eatures: Wombrose Workshop A lbums The workspace had four dedicated albums: Archetypes, Heroines, Women’s Work 1, and Women’s Work 2, containing the work in progress for the different sections of the window. Figure 7 shows an image from the Archetype workshop album page. Artists could open multiple browser windows to enable them to look at designs, enabling comparison and providing a visual representation vital for discussing any necessary adjustments to a design. During the design process, several versions could be uploaded prior to final decisions being made. This created an archive of changes as a record that could be instructive to the other groups working on the project.
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Workspace F eatures: A rtists as C reators not C ritics In this project, the aim was to keep meetings to a minimum and ensure relatively rapid production of the stained-glass design, with the aim of each work group producing the final design within a month, with participants meeting every week for 4 weeks for workshop discussions. The discussions were to be between 30 minutes and an hour long. A time and date was to be made for the next meeting at the end of every session. Designs were to be made asynchronously and sent to the site well before the meetings and include any revisions suggested by the previous discussion. Table 1 shows the suggested stages of collective discussion process provided to participants The Curator was responsible for collecting finished images and assembling them into their respective circular section and uploading these to the respective gallery before the meetings for the participants to see the effect of the images as a compiled circle.
Inte racting with the Wo mb rose Wo rksp ace The artists interactions in the Wombrose workspace were evaluated by observation, remarks made in workshop conversations, and e-mails, as well as participant feedback requested after completion. By obtaining participant feedback
when the whole rose window was complete, participants would have had time to distance themselves from the process of making their own design and so, see the larger assemblage more objectively. It was hoped a more considered judgement would then result and through that, a sense of shared ownership that would indicate the creation of a genuine, online community of shared aims and goals. Participants were informed that all chat rose dialogues would be monitored, analysed, anonymised, and made available via the Wombrose Web site. The comments included in the following sections are identified in terms of the artists’ initials/curator (Delia), meeting time, and workspace/medium in which the comments were made. Artists interacted with the Wombrose workspace throughout the design and development of the window. Although the artist’s individual work is completed at the small group stage, their involvement is needed at some level until all of the panels have been included. The analysis aimed to assess both the artists’ experience in the collaborative virtual space and how they felt about their own creative process. The analysis considered how prepared the participants were to compromise their creativity to make their designs compatible with their group. This was viewed as evidence of community spirit, that is, the whole being more important to the participants than their individual efforts. The amount of interaction between the four different groups in terms of viewing designs, commenting, or e-mailing was
Table 1. Week
Meeting Purpose
1
Introductions, ideas, and choosing your image
2
Viewing initial images and agreeing on size of main figures Choosing the main background colour for figures
3
Viewing revised images in terms of details, especially legibility of symbolic items (small trees and/or houses etc.), balance of colours, and scale overall in the compilation
4
Borders; these should be in common or with a linking theme - i.e., the same patterns but slightly different colours, or the same colour and different patterns. Final agreement and consensus
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viewed as an indication of how far the design was a whole group activity.
T he A rtists Artists were invited to participate in the Wombrose pilot project by e-mail, personal invitation of the curator, and by advertisement on the Web site on the 18th April 2006. Personal calls were made to all the UK departments specializing in architectural glass. The publicity requested artists with an interest in figuration rather than knowledge of stained glass. As the Web-site help tools had been developed for the use of glass artists and nonspecialists alike; the participants required merely an interest in figurative work and good graphic/painting skills. It was envisaged, in a mixed group, that the stained-glass artists would be able to advise participants without experience about the technicalities of their design. Twenty-two female artists participated in the development of “In the Womb of the Rose” (several producing more than one design). This group comprised of 6 students from the BA and MA Ceramics and Glass from the University of Sunderland, and 12 independent artists: 6 stained-glass makers, 2 ceramicists, 3 painters (watercolour, oils, and mixed media), and 1 graphic Designer/Illustrator. Apart from the 6 students, the majority of the other artists only knew the Curator and not each other. Participants were aged between 22 and 58. Only one participant had extensive CAD skills, the graphic designer.
A rtists Meetings During the 4-month period of the Wombrose project there were 35 scheduled online meetings, of which 7 were informal and 28 were logged as workshop meetings. Most meetings lasted for an hour and the curator was present at 23. The suggested spatial organization, using named chat rooms for each different workshop, did not work. As few groups were online at the same time, most people used the generic Rose Room. 80
Overall, participants rarely met as a whole workshop group, with some participants never meeting each other at all. The participant feedback unanimously identified that organizing the meetings was the most difficult aspect of the collaboration process. A significant problem was the lack of commitment given to meetings, with participants often having poor punctuality, being unable to attend meetings for personal reasons or forgetting them altogether. As one participant admitted: The trouble is we aren’t getting paid, so dinner and cinema and other commissions is taking precedence [sic] over sitting down and getting our head round how the site works and sitting down and doing our designs. (Em 7834 Rose Room Jun 26, 2006 18:45:42) During the meetings, the participants did maintain focus on group design decisions about aspects of the work, especially after being reminded of the areas for discussion via e-mail. The workshop design discussions were reported to be supportive and to add value to the design process: All the chats I’ve been to, even the chaotic ones, have come up with good ideas [sic]. (H 11322 Aug 1, 2006 21:26:34 Rose Room)
S upporting the Wombrose C ommunity Artists were asked to include photos of themselves in their album, and these were also displayed in their respective workshop albums. People were also happy to use their own names rather than the pseudonyms that are common in other chat room situations. This is understandable as the albums were also advertising space (though few artists chose to put in a contact e-mail). Only a few artists chose to add some biographical information as well. The student group was particularly poor in this respect, perhaps because they were based on
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the same campus and so already knew each other, at least by sight. Other groups found it helpful that they could identify each other and have access to each others previous work, and they commented on each others work in discussions and used the comments facility in the albums. Overall, the individual groups felt a great deal of camaraderie with each other within their section. The participants were very positive about their experience, and found both the social and creative aspects of the interaction valuable. One participant, H, was a new mother: I wouldnt[sic] have touched a paint brush if it hadnt[sic] been for this project, and I’ve really enjoyed it’ (H 11328 Aug 1, 2006 Rose Room). The participants were able to make effective, collaborative decisions about their designs. The discussions were very supportive, with observable positive feedback between participants. Participants became identified with the common goal and developed good relationships with their colleagues as the project continued. This indicates that artists can work collaboratively towards a cohesive design within the virtual workspace, with respect for each other’s work, in pursuit of a shared goal. It was interesting collaborating with others to make a piece together, although it proved hard to reach decisions in the chat room. Misunderstandings seemed quite common (KH – Women’s Work 1 Participant) More personal information began to be exchanged by the end of the process, and even political debates on terrorism (after the 7.7. tube bombings). Those participants who contributed to more than one design and met each other in more than one workshop become even closer, and some were sorry to finish.
S upporting A rtistic Practice and N egotiation Each participant made at least three changes to their design as well as adding templates and making compilations of the panels into the circles of the rose window. These compilations gave the artists an opportunity to assess the relative success of their work in terms of scale, tonal values, and legibility next to the other designs. Every group had at least two compilations of work in progress and sometimes up to six before the final decisions were made. In all, there were 352 files relating to the four workshops showing the stages of design development in each workshop. The opportunity to view the panels whilst negotiating was seen to be useful. The participants valued seeing the stages of the design development and the different approaches taken by the other artists via the workshop gallery albums. …there was a lot of interesting information on the site as well, and it was great to see other artist’s work and their galleries. (MM feedback form) Only one artist (EB) was keen to remove her older designs from the albums, but it was explained to her this was an important part of the project. This was backed up by discussion in her group: Heroines. its [sic] like seeing different peoples minds work (CL 11290 Aug 1, 2006 21:18:01 Rose Room) The artists also enjoyed the difference in styles that the project produced and commented on this being an asset: I think that individuals should be able to use their own styles to a certain extent,....otherwise it might just as well be the work of one person (CL 7865 Jun 26, 2006 18:53:02 Rose Room)
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The participants viewed and wrote comments on the work of the others in their own workshop album more than the work in the other workshops. Participants were unanimously positive about the idea of an online community for creating collaborative artwork, and positive about the use of a stained-glass rose window for collaborative artwork, highlighting that it was an appropriate artwork to try to design collaboratively (e.g.,that the virtual was replicating the real). In feedback they reported that they learned a lot from the process of collaboration: I learned a lot from the approach of other participants as well as from Delia, through the structure of the Web site and the information on it. (A – Archetype/Women’s Work 2 Participant) The results suggest that the success of an online artistic community relies on a strong level of respect between artists, with criticism being constructive and positive. Participants agreed unanimously that the atmosphere in the groups was generally supportive. Only one participant expressed a preference for more criticism and debate. Criticism was usually couched as suggestions and the comments were positive and enthusiastic. All the participants were women who had a shared goal in making images to celebrate the female and perhaps this encouraged cooperation and community spirit:
It was a lovely thing to join with – that contact with other women, artists, all very positive and very talented, gave me a sense of ‘belonging’. And was very encouraging! (MM – Heroine Participant)
A rtistic Merit of Work As can be seen from Figures 8, 9, and 10, the finished panels exhibited considerable artistry. Most of the artists were pleased with their designs, though the BA Hons. students felt the pressure of end of year shows had not allowed them sufficient time to make designs. Non-glass artists reported enjoying learning more about stained-glass design, and all the participants felt that they had learnt more about online communication. Ninety percent of the artists involved would be prepared to take part in an online collaboration again. Artists felt that it would be a positive experience to be part of an international community working towards a common goal, and said as much in conversation and feedback: I found it interesting to make separate designs integrated into one window being communicated only through interne. t… Very nice experience helping to expand the boundaries of stained glass work. (Eg – Archetype and Women’s Work 2 Participant)
Figure 8. Women’s Work: Stained glass Artistry and Fishwives
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Figure 9. Heroines: Joan of Arc and Grace Darling
Figure 10. Goddesses: Brigid, Rhiannon and Kali
In addition to seeing the window in virtual space, many participants expressed an interest in a real projection, and looked forward to seeing the full-scale version: i [sic] was in York minster [sic] today looking at the rose window there and thinking about yours. i do hope you manage to get a projection - it will be very impressive (CM 12504 Aug 28, 2006 20:28:09 Rose Room)
T he Role of the C urator The curator operated not only as a contributing artist, but also as Web designer, Web content edi-
tor, project manager, site administrator, technical support, computer graphic artist, tutor, and not least, diary secretary. The curator also provided and supported the design brief, through providing detailed pages focusing on the stained-glass design process. Those artists who accessed and followed this advice made the most appropriate designs in a medieval style, and commented on its being valuable to them. However, the stained-glass artists did not use the Web site help as much as the inexperienced artists as due to having prior expert knowledge. Consequently some of their designs conformed more to their individual style than the Rose windows medieval glass brief. Although not all participants attended the artists’ meetings, they all had direct contact with 83
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the curator; in one to one chats and/or private phone calls as well as in workshop meetings. Forty-three administrative e-mails were sent out and the curator replied to 292 personal e-mails from participants. There were 11 phone calls over technical or design support. The Curator also made use of the comments facility in the albums to directly comment on participants designs. These comments were also e-mailed to the participants for discussion at the next meeting. The artists became dependent on the curator for reminders about meetings, although this did not necessarily mean that the contacted artists attended the meeting. Whilst it was assumed that the workshops would not need the curator present, in reality, the Curator’s presence was essential for continuity when not all the participants were able to meet as scheduled. If present in the design workshops, the Curator’s role was to ensure that the artists’ experience is constructive and some decisions were made. Artists tended to direct questions at the Curator if present in the discussion rather than expect input from each other; this often made the conversations rather one-sided. The curator exhibited concern that if she was present in a workshop, she often operated as a Web-site repository providing information that was available in the virtual space: If I ma [sic] there then I find that I do all the talking and no one is reading all thenotes [sic] I already put on the main site to help (delia 5947 Jun 17, 2006 10:05:39 Rose Room) I see what you mean. I think that people are inherently lazy (CL 5948 Jun 17, 2006 10:06:21Rose Room) There was more personal responsibility taken for decisions, advice, and moderation when groups met without the curator. The guidance provided in the chats was mostly giving advice to technical questions and suggesting improvements to the
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designs with due respect of the views, opinions, and work of others. The focus was to encourage rather than criticise. Ultimately, the curator’s involvement was more of a teacher/mentor than an independent curator. The role of the Curator was various and extremely time consuming. Administratively, it required reminders and regular contact in order to get people online together, and extra time to be available to advise individual participants personally. There was also a great deal of Photoshop work for the curator to do in order to make the images more glass like and compensate for the lack of IT skills in most of the participants.
A udience Response t o “In the Wo mb of the Rose” The ultimate goal of the Wombrose project was to create a monumental artwork. To assess an independent reaction to the finished design, a screening of a large-scale version of the window was organised for feedback from an invited audience. The projection was held in the Cinema of the Digital Media Centre, Sir Tom Cowie Campus, University of Sunderland, see Figure 11 with the curator in the foreground. This cinema screen has been especially designed for digital projection and measures 7 metres by 5 metres. This allowed for the rose window to be projected at third scale, 5 metres diameter, in a darkened environment. As Rose windows are usually viewed at least 30-feet below in a Cathedral setting, 5-metres diameter was sufficient to give the projection the monumental scale that would create an equivalent experience. Thirty-four people viewed the large-scale projection of the rose. They were given a small card on arrival, and asked to fill in details relating to their age, gender, and occupation, and whether they were staff or students. The audience was given a presentation about the development of the rose window as an online project, then shown the final images and compilation large-scale
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Figure 11. The Curator with the projected installation in the Cinema of the Digital Media Centre, University of Sunderland.
After the presentation, they were asked to turn over the cards and rank the finished image from 1 to 7, in relation to four areas relating to the success of the artwork, and add any other comments. The subjects for assessment were clarity of images, likeness to stained glass, interesting content, and significance as an artwork. The audience response was overwhelmingly positive to the content and the scale of the projection. None of the rankings were below 4 for all areas, as can be seen from Figure 12. The response to the question about the significance as an artwork received consistently high rankings across all ages and audience backgrounds. There was no significant difference in the assessment of the projection by gender or age. Among the comments on the audience feedback forms were the following: I feel that the content and approach to making the digital rose window makes the work as an art piece – very interesting approach (Female Art student 21)
A very rich project with great humanity (Male Artist 37) Interesting Concept! Very fertile ground for future exploration – Cyber-Feminism and so forth. Successful balance between the aesthetic and the concept; orchestration very interesting. Unlike Chicago you seem to recognise the input of others- would be fantastic to use this as a community based project? Very positive and interesting view into ‘new Feminist’ works (Female Artist 23) The audience response appears to confirm the achievement of one of the aims of the project to make a significant real-world artwork from a virtual collaboration online. However, further evaluation with the participating artists (many of whom have not yet seen the real-world projection), stained-glass artists, critics, and curators is required to determine the significance of the artwork.
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Figure 12. Audience response to projection
20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0
clear images interesting content like stained glass
excellent
v good
good
D iscussion Our intention in the Wombrose project was to create a community of practicing glass artists, and to use virtual space to communicate and collaborate during the process of design. Following the approach used in real-world architectural glass collaborations, the project required a consistent commitment to a negotiation process in order to achieve more sophisticated designs that would incorporate narrative and figurative consistency. In creating this artwork, our aim was to establish a possible mode of practice for collaborative Web-based art projects by testing strategies for management of a democratic negotiation process online in an innovative virtual space tailored to the requirements and interests of collaborating artists. In the Wombrose project, small groups of geographically distributed artists were involved in communicating using digital formats to make designs and then adapting the results to make them work together within the rose window. This required negotiation and compromise as designs were worked on asynchronously and then modified off-line according to the group discussion. “In the Womb of the Rose” was considered to be
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fair aesthetically successful both by the participants and a sample audience. The Wombrose project was very successful in creating a virtual space that supported a community of artists in work of considerable artistic merit, despite the difficulties of communication online. The participants all displayed a high level of commitment to the project and submitted designs that were of a consistently high quality in term graphic skills and suitability for stained glass. This was particularly impressive as their work was voluntary. Participants found the process enjoyable, learnt new skills in stained-glass design and computing, and would collaborate online again. They were largely satisfied with their designs and were very positive about seeing their designs as part of larger window. Whilst the aim with the workspace had been to reflect the various circles of the design, the participants typically used the Rose Room rather than the dedicated area for their group. The creation of multiple workspaces was not effective, with participants able to find the Rose Room, but often having problems in locating their own spaces. Essentially, artists found the Rose Room first and then made no further attempts to explore the collaborative work areas. However, as
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meetings rarely overlapped, this did not impact upon the design and negotiation process, with the Rose Room becoming a dedicated space for each group that used it for the duration of the meeting. Further, as the display of the relevant area of “In the Womb of the Rose” was provided in a second window, the actual location of the artists in the workspace was largely irrelevant. Similar to all other workspaces, the Rose Room used the spatial organization of the rose window, with each artist represented as a panel of the rose window. Artists were positive about this representation, with the form of the interaction replicating the intended artwork. Creating “In the Womb of the Rose” as a collaborative artwork designed in a virtual workspace was effective and enjoyable. Of particular benefit was the decision to reflect artists’ working practices. The off-line aspect gave them freedom in choice of medium and graphical manipulation tools. The Web site provided essential information, such as the design brief, support for using the collaborative workspace, and techniques for creating digital stained glass. The collaborative workshops worked, to some extent, with participants clearly feeling to be part of a community and to be committed to a single goal. However, participants did not use of the named chat rooms, and future use of the workspace will use only a single chat room, the Rose Room. A key challenge for future use of our approach relates to meeting organization. During the design of “In the Womb of the Rose,” it became apparent that the Curator had a critical role in organizing meetings, providing the agendas for these meetings, and reminding participants of decisions. However, although the Curator was present at many of the collaborative workshop meetings, in future work, we would aim to have less Curator involvement and direction. Thus, whilst the Curator would organize, they would not participate, thus distancing the Curator from the artistic decision process.
Glass translated into screen-based images has direct application to the craft of stained-glass in that both screen and glass use light as medium. Whilst the Wombrose workspace did enable the creation of the various panels, most screens are far too small to gain any appreciation of the artwork. The digital projection of “In the Womb of the Rose” at large scale is highly impactive, indeed significantly more impressive than anticipated prior to the projection. However, this projection was not of sufficient scale to fully appreciate “In the Womb of the Rose,” and we are currently focusing on supporting a full-scale projection in the real architectural space provided by the St. Peter’s Campus at Sunderland for Women’s Day 2008.
C onclusion The Wombrose project has identified that it is possible to create a virtual space to support a community of artists in the production of a collaborative online artwork. In reconfiguring the rose, we have developed a new model of practice using virtual space to facilitate cooperative discussion about designs, involving an alternative way of managing collaborative Web-based art projects through interaction and exchange.
Refe rences The Art Miles Mural Project. (2007). Retrieved from http//:www.the-art-miles-mural-project. org. British Society of Master Glass Painters. (2007). Retrieved from http://www.bsmgp.org.uk Callender, J. (1997). Full and part time students in higher education: Their experiences and expectations. Retrieved from http://wwwd2.leeds. ac.uk/ncihe/report2.htm
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Chadwick, W. (1990). Women, art and society. London: Thames and Hudson.
Gridcosm. (2004). Retrieved from http://www. sito.org/synergy/gridcosm/
Chicago, J. (1986). The dinner party. New York: Penguin Books.
H-Stained-glass Network. (2007). Stained-glass practitioner promotion, support and advice. Retrieved from http://www.h-net.org/~stnglass/
Communimage. (2004). Retrieved from http:// www.communimage.ch/engl/ Constanzo, J. (2000). REPOhistory’s circulation: The migration of public art to the Internet. Art Journal, 59(4), 32-37. Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA). (2007). Online archive of images of medieval glass in churches in the UK. Retrieved from http://www. cvma.ac.uk Cowen, P. (1979). Rose windows. London: Thames and Hudson. Davis, N. (2006). Give it a name - Apexart tries to pinpoint an art movement. Review of Andrea Grover’s exhibition Phantom Captains: Art and Crowdsourcing. Paper presented at the Apex Art, New York. Erlande-Brandenburg, A. (1993). The cathedral builders of the Middles Ages. London: Thames and Hudson. Farooq, U., Carroll, J. M., & Ganoe, C. H. (2005). Supporting creativity in distributed scientific communities. Paper presented at the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA Favier, J. (1990). The world of Chartres. London: Thames and Hudson. Gateway to Glass. (2007). Retrieved from http:// www.gatewaytoglass.org Geser, G. (2004). Virtual communities and collaboration in the heritage sector. DigiCULT, Thematic Issue 5. Glover, A. (2006). The Sheep Market. Retrieved from http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
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Hall, L., & Whibread, D. (2005). Artists collaborating to create digital stained glass. Paper presented at the 1st International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, Las Vegas, USA. Harries, J., & Hickes, C. (1996). Discovering stained glass. Buckinghamshire, UK: Shire Publications Ltd. Hypart-Hybrid Project. (2007). Retrieved from http://www.hypart.de/cgi-bin/HypArt.sh Ignat, C.-L., & Norrie, M. C. (2006). Drawtogether: Graphical editor for collaborative drawing. Paper presented at the CSCW ‘06: 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Banff, Alberta, Canada. Kemp, W. (1997). The narrative structures of Gothic stained glass. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lawlor, R. (1982). Sacred geometry - Philosophy and practice. London: Thames and Hudson. Maher, M. L., Simmoff, S. J., & Cicognani, A. (2000). Understanding virtual design studios. Springer Verlag. Nelson, N. J., LaBat, K. L., & Williams, G. M. (2005). More than “just a little hobby”: Women and textile art in Ireland. Women’s Studies International Forum, 28(4), 328-342. Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the cyberspace classroom: The realities of pnline teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Petrie, K. (2006). Glass and print. PA: Penn Priss.
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Richards, N. (1999). Stepping outside the box Women beyond borders unites women on journey around the globe. The Independent, 43. Samovar, L. A., Henman, L. D., & King, A. W. (1996). Small group communication. In R. S. Cathcart, L. A. Samovar, & L. D. Henman (Eds.), Small group communication: Teaching and practice. Boston: McGraw Hill. Tay, F. A. H., & Roy, A. (2003). CyberCAD: A collaborative approach in 3-D-CAD technology in a multimedia-supported environment, . Computers in Industry, 52(2), 127-145.
Van Ryneveld, L. (2005). Surviving the game: Interaction in an adult online learning community. University of Pretoria, Cape Town, South Africa. Women Beyond Borders. (2007). Retrieved from http://www.womenbeyondborders.org/main.htm Zha, X. F., & Du, H. (2007). Knowledge-intensive collaborative design modeling and support: Part II: System implementation and application. Computers in Industry, 57(1), 56-71.
van Joolingen, W. R., de Jong, T., Lazonder, A. W., Savelsbergh, E. R., & Manlove, S. (2005). Co-lab: Research and development of an online learning environment for collaborative scientific discovery learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 21(4), 671-688.
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Chapter VII
Context, Boundedness, and Structure: The Apprehension of Place in the Development of Information Environments Elin K. Jacob Indiana University-Bloomington, USA
A bst ract In distinguishing between space and place, one approach is to contrast the physicality of space with the sociality of place: space directs attention to the material configuration of the physical environment while place indicates an individual’s understanding of the social behaviors that are appropriate within that environment. However, such a distinction juxtaposing the physical configuration of space to the social orientation of place is, on consideration, too limiting in its applicability. A more effective and generalizable distinction between space and place must also consider perceptions of context, implications of boundedness, and the influence of organizational structure. This broader approach to analysis of space and place can lead to the identification of meaningful differences that influence the functional activities of an information system and contribute to a greater understanding of what it is that constitutes an information environment.
Int roduction The challenge to identify a meaningful way in which to disentangle the concepts of space and place has intrigued philosophers and theorists from the time of Plato and Aristotle (Casey, 1997).
However, the need to discriminate between space and place has become increasingly more important and more insistent in light of recent technological advances in the area of virtual reality. In addition, the explosion of digital information resources, available in the nonphysical milieu of conceptual
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space, has pointed up the necessity for designing collections of resources as meaningful “information places” (or information environments) on the World Wide Web. Growing awareness that the sense of familiarity associated with a specific geographical place is as important on the conceptual level as it is on the physical level has encouraged researchers to consider how the use of traditional organizational structures, such as classification schemes and subject heading systems that might contribute to the recognition of “places” in intellectual space. One recent attempt to address the problem of space and place contrasts the physicality of space with the sociality of place. According to this approach, space directs attention to the material configuration of the physical environment while place indicates an individual’s understanding of the social behaviors appropriate within a given environment. However, juxtaposition of the physicality of space with the sociality of place, while appealing for its parsimony, is ultimately too limiting in its applicability. A more generalizable, and therefore more workable, distinction between these two concepts must also consider individual perceptions of context, the implications of physical and conceptual boundedness, and the influence of the organizational relationships that bring structure to a place. A broader approach to the analysis of space and place, an approach that accounts for the roles of context, boundedness, and structure, might point up meaningful differences that could affect the functionality of information system and thus, contribute to a greater understanding of “information places.”
T he Physicality of S pace and the S ociality of Place Dourish (Dourish, 2001; Harrison & Dourish, 1996) attempts to capture both the distinction between space and place and the potential applicability of this distinction when he differentiates
between behaviors that are shaped by the space in which they are performed, and those which reflect the individual’s understanding of what is acceptable or expected within that place. Accordingly, he contrasts the physicality of space with the sociality of place: space directs attention to the material configuration of a physical setting while place focuses attention on the individual’s understanding of the social behaviors that are appropriate within that environment. Because the individual’s apprehension of place is governed by practices and conventions relative to a community of interest (CoI), it reflects the social knowledge that is shared across the members of that community. Thus, a sense of place focuses the individual’s attention on those behaviors that are facilitated by an understanding of what is possible within a socially construed environment rather than on those activities that may be afforded by the physical arrangement of three-dimensional space. Dourish (2001, p. 89) illustrates this argument by pointing to differences in use that separate meeting rooms from dining rooms: although the material contents and the physical configuration of space is similar for meeting rooms and dining rooms, the behaviors that occur within each place are shaped by conventions and expectations associated with the encompassing social environment of business or home, respectively. It is unfortunate, however, that Dourish’s attempt to illustrate the socially construed understanding of place relies not on the individual’s understanding of what behaviors are acceptable within a specific place, but on very general categories (or kinds) of spaces. Because recognition of place presupposes the individual’s familiarity with conventional behaviors that have evolved within a particular CoI, Dourish (2001, p. 91) argues that the perception of space-as-place cannot be “designed,” but that it can be “designed for” by addressing the expectations of a community of users who share a common orientation to a specific task or goal typically undertaken by that CoI. Thus, the activities and practices of such a community can
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be supported by the conscious provision of a space in which activities of the CoI can be successfully undertaken (Dourish 2001, p. 93). Whether such a space is virtual or material is unimportant. What is important, however, is that this space should encourage the social apprehension of place by facilitating activities of the CoI and thereby, contributing to the emergence of shared expectations and behaviors. Unfortunately, the attempt to distinguish between space and place, by contrasting the physical nature of space with the social orientation of place, is, on consideration, overly simplistic and ultimately too limiting in its applicability. A more effective and more generalizable distinction between space and place must also account for the influence of situational context; for the boundaries that demarcate a given place within its encompassing space; and for the structure of relationships, whether physical, social, or conceptual, that organize elements within a bounded space and thus, contribute to the individual’s perception of a space as a place. Inclusion of these factors in analysis of the concept of place can point up meaningful differences between space and place, differences that may have a significant impact on the functional activities of an information system and thus, contribute to a greater understanding of what it is that constitutes an information place.
O n C ontext There is no universally accepted understanding of what it is to be “context.” One approach, described by Brézillon and Pomerol (2001) as the engineering approach and by Dourish (2004) as the positivist position, views context as a purely external phenomenon that can be operationalized, observed, and quantified. From this perspective, then, context would be defined as “the collection of relevant conditions and surrounding influences that make[s] a situation unique and comprehensible” (Brézillon & Pomerol, 2001).
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In contrast, Nardi (1996) argues that the notion of context is not reducible to a simple enumeration of the objects, the people and the artifacts, that are involved in a particular task or activity. Rather, context must be understood as encompassing both external and internal influences. External influences will include the artifacts, the people, and the particular setting(s) associated with a given situation, task, or activity; internal influences will involve the personal objectives and goals that have been identified by the individual. She contends that the interaction between people and their artifacts can actually “transform” the relationship between individual and artifact, as well as the situation or activity in which they co-occur: “… context cannot be conceived as simply a set of external ‘resources’ lying about. One’s ability—and choice—to marshal and use resources is, rather, the result of specific historical and developmental processes in which a person is changed. … [T]he specific transformative relationship between people and artifacts … is at the heart of any definition of context” (Nardi, 1996, 76). Brézillon and Pomerol (2001) contribute to a deeper understanding of the subjective aspect of context by elaborating on Nardi’s observations regarding transformative relationships. They argue that, by actively focusing on or participating in a particular goal or activity, the individual’s perception of the surrounding context is transformed into functional knowledge that supports identification of appropriate actions, and is subsequently drawn upon to anticipate the outcome of alternative behaviors. Dourish (2004) seems to echo Nardi’s observations regarding the transformative nature of context when he describes context as the result of interactions that cannot be reduced to constituent parts. Furthermore, he makes an important contribution to the analysis of context when he sets out four fundamental assumptions that he claims would provide a theoretical framework for the consideration of context: (1) context is not a given, but is related to a particular object,
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situation, or activity; (2) the features of context are dynamic and (3) relevant to the immediate situation; and (4) context is generated by, and maintained within, the immediate situation or activity. Unfortunately, however, these assumptions focus exclusively on the external, objective aspects of context, and do not address either the internal, subjective, and transformative contributions of the humans involved in a given situation or the transformative nature of the interaction between the individual and her artifacts. As such, Dourish’s assumptions fail to take into account the dual, internal-external nature of context that is characteristic of the “transformative relationship” identified by Nardi (1996) and elaborated by Brézillon and Pomerol (2001). Barsalou (1989) contributes to an understanding of the psychological (or cognitive) origins of context when he describes the factors contributing to the individual’s conceptual framework. He observes that the conceptual framework the individual associates with a situation or activity, the context within which the individual situates him/herself and his/her activities, is dynamic and frequently varies from one interaction to the next. At any point in time, this conceptual framework will be comprised of three types of information: (1) external information that is present for and consistent across all occurrences of the situation regardless of immediate circumstances; (2) external information that is associated with, or cued by, circumstances in the immediate situation; and (3) internal, goal-related or experiential information that is brought to the situation by the individual. External, context-independent information provides stability of reference across multiple occurrences of a particular situation because it consists of features that will be found in any instance of the same situation. In contrast, context-dependent information is unique to the immediate situation: it is information that is contributed by external data about the relationships between the individual and his/her artifacts within the immediate setting (for example, expectations
that may differ across instances of the same situation based on data acquired from intervening experiences); or information that is internally generated by the individual in the form of current personal goals. Analysis of these several approaches to an understanding of context points up the functional role of context in shaping (or reshaping) the conceptual framework within which behavior occurs and that influences the activity of the individual. Adopting the position advocated by Nardi (1996) and by Brézillon and Pomerol (2001), context is not a given but a property of the immediate situation that emerges from interaction between the individual and his/her artifacts and environment. Context is thus the individual’s potentially dynamic abstraction of the physical, temporal, social, or affective conditions that characterize a particular interaction between the individual, his/her artifacts and the immediate setting. It is context, then, that not only emerges from, but also transforms the individual’s understanding of, and interaction with, a space as a place for activity. As such, the context associated with a given situation cannot be predefined, or designed, as Dourish argued for place, because it is constructed within and emerges from the conceptual framework of the individual. While the individual’s construction of a meaningful context is central to his/her identification of appropriate behaviors and the formation of realistic expectations within a given situation, the question remains as to whether context alone is sufficient to transform the space of activity into awareness of place? If context is understood as the individual’s conceptual understanding of the objects relevant to the immediate situation or activity, if context is comprised of or emerges from the objective, external information associated with or cued by circumstances in the immediate situation, then the individual’s recognition of context would have the potential to infuse the activity space with a sense of place in just the way that Dourish (2001) proposes and context could,
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indeed, be “designed for” a predetermined CoI. That is, provision of an appropriate context would support the individual’s apprehension of place by focusing attention on those activities and practices of value for a known community of users. But if context is understood as the conceptual framework that encompasses both internal and external factors and mediates the individual’s understanding of a situation or activity within a given setting, if context emerges from the interaction of external information about artifacts and relationships within the immediate situation and internal information about individual experiences and goals, then Dourish’s approach to an understanding of context is misleading. For Dourish, context is seemingly independent of individual users and therefore, for any given situation, consistent across all members of a CoI regardless of individual experiences and objectives. If context emerges from, mediates, and ultimately transforms the individual’s understanding of the participants, artifacts and settings involved in a particular activity or situation, if context reflects a personalized and potentially unique comprehension of the immediate situation, then context is not independent of the individual. Furthermore, because apprehension of context and, by extension, awareness of a sense of place cannot be assumed to be stable across the members of a CoI, context can neither be designed nor designed for.
O n B oundedness The juxtaposition of the physical configuration of space against the social orientation of place is disingenuous because it seems to imply that the social subjectivity of place is somehow independent of the material objectivity of space. It should be obvious from the previous discussion of context that the sense of place, though subjective and frequently personalized, relies upon objective recognition of the participants, artifacts, and setting(s) involved in a given activity or situation,
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as well as comprehension of the relationships that exist among them. As Malpas (1999) observes, any conceptual framework generated by the individual, what he describes as “the mental life of the subject” (p. 177), depends on the individual’s involvement with his/her surroundings: “ … it is only in, and through our grasp of, the places in which we are situated that we can encounter objects, other persons or, indeed, ourselves” (p. 177). Whether the particular surroundings with which the individual engages are physical, virtual, or conceptual is immaterial. What is important is the recognition that the individual’s construction of context and subsequent perception of place are necessarily spatial, if only in a metaphorical sense, in that they occur within a specific space. Place, understood here as the individual’s understanding of the behaviors that are appropriate to, and facilitated by, a particular configuration of relationships within a recognizable setting, cannot be abstracted from the actual configuration of relationships that constitutes the physical, virtual, or conceptual space within which a place is contained. That is, a place and the activities associated with that place cannot exist in a void. Rather, as Malpas (1999) contends, “The connection between place and activity, then, puts certain constraints on place, constraints that are reflected in the bounding of places in ways that … are tied to the boundaries on capacities for action” (p. 171). Thus, a sense of place is necessarily characterized by its boundedness, by the very fact that it serves as a container for activity by embedding within its boundaries those relationships, features, and functionalities that support the activities of a particular community, and by the fact that it is itself contained within (or bounded by) a larger, potentially undifferentiated space. Recognition of a particular place and, more importantly, the apprehension of a sense of place require the comprehension of a constrained, spatially cohesive and conceptually unified space-as-place that has been carved from the surrounding environment
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by the need to accomplish a given set of goals or activities. Malpas (1999) contends that, because the sense of place is necessarily tied to the capacity for action and to the expectation of the individual to be able to perform certain behaviors within that place, “the less a place is encompassed by our capacity to act or to react, the more abstract must be our grasp of that place” (p. 171). Thus, the boundedness of place is not to be confused with physical demarcation in concrete space. While the boundedness of a specific place is necessarily spatial in that it demarcates a cohesive and contained area of activity within a larger surround, the individual’s sense of place represents not the place itself, but the potential for action or, as Malpas points out, for reaction. As such, the concept of place need not be constrained by the physicality of a material space, but may actually involve the individual’s recognition of a conceptual cohesiveness that unifies the constituent elements of a specific situation, a cohesiveness that marks the situation not only as bounded, and thus as distinct from its immediate environment, but also as self-contained and, therefore, independent of the larger space within which it occurs.
O n S t ructu re The recognition of place is frequently subjective, influenced as it is by the individual’s interpretation of context-dependent and context-independent information abstracted from the physical, temporal, social, affective, and/or spatial elements that mediate the individual’s understanding of, and interaction with, a particular situation. More importantly, a sense of place relies not only on the individual’s subjective interpretation of objective elements, the participants, artifacts, and setting that populate a particular activity or situation, but also on his/her comprehension of the relationships that exist among those elements. If the concept of place is understood as the individual’s appreciation of the behaviors appropriate to a particular
configuration of elements within a bounded space, then a sense of place must depend, in large part, on the individual’s awareness of the web of relationships that link the physical, digital, and conceptual elements within a space-as-place. These relationships, which contribute to or even determine the individual’s understanding of context, comprise the structure of the situation. It is this structure of relationships that organizes the various components of a situation, and thereby contributes to a sense of place through the establishment of meaningful, knowledge-rich links that not only connect the physical, social, and conceptual elements of a given situation, but also integrate them within a unified and coherent whole. As for the apprehension of context, there is a strong interdependence between the structure of a particular situation and the individual who actively participates in that situation: although the structure of a situation is relatively stable and “cannot be grounded in the existence of an independent subject,” as Malpas observes (1999, p. 185); its contribution to the identification of spaceas-place cannot be separated from the subjective understanding of the participating individual. Unlike the relative objectivity of a situation’s spatial boundedness, apprehension of structure and context is necessarily tied to the individual’s interpretation of objective, context-independent information and subjective, context-dependent information (Barsalou, 1989). Thus, although it is the unified structure of relationships that must ultimately determine the character of a specific place (Malpas, 1999, p. 185), the meaningfulness of a relational structure demands interdependence between the situation and the individual, whose understanding of both structure and context will necessarily be biased by the experiential knowledge he/she brings to participation within a given situation. The dual nature of the interpretative process, the reliance on both objective and subjective sources of information, is only one way in which structure and context are linked in the determina-
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tion of place. In fact, structure and context are so closely interwoven that it would be virtually impossible for the individual to develop a sense of place without first having arrived at an implicit or minimal awareness of both the structure and the context of a situation. More importantly, perhaps, because the structure of relationships within a given situation can be understood as governing the emergence of context, it can be argued that the presence of a unified and cohesive structure of relationships plays a more important role in the perception of place than does the apprehension of context.
O n the N atu re of Info rmation and Info rmation Places Information Discussions of what it is that distinguishes a place within the larger expanse of undifferentiated space is of general interest for the emerging knowledge domain known as the philosophy of information and, in particular, for an understanding of the “dynamics of information”: the composition of information environments; the constitution of information life cycles; and information processing (Floridi, 2002, p. 15). Obviously, an understanding of place, and its relationship to the phenomenon of information, is key to an appreciation of what it is that constitutes an effective “information place” (or information environment). However analysis of the relationship between the concept of place and the development of an information environment must begin with a definition of information itself. Over the years, researchers and theorists have offered numerous definitions of information, but they have consistently failed to reach even a semblance of consensus. In fact, many of these definitions are either blatantly contradictory or overly ambiguous in their generality. At a more abstract level, Floridi (2004) has identified three
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approaches that dominate attempts to define the nature of information: information as reality (or ecological information); information for reality (or instructional information); and information about reality (or semantic information). The approach adopted in this chapter is that information is inherently semantic, and therefore about reality. Following Bateson’s observation that information consists of “differences that make a difference” (Bateson, 1979, p. 99), information is defined here as an emergent property that is the result of individual experience, and reflects or represents meaningful differences (or data) that the individual has acquired about his/her surroundings. In line with the definition of information, an information space is defined as a collection of physical, digital, or virtual resources consisting of an undifferentiated accumulation of resources that can be used by the individual to identify differences that would make a difference. In contrast, an information place, identified here as an “information environment,” is understood as a collection of resources that has been intentionally organized to address the specific needs of a knowledge domain, or CoI, whose members share a common interest, activity, or goal.
Information S paces and Information Places It has been argued that an in-depth understanding of the concept of place may be relevant to the development of effective information environments. Analysis of the contribution of context, boundedness, and structure to the distinction between space and place could point to features or functionalities that distinguish information places as environments from information spaces as collections, differences that could influence the development of an information space and even contribute to its emergence as an information place.
Context, Boundedness, and Structure
What gives a collection of resources a sense of place, and transforms an information space into an information environment, is the introduction of context, boundedness, and structure, those elements that serve to establish a sense of place and, in consequence, to shape the utility of the collection for the members of a CoI. Transformation of a collection of resources (“an information space”) into an information environment (“an information place”) must begin by addressing the fundamental features of a resource collection that shape the development of an information environment, and determine the expectations of a CoI for an information collection: audience (the strategy), content (the scope), and organization (the structure) (Garrett, 2002). Strategy establishes the intended purpose of the information environment. It identifies the audience or CoI that is to be targeted, and delineates projected outcomes and expectations for members of the targeted CoI. Specification of the strategy as purpose and projected outcomes contributes to the emergence of context by defining the audience for the resource collection, the type(s) of users who will actively participate in the activities of the information environment. In addition, the statement of strategy begins to define the boundaries of the information environment by identifying both a content of interest to the CoI and the expectations of CoI members. Scope consists of the features and functions to be provided by the information environment. It provides an explicit statement of the range of content in the collection, and the specific behaviors or activities that will be supported to facilitate the outcomes projected in the statement of strategy. Identification of the breadth and depth of content formalizes the boundaries of the collection by setting specific limits on the range of content and the activities that are possible within the information environment. In addition, specification of the activities that will be supported by the collection contributes to the emergence of context.
Structure is the single most important element responsible for the transformation of an information space into an information environment. Structure converts an undifferentiated accumulation of resources into a unified and cohesive arrangement of resources organized by a system of interrelated, knowledge-bearing relationships, relationships that will, ideally, indicate not only the similarities within and across categories, but also the differences between them. It is necessary, then, for structure to address the organization of a resource collection by specifying the conceptual basis for grouping similar resources, and by establishing the semantic relationships that will organize those groupings within a unified and meaningful structure. Structure defines the contours and boundaries of the information place in line with the content, functionalities, and expectations of the target CoI specified in the statements of strategy and scope. More importantly, while organization of the relationships that comprise the structure contributes to the emergence of context, the perception of the collection as a cohesive and bounded unity is requisite for the individual’s apprehension of a resource collection as an information environment.
Information Places and S patial A nalogies To be effective in the transformation of an information space into an information environment, the system of semantic relationships that organizes the resource collection and establishes the structure of the information environment must evoke for the user an analogy with a concrete spatial structure. Spatial analogies exploit the individual’s familiarity with the structure of objective, everyday physical spaces in order to make abstract concepts and relationships comprehensible. Just as an alphabetical arrangement of resources is universally accessible because the alphabet is familiar to everyone, spatial metaphors
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are meaningful because they build on experiential knowledge that is shared across communities; knowledge of the physical environment as well as knowledge of how individuals interact with their material surroundings. For example, the concept of a “chat room” capitalizes on the individual’s familiarity with rooms as self-contained spaces, in this case, as a self-contained virtual space that is “bounded” by the explicit specification of a topic that is, by definition, of common interest to all participants in the chat room. Similarly, the emerging profession, known as “information architecture,” relies on a spatial analogy with traditional architecture. An architect partitions the interior space of a building into rooms (or “places”) according to the activities that are projected to occur in those spaces, and then organizes those places to facilitate the flow of similar or related activities, for example, locating the dining room in close proximity to the kitchen relates spaces intended for the preparation and consumption of food. In similar fashion, the information architect creates a structure of relationships first by partitioning a collection of resources based on similarity of features or use (the activities supported by the collection), and then organizing those initial groupings to facilitate accessibility based on common functionality or intellectual content. It is noteworthy that, even though an alphabetical system is universally accessible, it fails to create a sense of place precisely because the simple ordering of resources, according to a simple alphabetical or numerical system, cannot identify groupings of related resources or organize those groupings into a coherent system of relationships. More importantly, such an arrangement cannot evoke a spatial analogy that will facilitate the individual’s comprehension of the content and scope of the collection, or facilitate his/her interaction with it. Dourish and Chalmers (1994) point out that spatial models have two distinct applications. The first of these, the provision of maps of actual
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physical spaces, is obvious. The second, more common but less obvious application, involves the “mapping” of semantic relationships onto a spatial arrangement, an application that could be restated as the popular aphorism “form follows function.” Although Dourish and Chalmers describe spatial models as mapping semantic relationships onto a spatial arrangement, it is more appropriate to say that a structure of semantic relationships between resources and groups of resources responds to the functionality of an information place and thus, determines the spatial arrangement. Analysis of the semantic intent, encapsulated in the aphorism “form follows function,” can illustrate how the structure of relationships, and thus the spatial analogy evoked by the organization of resources, must respond to the functionality of the collection itself. The nineteenth century Chicago architect Louis Sullivan is credited with originating the design principle captured in the phrase “form follows function.” There is, however, a common misconception that Sullivan had intended that the architectural form of a building should reflect the function for which the building was designed. What Sullivan had actually proposed, however, was that form, the structure of a building, would be determined by or follow the functionality of the materials that were to be used in its construction. By extension, then, the structure (the “form”) imposed on an information space, the groups into which the content is organized and the semantic relationships established among resources and groups of resources, will be driven by the content (the “material”) that is required to support the activities and outcomes (the “functions”) specified by the site’s strategy and scope.
C onclusion The contributions of structure, context, and boundedness, in evoking a sense of place, indicate the value of place in the analysis of information
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environments. For example, the sense of place that can follow from the individual’s recognition of the structure of relationships in an information environment produces functional knowledge that cannot only mediate immediate information seeking behaviors, but can also be used to anticipate the results of future interactions with the information environment. Rejection of definitions of place, grounded in the physicality of space, in favor of the conceptualization of place as bounded potential contained within a larger expanse of physical or virtual space, points up, as Malpas (1999) observes, “an inevitable multiplicity in the ways in which place can be grasped and understood: place may be viewed in terms that emphasise the concrete features of the natural landscape; that give priority to certain social or cultural features; or that emphasise place purely as experienced” (p. 173). Nonetheless, the apprehension of place associated with a situation or setting is dependent on the perception of structure, on the influence of context, on recognitions of the boundaries that circumscribe a setting, and on factors, such as spatial analogies, that influence both the individual’s comprehension of structure and the emergence of context. Place is both subjective and dynamic; but a sense of place that persists across any two instances of the same situation or activity will depend on the individual’s apprehension of similarity not only of context, but of the internal structure of the situation; apprehension of similarity that results from the redundancy of context-independent information provided through the situation and context-dependent information contributed by the participant. Place is a potentially powerful construct applicable within and across a multiplicity of intellectual domains. Removing place from constraints imposed by an overly simplistic understanding based on physical spatiality and emphasizing, instead, the inherent boundedness of place within a broader setting, whether concrete or abstract, permits the extension of place as an explanatory
construct in a process of comparing and contrasting the form and functionality of information spaces and information environments. For example, recognition of the boundedness of place, as inherent limitations on the potential for action, can be applied to innovations in the configuration of information environments, and to optimization of the organizational structures and functional properties that influence user expectations and behavior within an information environment or the systemic properties and forms of interaction that constitute these environments.
Refe rences Barsalou, L. W. (1989). Intraconcept similarity and its implications for interconcept similarity. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 76-121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. New York: Dutton. Brézillon, P., & Pomerol, J-C. (2001). Is context a kind of collective tacit knowledge? Retrieved from http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/502155.html Casey, E. S. (1997). The fate of place: A philosophical history. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Dourish, P. (2004). What we talk about when we talk about context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8(1). Retrieved from http://www.ics. uci.edu/~jpd/publications/context7.pdf Dourish, P., & Chalmers, M. (1994). Running out of space: Models of information navigation. Retrieved January 30, 2004, from http://www. is.uci.edu/~jpd/publications/1994/hci94-navigation.pdf
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Floridi, L. (2002). What is the philosophy of information? Minds and Machines, 33(1/2). Retrieved August 20, 2003, from http://www.wolfson.ox.ac. uk/~floridi/pdf/wipi.pdf Floridi, L. (2004). Open problems in the philosophy of information. Metaphilosophy, 35(3). Retrieved August 20, 2003, from http://www. wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/oppi.pdf Garrett, J. J. (2002). The elements of user experience. Indianapolis: New Riders. Harrison, S., & Dourish, P. (1996). Re-place-ing space: The roles of space and place in collaborative systems. In CSCW’96 (pp. 67-76). New York: ACM
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Malpas, J. E. (1999). Place and experience: A philosophical topography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nardi, B. A. (1996). Studying context: Comparison of activity theory, situated models, and distributed cognition. In B.A. Nardi (Ed.), Context and consciousness: Activity theory and humancomputer interaction (pp. 69-102). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Section III
Auditory and Pictorial Space
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Chapter VIII
Voice and Space:
Agency of the Acousmêtre in Spatial Design Richard Coyne University of Edinburgh, UK Martin Parker University of Edinburgh, UK
A bst ract The widespread use of mobile telephony prompts a reevaluation of the role of the aural sense in spatial understanding. There are clear correlations between voice and space. The attributes of the voice constitute important variables in the way people position themselves in public spaces: to speak, to hear, or to get away from the voice. The voice can connote intimacy, communality, and welcome, but also has the potential for disquiet and disruption, particularly as an unseen acousmêtre, (a term developed in film studies). Spatial design can benefit from an exaggerated consideration of voice, to counteract the primacy already given to the visual field. This chapter examines the relationship between the voice and space in public spaces, and the technologies and practices involved.
Int roduction There are obvious correlations between voice and space. The dimensions and shapes of spaces have been influenced arguably by the audibility of the human voice. Chairs and tables in a restaurant are positioned to facilitate the reach of the hand and the consumption of food, but also to enable quiet
conversation, enabling us to hear the voice of our companions and to be sufficiently distant from others to aid privacy. In a restaurant, the position and volume of the voice is one of a complex of variables that influences spatial configuration. The voice also influences the dimensions of civic space. There is a famous photograph of Lenin addressing a crowd in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. There is
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Voice and Space
a vast crowd, the space is huge, his gestures are theatrical, and there is no artificial amplification. We can only guess at the sound of his voice, the hush of the crowd, and the whispers of those conveying the message to others at the limits of hearing. Great civic spaces were laid out with a consideration of the voice and its limits. The voice, in turn, has adapted itself to the character of spaces. People adjust the volume of their voice according to the ambience and functioning of the restaurant. The ideological stridency of assembly spaces, such as Sverdlov Square, stands in contrast to the milling spaces of contemporary cities. The voices of London’s refurbished Trafalgar Square (or Sverdlov Square now) are muted, individualised, and mediated by digital networks. The voices of contemporary civic assemblies are broadcast via sound systems and commodified as entertainments. Concurrent with the public spectacle, individuals and groups negotiate gathering patterns with their mobile phones. Some communicators are not so much there as forever elsewhere. As a further remove from the ideology of civic space, we can consider the emerging norms of the voice amongst commuter interchanges, the shrill tones of the voice battling the sounds of clubs and bars, the anxious voice at the motorway breakdown point, the plaintive or strident voice of the socially marginal and homeless. The human voice also serves to locate us in space. In writing about the voice in cinema, Michel Chion notes how “the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it” (Chion, 1999, p. 5). In the visual field, our eye is drawn readily to the presence of a human body, even a long way off, and by this means gives scale and significance to a space. So, it is for sonic space, that is, space as defined and enhanced aurally: “If a human voice is part of it, the ear is inevitably carried toward it, picking it out, and structuring the perception of the whole around it. The ear attempts to analyze the sound in order to extract meaning from it—as one peels and squeezes a
fruit—and always tries to localize and if possible identify the voice” (Chion, 1999, p. 5). Voices carry, and demand attention. Presumably, part of the annoyance of overhearing half-conversations on mobile phones in public spaces derives from our unavoidable propensity to seek out the voice. We can more readily tune out the clanging of dinner plates, or even a ring tone, than we can the chatter of the voice, even if we cannot make out what it is saying. Conversely, if we wish to attract attention to a space or within a space, then there is sense in placing a voice there, a strategy commonly deployed through the vehicle of ubiquitous piped music, especially the singing voice. These are the obvious correlations between voice and space: positioning ourselves and configuring our spaces so we can speak and hear; adapting our voice to the character of the spaces we occupy; and being drawn to the voice as a spatial focal point. These correlations suggest that the voice is a factor to be taken into account in the design and configuration of spaces. However, we can see that there is a dynamism to the voice, which makes it more difficult to grasp as a spatial determinant than vision. Architects are adept at designing spaces such that people can be seen or unseen. They configure vistas, frame views, and play with visual balance. The geometry of seeing is easy to abstract on paper in plans, sections, and elevation, and to plan for. Architecture and consumer culture consciously participate in the “society of the spectacle” (Debord, 1983), but less knowingly in the “culture of the acousmêtre” (defined next). In the case of sound, there are competing voices, voices are often mobile, we are generators and receivers of voices, and we may also be distracted by listening to what the voice is actually saying. In this chapter, we have already resorted to a long-standing tradition in the way scholars talk about voice. We have described voice in visual terms. In fact, the tradition suggests that the voice is incomplete without vision. According to Roger Connor’s cultural history of voice: “Sound, and
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especially the sound of the human voice, is experienced as enigmatic or anxiously incomplete until its source can be identified, which is usually to say, visualised; visual objects, by contrast, do not appear to us to need complementing or completing” (Connor, 2000, p. 20). The elusive nature of the voice requires pinning down, which is to say, it needs to be seen. The voice is a restless entity, to be contrasted with the stability of vision.
T he Retu rn of the V oice There are two theories that pertain to the nature of sound and the voice, with different implications for correlating voice and space. The first we regard as the “mellow theory,” popularised by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan highlights the difference between aural and visual culture (Coyne, 1995, 1999; McLuhan, 1962). The former belongs to a preliterate phase in the history of civilisation. Humankind was united by common participation in a world of chatter and unselfconscious absorption into the communal ethos. It was only subsequently, with the development of technologies of writing and print, essentially visual technologies, that we began to “see,” which is to say, objectify and discriminate. The voice belongs to the former, more primal, realm of engagement. The voice draws us in. Sound and chatter are unitary. This attitude to aural culture appeals to a lengthy tradition dating back at least to Plato, which asserts that the voice is visceral, immediate, and close to thought. It is when ideas are written down that we lose the indeterminacy and connectedness of conversation and voice. However, McLuhan asserts that in the current electronic age, we are returning to this tribal condition through the influence of electronic media. Radio and fuzzy television imagery represent a return to the incessant buzz of the tribe. This is not to suggest that sound pacifies. In fact, McLuhan regarded the radio and other sonic media as hot media, potentially inflammatory, as so much is
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required of the imagination. In the electronic age, the voice encourages us to join in, get worked up. Television and cinema, by contrast are cool media. The visual sense is passive and invites us to settle down, watch, observe, and keep our distance. What are the spatial implications of this mellow theory? Mobile phones pressed against the ear are both intimate and inflammatory. If you want to work people up, then do it with sounds, not images. To induce docility in waiting rooms, deploy flickering television screens, or better yet, photoreal imagery, reality TV shows, and news documentaries that leave little to the fevers of the imagination. There are simple correlates here from the history of architecture, with spaces that are reputedly participatory, communal, indigenous, local, and welcoming, on the one hand, and those that are formal, distant, and oriented to vision, on the other. At least, this is how the tradition has characterised its architectures. John Ruskin, for example, praised naturalistic, ornamented, curved, and voluted forms and details, against the rigid adherence to proportion and repetition evident in nineteenth century neoclassical architecture (Ruskin & Links (Ed.), 1960). His advocacy of Gothic naturalism in architectural style was easily aligned with his support of communitarian and socialist ideals (Coyne, 2005). Folded and voluted spaces are suggestive of informality, welcome and democratic engagement. One also thinks of the enfolding arms of Bernini’s Baroque forecourt to St Peter’s Basilica, and the folds of Frank Ghery’s Bilbao Museum, both intent on an exaggerated language of participation. These are also acoustical shapes: the spiral, horn, shell, volute, curved wall, and amphitheatre. Such shapes are also suggested by the folded form of the outer ear, and the spirals of the inner ear (Barthes, 1991). Sounds radiate and emanate, and there are shapes that abet their reception and concentration. Connor adds the shape of the tongue to this spatial morphology, and its continuous rolling action during speech (Connor, 2001). These curved shapes do not guarantee ef-
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fective acoustic transmission or amplification, but are readily associated with it. Put simply, under this “mellow” theory, the curve is aligned with sound, and hence voice, while the straight vector pertains to seeing and being seen. A further advance on this theory is to regard the voice not only as comfortable with the curve, but as requiring a looping process to function. The voice returns. The loop also exists in visual culture. Psychoanalytic theory has made much of the importance of the looped visual structure (Lacan, 1977): a defining moment comes for the infant when she sees her reflection in a mirror, a moment that indicates separateness and alterity from the rest of the world, a moment often related back to the myth of Narcissus, the god who fell in love fatally with his own reflection in a pool. Vision entails a sense of seeing, being seen, and seeing oneself; a kind of looped perceptual field. However, the loop is even more obvious in the case of the voice. As indicated by Dolar, the myth of Narcissus involves the nymph Echo (Dolar, 1996, p. 14). In offending Hera, Echo had already been consigned to a communicative life of repetition: merely repeating what others say. Her love for Narcissus goes unrequited, and she eventually fades away, leaving only her voice (Graves, 1960, p. 287). At least she persists in vocal form, whereas Narcissus dies in his reflection. Despite its obvious transience, the voice has a persistent quality, even before the advent of recording technologies. It is implicated in processes of looped repetition: in the echo, and in the importance of hearing oneself. The voice projects. It emanates from the human vocal apparatus, but it also returns, through a kind of instant feedback. We are so familiar with hearing our own voices that it comes as a shock to hear the voice as others hear it, returned by other means, and without the body’s inner reverberations. Speaking in an anechoic chamber for the first time has a similar effect, where one’s echoless voice seems to be smothered in silence.
The loop is also implicated in modes of transmission. Connor draws attention to the early intrigue with electronic transmission of the voice (Connor, 2001). The miracle of electronics was not only that communication could be achieved at a distance, but the fact that the voice was passed into a wire that could be bent and stretched and turned into a coil. On the one hand, the wire suggested the voice could be propagated by a vector rather than just a radiation. On the other hand, the wire was suggestive of coiling, compression, storage, and amplification. The loop is also realised in concepts of repetition. The voice returns again and again through the rhythm of phonemes, rituals, refrains, pauses, and breaths. Freud makes much of the role of repetition in human development. His leading example is of a child ritually flinging a cotton reel from the cot and pulling it in again by a piece of string. The repetitive process is accompanied by the childish words (in German) “fort” and “da,” which are for Freud, cathartic enactments of the absence of the mother from the room, and her hoped for return (Freud, 1990). For Freud, conspicuous repetitions in later life, which strike us as surprising and uncanny, are similar reminders of the distress of that childhood condition (estrangement from the mother). Such repetitions may come in the form of coincidences, habits, and duplication where we expect none: a lineup of identical Father Christmases, or identical Oompa Loompa’s in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Whatever its psychic origins, repetition has an uncanny effect, no less so than in the case of voice: the recurrence of vocal gestures, and repetition in nonsense poems. The repetition in Freud’s primary example is a vocal repetition. The uncanny voice surfaces in the vocal contortions of Kurt Schwitters, Bruce Nauman’s sonic installation Raw Materials in the Tate Modern, and Matt Rogalsky’s Two Minutes Fifty Seconds Silence. The latter Web-based piece captures the silences between the words in a speech by President Bush, described as “a reduction of ad-
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dress to the world by President George W. Bush 8 pm EST, Monday March 17 2003” (Rogalsky, 2003). The uncanny drone, intakes of breath, and exhalations are likened to the rhythmic sounds of the drums of war. In summary, the voice is a looped phenomenon that reflects on spatial form. We do not just project, but what we say is returned, in echoes, reverberations, vibrations, repetitions, features of voice that can be exaggerated or resisted, but are ever present. On the one hand, there is something reassuring about the voice, that speaks of putative primal origins and participation in global community. According to Chion, there are resonances with the participative aspects of voice in the exaggerated overdubbing of a Fellini film: “When someone begins to speak, everyone joins in; it’s alright to leave behind your own individual vocal contours, then return to them” (Chion, 1999, p. 86). On the other hand, repetition contributes to the unsettling aspects of voice, its disturbance, and its purchase in the realms of the uncanny. This leads us to a second theory of voice. Counter-posed to the “mellow theory” is a theory of the “clipped voice.”
T he C ut of the V oice For Connor, if the voice is modulated by the rolled tongue, it is also macheted by the teeth (Connor, 2001). Voices are punctuated by glottal stops, cuts, discontinuities, and breaches to the rhythm and flow of the loop. The metaphor is that of the circle and the cut. As an inspection of Frank Gehry’s voluted buildings indicates, the socially articulated scroll is characterised by so many disjunctions of surface. Shells and petals thankfully do not stack seamlessly, and much of the intrigue of the new organic architecture resides in the ingenuity of the junction as much as the smoothness of the acoustic surfaces. However, the smooth articulation of voice is disturbed in other ways.
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The voice is an attribute of the body that differs from our appearance. I can gesture (wave my arms), but without a mirror, the gesture does not return to me with the same immediacy as my voice. My gestures do not function from behind a screen, whereas, I can be heard when invisible. The voice constitutes an emanation over which I have agency, whereas I cannot easily control who sees me and when. The voice is transient (or repetitively attenuated), whereas my appearance persists as long as I am present. By some accounts, the voice projected, and detached from the body, is our earliest encounter with otherness. How could we have ever conceived of separateness were it not that the voice is so obviously separable from the body? No other sense or human capability so readily provides a model of discontinuity and separateness. As we saw in the myth of Echo and Narcissus, the voice held the possibility of separation from the body. The echo persists after the body is gone. Rabelais’ sixteenth century satire, Pantagruel, further exemplifies this fascination with the separation. The ship of his main character, Pantagruel, enters the waters on which once a fierce battle had been fought: “The shouts of men, the cries of the women, the slashing of battle-axes, the clashing of the armour and harnesses, the neighing of the horses and all other frightful noises of battle became frozen in the air. But just now, the rigours of winter being over and the good season coming on with its calm and mild weather, these noises are melting, and so you can hear them” (Rabelais, 1955, p. 568). Pantagruel grasps some words that are not yet thawed: “Then he threw on the deck before us whole handfuls of frozen words, which looked like crystallized sweets of different colours. … When we warmed them a little between our hands, they melted like snow, and we actually heard them, though we did not understand them, for they were in a barbarous language” (Rabelais, 1955, p. 569). According to several accounts, the earliest days of the electronic transmission of the voice were accompanied by the thought that we could now
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hear the voices of the deceased (Kahn, 2001, p. 214). Voices persist, but in ever diminishing volume, if only we had equipment sensitive enough to receive them. By this reading, the characteristics of voice have likely contributed to a sense of transcendence. The soul’s apartness is a homologue of the voice’s separateness from the body. Contrary to this metaphysical reading of voice, a more radical manifestation of apartness is in understanding the nature of language. Following the legacy indicated by McLuhan, the conventional wisdom is that the voice provides authentic access to meaning. Voice is immediate, direct, unmediated. By contrast, the written word pertains to the visual sense, and is derivative, secondary, and unauthentic. Writing is also dangerous in that it implies certainty where there is none, permanence where there is contingency, and mere recommendations assume the character of laws. Derrida explores the history of this prejudice in favour of speech at length (Derrida, 1976). His project is less about problematising the voice than challenging the Western philosophical tradition, particularly its trade in certainties and foundations, metaphysics, which he asserts is a kind of symptom of the primacy accorded to speech over writing. Derrida’s position is summarized by Dolar, who brings the issues home to the voice. The traditional position “consisted in the simple and seemingly self-evident assumption that the voice is indeed the basic element of language, its natural embodiment, and is consubstantial with it, whereas writing presents its derivative, auxiliary, and parasitic supplement, at the same time secondary and dangerous” (Dolar, 1996, p. 11). Following Derrida, Dolar seeks a more dangerous interpretation of voice: “There exists a different metaphysical history of voice, where the voice, far from being the safeguard of presence, is considered dangerous, threatening, and possibly ruinous” (Dolar, 1996, p. 16). Zizek concurs with this inversion: “We have thus arrived at the formula of the relationship between voice and image: voice does not simply persist at a different
level with regard to what we see, it rather points towards a gap in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze. In other words, their relationship is mediated by an impossibility: ultimately, we hear things because we cannot see everything” (Zizek, 1996, p. 93). The voice points towards a series of gaps. Certain theorists take the voice’s separateness as the starting point in understanding its character, made vivid in the case of film studies. Chion bases his study of voice in cinema on the concept of the acousmêtre, the acousmatic being, the voice whose source is invisible and unknown (Chion, 1999, p. 18). In film, this is the voice of the narrator, someone offstage or behind the curtain. For Chion, the acousmêtre carries a certain authority, derived from its tendency towards “ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence” (Chion, 1999, p. 24). The acousmêtre is putatively everywhere, and is frequently deployed in film to confer authority with menace. It is all seeing, knows everything, and is all powerful. The voice-over narration in documentaries and news broadcasts inherits its authority from this propensity. As a hapless acousmêtre, the fated Wizard of Oz sought to invoke respect by concealing himself behind a screen. In public spaces, the public address system fulfils a similar role. As the Wizard of Oz is eventually unmasked, so we see that scrutiny of the character of the acousmatic voice provides us with access to the voice in its more fraught aspects. In what follows, we adopt some of Chion’s categories in exploring these disjunctive aspects of voice, translating from cinema to public space, and in the process, consider their mediation through digital technologies. The categories chosen here are of the troubled voice, in distinction to its more mellow presentation.
T he D ise mbodied
V oice
Chion refers to the “already visualised acousmêtre,” the voice whose face we know but
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currently do not see and that generally projects reassurance. The voice of a friend or known voice on the telephone can have this function. The “commentator acousmêtre” is a category of disembodied voice, but a voice that has no personal stake in the scene. Comparable to the narrator of a news item or nature programme is the public address announcement, whether live or recorded. We generally take such announcements in our stride, though are sometimes surprised to discover that the source of the ubiquitous voice is, in fact, the check-in clerk in front of us. The commentator acousmêtre is otherwise close to Chion’s “radio acousmêtre,” the voice over the radio that has no possibility of showing itself and does not, therefore, participate in the uncertainty or choice of visibility. The “complete acousmêtre” is the voice to whom we cannot yet attach a face, “but who remains liable to appear in the visual field at any moment” (Chion, 1999, p. 21). The complete acousmêtre is a potent element in cinema that is dominated by the presence of the frame. The acousmêtre can be within the frame or outside it. Film directors make play with the possibilities of revelation at any time, and the suspense this builds, the “epiphany of the acousmêtre.” As in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: “the acousmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension” (Chion, 1999, p. 24). Public spaces are not so dominated by the frame as cinema, though it is difficult to divorce our experience of space, and the expectations it engenders, from cinema, cinematic collage, and amateur photography. Furthermore, public spaces in Western cities are dominated by advertising and imagery that inevitably adopts the conventions of framing, and presents to the visual field as so many overlapping pictures. Increasingly, such spaces are dominated by at least one animated video screen showing Sky or CNN broadcasts. Outside of the controlled environment of the film theatre or living room, the complete acousmêtre is lost in the melee of competing voices. In public spaces, the complete acousmêtre requires a rare state of silence to achieve its effect. 108
In public spaces, we can add a further category, the “localised acousmêtre”: the voice behind you in a queue, the person who causes you to look in her direction, the beckoning voice, and the voice that stands out amongst the chatter. As a spatial consideration, much attention is directed towards configurations of partitions and materials, and the introduction of sound masking and white noise to occlude the localised acousmêtre as an annoyance. Spaces designed for people to be heard and not seen are rare. Telephones are a means of keeping people invisible, but also confining the voice. Head-height screens in offices preserve a degree of visual privacy, but are not intended to enhance the effects of the acousmêtre. The hidden voice is associated with mischief and public nuisance. Unlike cinema, being able to hear the voice in public spaces but not see its source has an opposite correlate; being able to listen without being seen, a form of eavesdropping. The acousmêtre thereby provides a means of considering privacy, security, and personal space. The acousmêtre draws attention to the uncertain condition whereby we do not know the source of the voice, whether it will come into visibility at any moment, that we are being listened to, or in private, or that the screen will drop and we find that our private conversation has been broadcast.
T he Muted
V oice is not S ilent
Chion also draws attention to the role of the mute in cinema, made all the more potent when we consider early cinema as a silent medium. It is not that the mute has no voice, but several. Chinon suggests that prior to talking movies: “Garbo in the silent era had as many voices as her admirers individually conferred on her. The talkie limited her to one, her own” (Chion, 1999, p. 8). The muted voice is not silent. In public spaces, we can know that someone is speaking but be unable to hear them. We see evidence of an inaudible or far away voice. When observing a mobile phone user, we
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know there is a voice at the other end of the line that makes its presence felt in the silences. There are also situations in which people do not speak, will not speak, or cannot speak: as in the case of the silent musician or dancer. The singer, whose voice is only present in song, but would be something else again were she to speak. The voice, when heard, produces disquiet, a condition that cannot easily be restored even by silence again. Silent commuters on public transport, or clients at the gym, speak with a voice of our own choosing until we hear them. The uncertainty of voice also connotes authority. A phalanx of security police who are mute instils authority with menace, easily broken when one of them speaks, and with the voice of the everyman. Silent and obsequious attendants and servants further tarry on the edge of authority and inscrutability. Foucault’s prison warder, who can see but barely be seen, has a further homologue in voice (Foucault, 1977). The controller at the security console is mute. Spaces can be designed for various forms of silence. A sense of the sublime in nature and in architecture is strongly associated with silence. Kant describes the aesthetic category of the sublime as that which defies expression. The sublime ostensibly leaves us breathless and dumbstruck (Kant, 1988, p. 141). The mood applies to machines as much as to raging waterfalls and towering cathedrals. Ruskin would stand before the railway engine: “I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station” (Ruskin & Davis, 1995, p. 57). The feeling of the sublime is at the cusp of enjoyment and disdain, respect and contempt, a feature of much contemporary spatial design. One thinks of the overscaled airport complex (Kansai International Airport, Japan), or Norman Foster’s Millau Viaduct bridge in France, a disorienting feature of spaces also commonly characterised as non-places (Augé, 1995). The sublime is not only a visual category, but implicates an acousmatic response: the absence of voice.
Certain spaces also invoke respectful silences in response to institutional apparatus, the means by which bodies are encouraged to be docile or placid. This is one of Foucault’s main observations about the development of modernism towards progressively ordered practices and institutions that encourage quiet, well-comported, and docile bodies. The expression of state power is transformed from brutal punishments, public ridicule, rebellion, and noisy repression, to confining people in corrective prisons, ordering people’s days by the clock, disciplining inmates, soldiers, and children with arbitrary marching drills and recitations, and submitting the sick and social misfits to hospital routines. Returning to Foucault’s theme of the panoptical prison, society orders space so that we are constantly aware of the presence of the reproachful gaze, of our superiors, or of each other. As in Thomas More’s Utopia, we have a tendency to behave ourselves because: “Everyone has his eye on you” (More, 1965, p. 84). Expanding further on Foucault’s panopticism, we may be inured to the sublime aspects of spaces with mezzanines, glass lift shafts, communicating bridges, escalators, and other clichés of contemporary non-place, but such devices ensure we are always under the gaze of others. Contemporary panoptical architecture invokes a sense of seeing and being seen, hearing without being heard, that engenders a kind of docility and quiet. Technologies are further grafted onto such spaces, such as CCTV, to abet the inducement to acquiescent silence.
T he Gr afted
V oice
Cinema rarely deploys the voice as recorded by the actors at the same time they are being filmed. Voices are added afterwards by the actors and engineers in a sound studio, and adjusted and placed with the image as part of the editing process. This overdubbing, or postsynchronisation, further indicates the disjunction between voices
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and bodies, sounds, and visual images. In some cases, the connection can be disengaged deliberately, as in the case of Fellini’s use of voices that “hang on the bodies of actors in only the loosest and freest sense, in space as well as in time” (Chion, 1999, p. 85). Connor’s seminal work on the history of ventriloquism, Dumbstruck (Connor, 2000), highlights the legacy of throwing the voice, making it appear to come from a different part of the body than the throat, projecting it across space, disguising the voice, and grafting the voice onto other entities. The control of the voice in a way that suggests action at a distance (Connor, 2000, p. 215) shows a command over space. Impersonation is a further means by which the voice of another is applied, as if grafted to one’s own body. Impersonation, mimicry, is a common social device, even away from the stage. Mimicry is a route to learning. Copying others facilitates Foucault’s disciplinary body and social cohesion. Exaggerated impersonation of the voice and mannerism of others can provide vehicles for communicating endearment, contempt, or ridicule, much of which passes as habit. In public spaces, people have been observed to assume the vocal manners of those near to them, as if unconsciously. Social practices are explicable in terms of the functions of mimesis as well as of agency. On occasion, people will mime the voice of a singer in piped music. On a train, certain individuals will impersonate idiosyncratic public announcements. The grafted voice draws on concepts of role-playing. DeNora discusses the way people make use of public spaces, such as shops and arcades, in acting out a role (deNora, 2000), of glamour, cool, piety, intelligence, and loutishness, abetted by sounds and décor. Music, and we could add, the voice, are factors in this narrative invention. People use spaces and music to construct themselves for the moment. Spatial designers are involved not so much in engineering people’s behaviours and the way they use the voice, as in setting a stage, providing an environment
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for the mimetic fantasy to take place, the grafting of personas and voices. Cinema draws on the false attribution of vocal agency, the simulation of vocal apparatus (dubbing, postsynchronization, Foley editing) continuing the Rebalesque tradition whereby comedians and impersonators artificially graft words into the mouths of public figures. There are now algorithms that simulate the voice, digital devices that deploy the synthetic voice to advise on the progress of software processes, and satellite navigation systems that articulate vocal directions and warnings. The synthetic voice provides handand eye-free feedback. There are two methods for synthesising the voice. The most familiar uses combinations of synthetic sound sources, filters, and a collection of preformed, synthesised phonetics to produce low-fidelity voice bytes. The second method deploys a database of audio samples gathered from a human voice to produce high-fidelity utterances. Small phonetic grains are reconstituted to form any word and phrase and inflect it with natural intonation. The conditioning of the acousmêtre permits us to graft agency onto a machine; to imagine that a machine can speak, even with expressionless low-fidelity speech synthesis that is difficult to understand. The acousmêtre of the hi-fi synthetic voice is closer to our own, but betrays its synthetic origins through imperfections that emerge irregularly when the voice makes a question of a statement or tells a joke without chuckling. The hi-fi acousmêtre is inevitably imperfect. Paradoxically, the seasoned ear finds it difficult to trust and believe the agency and autonomy of the high-fidelity synthesised voice. This lack of confidence in the synthetic voice seems to deter companies from replacing human telephone operators with convincing digital voices. However, human-operated call centres are already synthetic grafts. The flat, scripted voice that results from reciting preplanned clauses constitutes the company speaking through the
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mouths of human operatives. The acousmêtre of this dynamic is doubly vexed. Callers using the service are obliged to accord courtesy to the voice, and call centre operatives risk complications if they deviate from their scripts. The depersonalised synthetic voice is also vulnerable. In 2001, Stanley Kubrick represents the breakdown of the Hal 9000 computer as an acousmatic event. Throughout the film, Hal is an all-seeing voice, insistent, controlling, and synthetically cold. However, his dismantling is unnervingly accompanied by his reversion to a primal condition, revealing his digital substrate as he is reduced to an infantile recitation. Once the voice has died, Hal’s physical menace ceases: “a strange death, leaving no trace, no body,” (Chion, 1999 p.46) and no echo.
C onclusion We have considered the voice, in relation to space, through the mellow theories of connection and consonance, concomitant with ideas of intimacy, engagement, and communality. Architectures and technologies that give primacy to the voice could be said to be smooth, welcoming, intimate, and organic. We counterposed this position with that in which the voice is considered as disruptive of such certainties, separated, indicative of sensory and spatial discontinuities. The vehicle for this excursion is the acousmêtre, a term developed in film studies that recognises the voice as already disembodied, floating, caught in cycles and cuts, at times mute, and often grafted. Spatial design can benefit from an exaggerated consideration of voice, to counteract the primacy already given to the visual field. This reversal is even more revealing if we dissociate the voice from the smooth and the voluted, and see it as a primary source of disconnectedness. The voice is already a troubled category, and can abet the creation of spaces in which it can speak out, break the silence, be struck dumb, cause anxiety and suspicion, or otherwise fall out of place.
A ckno wledg ment This work is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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Dolar, M. (1996). The object voice. In R. Saleci & S. Zizek (Eds.), Gaze and voice as love objects (pp. 7-31). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Graves, R. (1960). The Greek myths: Volume 1. London: Penguin. Kahn, D. (2001). Noise, water, meat: A history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kant, I. (1988). Critique of judgement: The philosophy of Kant, as contained in extracts from his own writings (J. Watson, Trans.). Glasgow: James Maclehose. Lacan, J. (1977). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Routledge.
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Rogalsky, M. (2003). Two minutes fifty seconds silence. Retrieved 15 July 2005, from http://mrogalsky.web.wesleyan.edu Ruskin, J., & Davis, P. (1995). John Ruskin: Selected writings. London: Everyman. Ruskin, J., & Links, J. G. (Eds.) (1960). The stones of Venice. New York: Da Capo Press. Zizek, S. (1996). I hear you with my eyes; or, the invisible master. In R. Saleci & S. Zizek (Eds.), Gaze and voice as love objects (pp. 90-126). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Chapter IX
Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence Susan Turner Napier University, UK Iain McGregor Napier University, UK Phil Turner Napier University, UK
A bst ract This chapter considers the role of sound, and more specifically, listening, in creating a sense of presence (of “being there”) in “places” recreated by virtual reality technologies. We first briefly review the treatment of sound in place and presence research. Here we give particular attention to the role of sound in inducing a sense of presence in virtual environments that immerse their users in representations of particular places. We then consider the phenomenology of listening, the nature of different types of listening, and their application: listening is active, directed, intentional hearing, and is not merely egocentric, it is body-centric. A classification of modes of listening that draws on work in film studies, virtual reality, and audiology is then proposed as a means of supporting the design of place-centric virtual environments in providing an effective aural experience. Finally, we apply this to a case study of listening in real and simulated soundscapes, and suggest directions for further applications of this work
Int roduction: S ound, S ense of Place and Presence Studies of sense of place and allied concepts, such as spirit of place, place identity, and place
attachment, are distributed across the literature of phenomenological and social geography (the classic work of Relph, 1976, Tuan, 1977, among others) environmental psychology (e.g., Canter, 1997), cultural and leisure studies (e.g., Haldrup
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Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence
& Larsen, 2006; Jorgenson & Stedman, 2001), and philosophy (from Aristotle to Bachelard, 1994 and Casey, 1997). Throughout, the material characteristics of the physical space are treated as intrinsic to sense of place, comprising not merely the natural or manmade landscape, but sights, smells, and sounds. As Tuan observes, sound serves to delineate the dimensions of a place; to create a sense of its size and the relative distance of objects within it from the observer. Further, places have their own characteristic sounds, some of which serve to identify a particular sort of place – the conversation, keyboard clicks, and printer noises of a busy office, the constant thrum of a busy road, the birdsong and leaf rustle of a wooded glade – others of which are unique to that place alone. This is vividly encapsulated in the US National Public Radio (NPR) network’s solicitation of “audio postcards”: “… the sound should somehow be remarkable -- the rasping of 17-year cicadas so loud it drowns out conversation; the music of church bells in the medieval German city resonating with history and spirituality and celebration; the midnight creaking and snapping of birches in the Maine woods in January eerie and otherworldly. This is sound that is not just ambience. It’s the audio equivalent of that fourcolor photo. It should really make listeners feel they were there.” (NPR, n.d.) However, a detailed treatment of sound and sense of place is rare in the academic social science literature1, perhaps because much recent work has focused heavily on nonmaterial, sociocultural meanings of place. For this we must turn to the present research community, and as we shall see later, to film design. There are many possible definitions of sense of presence, some emphasizing the illusion of nonmediation in virtual environments, others the quality of being with others who are not physically present, but for our purposes here, we intend the sense of “being there” in an environment (including real environments as well as virtual environments, or the location of a movie scene, or the setting of a chapter in a novel…)
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even when one is physically situated in another. (Insko, 2003, Witmer & Singer, 1998). Sound has been explored largely as a contributory factor to sense of presence: sound is better present rather than absent (Gilkey & Weisenberger, 1995; Hendrix & Barfield, 1996); usually better spatialised than not (Bormann, 2005; Hendrix & Barfield, 1996; Murray, Arnold, & Thornton, 2000; Stanney, Mourant, & Kennedy, 1998); and, generally, the more realistic (or perhaps plausible) the better. Sound is also used to suggest a location or event, rather than simply reproducing it, or to evoke a particular mood, as discussed inter alia in Robertson, de Quincey, Stapleford, & Wiggins (1998) and Sheridan (2004), and in common with other forms of mediated experience such as (video) games or movies: Kubrick’s use of Ligeti’s requiem in 2001: A Space Odyssey successfully transported us to the depths of the solar system, while John William’s theme music for Jaws created an extraordinary sense of dread, respectively. In present research that is explicitly related to sense of place2, recent sound-oriented work includes the BENOGO project (Serafin & Serafin, 2004; Turner & Turner, 2006), whose virtual, photo-realistic recreations of botanic hothouses, cityscapes, and interior environments included equally realistic audio and EMMA, where the virtual “Relaxation Island,” intended for psychotherapeutic use, was set in a soundscape of mewing seabirds and lapping waves (Freeman, Lessiter, Keogh, Bond, & Chapman, 2004). However, the exploration of the phenomenology of listening, rather than sound in itself, has received less attention by the presence community. References to listening do appear regularly in almost all the various questionnaire instruments developed to assess presence (Baños, Botella, Garcia-Palacios, Villa, Perpina, & Alcaniz, 2000; Dinh, Walker, Song, Kobayashi, & Hodges, 1999; Larsson, Västfjäll, & Kleiner, 2000; Lessiter, Freeman, Keogh, & Davidoff, 2001, Nichols, Haldane, & Wilson, 2000; Schubert, Friedmann, & Regenbrecht, 2001; Witmer & Singer, 1998),
Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence
but listening is generally treated as an unnuanced activity, and probe items confined largely to the clarity, realism, and localization of sounds. Those research reports that provide a more considered treatment of listening are Pressing (1997), who discusses sound and musical performance in virtual environments and observed the “familiarity, context, and developmental or physiological significance clearly have a substantial impact on sound reception,” Storms and Zyda (2000), who treat prior listening experience as a nuisance variable; Brunart (2002), who investigates how near-field audio displays may, for instance, allow discrimination of urgent and nonurgent warnings, sounds nearer the head being interpreted as more urgent, or to increase the perceived intimacy of an experience by presenting sounds as apparently very close to the listener; and Cheung and Marsden (2002), who discusses the role of expectation in auditory experience. A more substantive consideration, however, of listening and hearing is provided by Murray et al. (2004), and we return to this next.
L istening In describing the auditory system, Gibson (1966) argues that the perception of sound involves listening, not just passive hearing, and it is to listening we now turn our attention. We begin with a consideration of listening, with reference to our bodies, before discussing the ways in which different forms of listening have been classified. Sound is not merely (potential) sensory stimuli, a source of auditory information, it is information. Gibson also distinguishes between two functions of the auditory system: •
Extero-receptive: This collects information on the direction of the sound event, its orientation, the nature of the event giving rise to it;
•
Proprio-receptive: This collects and processes sounds made by the individual (e.g., speaking, breathing, sniffing).
The ears collect sounds and, through the movement of the head, also collect information on their direction3. The auditory system processes information concerning the intensity, pitch, direction, and duration of the sounds, but this is not confined to the ears. The interpretation of auditory information is always with reference to the body. At the simplest level, our corporeality allows us to locate sound, above, below, in front, behind, and in doing so, identifies the location of our bodies. While the ears may be the most obvious focus of our audition, they are not the sole source of information. Rodaway (2001, p. 91) notes that the body has its own auditory presence, “both explicitly through the vocal chords and implicitly in the friction of its movement (internally and against the external environment) and, most importantly, its own biorhythms which allow us to measure the pattern of sounds (rhythm, pace, duration). Auditory perception is against this corporeal background and in reference to it.” The auditory world is experienced as it surrounds us and as participants in it. Auditory space is, however, quite different from visual space. Hull (1990) comments that “sound places one with a world.” Similarly, Ihde (1976) observes that we are at the edge of visual space and consequently, at a distance: in contrast, we are also at the centre of the auditory experience. This is all neatly summarized by Carpenter (cited in Rodaway, ibid: 114) as follows, “Auditory space has no favoured focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries, space itself (soundfield) not space containing a thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries, it is indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pin-points, abstracts, locating each object in physical space
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against a background; the ear, however, favours sounds from any direction.” Listening is, thus, not only a matter of localising sounds (as discussed in much presence research), but also places us in space through its inherently corporeal nature. Listening, like its visual equivalent, looking, is active and intentional. A consequence of these active, involved, and directed senses is that they have the attribute of “throwness.” “Throwness” is a term introduced by the phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger (1927/1962), and used to describe the way in which moods are disclosed (become known)4. Dreyfus (1991, p. 174) helpfully notes that “moods provide the background on the basis of which specific events can affect us”. If I am in a bad-tempered mood, everything is annoying to me. Moods colour our view of the world and events, and reveal how things are going with us, that is, moods reflect things back to us. Things, whether we are seeing or listening to them, are encountered as attractive, appealing, boring, tiresome, and a dozen other things, and there is no way in which they can appear neutral. The “throwness” of listening compels us to have the world disclosed to us in a manner which reflects our moods. (The language of Heidegger may be difficult, but the points he makes are invaluable.) In all, this is why listening is so compelling, and its interpretative function so central. As Menninger (1938) asserts, “Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.”
C lassifying and S upporting D ifferent Modes of L istening Sound and listening has been the subject of much attention in the film community, and here Sonnenschein (2001), an authority on cinematic sound design, notes the active nature of listening, entailing filtering, selective focus, links to memory,
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and the capacity to respond. Sonnenschein cites the film theorist Chion’s three listening modes: reduced, concerned only with the parameters of a sound and not its source or meaning; causal, where the listener is identifying the sound source; and semantic, relating to the spoken language or other symbolic codes (Chion, 1994). To this, Sonnenschein adds a further mode, referential listening, which implies links to the emotional connotations and meaning of the sound as well as an awareness of its context. When constructing soundscapes for films, sound designers consciously use sounds in the manner suggested by such a classification. Within this, while dialogue almost always takes precedence, effects and music often vie for prominence within a mix. Music usually is regarded as providing the emotional backdrop, while effects supply almost all of the context. All three combine to form a soundtrack that “is communicable and valid but unanalyzable” (Doane, 1985), designed to elicit emotions, invoke feelings, and set moods. No matter what the method of production for dialogue, music, or effects, between them, as illustrated, they support each of the three levels of listening proposed by Chion and extended by Sonnenschein. Reduced listening Here we have the rumble of a “star ship,” the sound of tyres on the road to indicate movement from within a car, or general “room tone” to indicate that the characters inhabit a larger space than is visible. All of these are termed “atmos[pheres]” and are an essential part of any sound design. It is expected that they will become rapidly habituated, and they are typically introduced slightly above the mix, and then reduced to sit back within it, as a way of emulating the way in which listeners experience and interpret real-world environments. This “selection” is essential, as “irrelevant” sounds have to be ignored in order to interpret what is either most useful or most interesting (Bordwell & Thompson, 1985). Most films adhere to the principle of “starve the eye and feed the ear.”. During the introduction to scenes or transitions
Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence
between scenes, “atoms” play an important part. One of the most useful applications of reduced listening for the designer is the ability to colour the sounds, this means affecting each sound’s timbre so that the sound itself provides cues about the environment. A radio playing music with a lot of reverberation can suggest a large space; add the sound of gently lapping water and the listener thinks of an indoor swimming pool. Aesthetic cues are also put to use: the crackles and pops of a record player place the music within the scene, and therefore make it diegetic, with inherent narrative importance, but the intention of these additional sounds is not to be consciously heard but rather felt (Beauchamp, 2005). Effective use was made of this in The Matrix, where rhythmic effects aid the perception of slow motion without the shots appearing static. The sounds themselves are not important, but their innate temporal dimension allows time to progress slowly while still retaining the audience’s interest. Causal listening Causal listening, which Bohme (2000) refers to as “object orientated” and Metz (1985) calls the “sound of what?”, is by far the most important form of listening in film. Everything that can be seen on the screen, that can make a sound, potentially has to be heard without imposing upon the dialogue. So the first thing any sound design team does is to list the sounds that are either essential or might enhance the film. This proves often to be of great advantage to filmmakers, as it can transform the artificial into the real: polystyrene rocks can have weight when rumbling towards the lead character, plywood doors become solid oak, and painted backdrops can appear animated. These sounds are commonly synchronised with the action, and provide all of the physical cues about a sound generating object, such as its mass, velocity, composition, and vibration. The film director, Robert Bresson, states that he will replace an “image with a sound whenever possible” as a “sound always evokes an image; an image never evokes a sound.” A further example can be seen in The Empire Strikes Back, where
the director, Irving Kershner, uses a pneumatic sound to suggest a door opening. In actuality, this “sleight of hand” was a single shot of a closed door cut straight to an open door without any intervening movement (Chion, 1994). Chion refers to “synchresis” as being the bonding of a sound to a visible source. This allows Foley artists to replace human heads with watermelons in horror films when a character’s head explodes, and baseball bats hitting leather baseball gloves stand in for human punches. This is a form of analogy, where isomorphic or iconic sounds can stand in for “real-world” sounds, as long as they match the audience’s perception of what the source’s timbre and dynamics should be. Semantic/referential listening Here is clearly where dialogue lies, but also music, especially themes, such as those associated with the shark in Jaws and Darth Vader in Star Wars. However, the sound designer also works in this area: as Smeagol strangles his friend to gain the ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there are a series of interrelated cries that express the character’s emotional trauma as the ring calls out to him. Offscreen sounds are routinely utilized in the horror genre to indicate that the yet unseen antagonist is approaching the heroes with murderous intent. An example from comedy is when the sound of a car crashing in A Fish Called Wanda indicates that an unseen character is yet again driving on the wrong side of the road and has caused another collision. Subtlety is also beneficial here: as a fridge door closes, it can have the sound of glass vibrating, indicating that it is full of bottles, which might mean that it is full of beer, or it might be hollow, indicating that it is empty, or close with a solid thud, suggesting that it is full. In turn, this can reinforce the sense that the character has a drinking or eating problem. Motifs are the most useful form of sense-making sounds, making connections to “story, plot and mood” (Burwell, 2003). Sound imagery usually takes the form of simile, hyperbole, metaphor, allegory, irony, paradox, or vivification (Sonnenschein, 2001). With
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simile, a clock ticking can suggest a heart beating regularly, implying that a character is trying to calm themselves before a confrontation. Hyperbole can take the form of the sound of fireworks when a champagne cork explodes to exaggerate the impression of a celebration. An example of a metaphor in sound design terms could be the groans of a nonexistent character as someone kneads bread, showing that they are taking out their anger on the bread, as a substitute for the unseen person. Allegory can take the form of the sound of chains clinking as a character walks, when there are no visible shackles, suggesting the character’s feeling of being imprisoned. Ironic sounds are the mainstay of comedy: the miniature pistol that produces the sound of a cannon, while the much larger gun of the “hero” creates merely a “pop.” The contradiction of a paradox, where the sound of a child screaming can come from a car as it starts up, foretelling the car accident, this can be an effective device, especially as the scream was originally attributed to a malfunction in the car. The final form of imagery can be both sinister and comedic; an example is the sigh of a sofa as an obese character throws themselves onto it, with a further exhalation by the sofa when the character arises, as the object expresses relief at the removal of its burden. An experienced sound designer limits the number of key sounds that an audience has to interpret. This is achieved through judicious mixing, where after being introduced, a sound may be dropped in volume, or its frequency is altered so that there is no spectral overlap. However, more often, it is dropped, emulating habituation, as the sound has moved from providing information about object and event to effectively becoming the object of reduced listening. This form of mixing guides the audience through a series of key sounds so that they can make sense of the complex auditory environment they are inhabiting. Sound design in films thus has little to do with the presentation of reality; it is a technique that, if used, successfully
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manipulates perceived reality, enhancing the narrative and contributing towards the suspension of disbelief, placing the viewer within the environment of the story. Designers are not concerned with recreating sounds: accuracy is confined to the genre of documentary, sound is used to extend the screen, highlighting truths and obscuring lies through its use of synchrony and conventions. Sound is a “rashomon” phenomenon; it exists only in the individual interpretations of its listeners (Altman, 1992), and if it is executed successfully, then audiences will remember visual elements that only existed aurally (Beauchamp, 2005). In present research, we find a similar framework underpinning the argument in Murray et al., (2000) for the significance of sound in immersive virtual environments. Following Gilkey and Weisenberger (1995), Murray adopts Ramsdell’s three levels of hearing as a framework to discuss an empirical study of induced hearing loss and its implications for virtual environment design. Ramsdell’s three levels are social hearing, which concerns communication, warning hearing, which relates to sounds that indicate something happening, the ring of the doorbell, or the boiling of the kettle, and primitive hearing, relating to background sounds of which we are not normally consciously aware (Ramsdell, 1978). In Ramsdell’s view, primitive hearing is essential for psychological coupling, the sense of active connection with the environment. Murray’s data was obtained from studies of people with temporary, induced hearing loss walking around a university campus and attempting to communicate with others. The results indicate that support for both warning hearing and primitive hearing are necessary for a sense of presence in real environments, and by implication in their virtual counterparts, with the addition of social hearing in the case of environments where other people are present.
Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence
A Three-level Classi.cation of L istening While several elements are common to the descriptions of listening, summarized previously, other useful points are unique to single accounts. Drawing, inter alia, on the work of Sonnenschein and Chion in film theory, Ramsdell in the study of deafness, and Murray et al., in presence research, and taking the corporeality of listening into consideration, we propose a three-level account: Prelistening. This is preconscious and is prone to rapid habituation. The listener is not normally aware of sounds in this level of listening, but can comment on them if asked to do so (“there is a buzzing sound”). Sounds are not consciously attributed to their sources. Prelistening is equivalent to Ramsdell’s primitive hearing and Chion’s reduced listening. We also include such things as the startle reflex, alerting the body to potential threats; this is the most ancient from of listening phylogenetically. Object-event listening. This might equally be described as everyday listening (Gaver, 1993), or causal listening (Chion), and would include Ramsdell’s warning hearing (this is at a higher level than the startle reflex). In object-event listening, we typically recognize and locate the sound source relative to our bodies, and are able to judge the size and shapes of objects. (“The sound of a heavy door closing behind me,” “the sound of a cat meowing a long way off”). The final category we describe as sense-making listening. This final category of listening is built upon object-event listening but involves making sense of the sound, and often includes affective or autobiographical elements (“the sound of a door closing, which means it must be about 6.30 pm as that’s when my wife returns from work”). Similarly “the sound of a cat meowing” becomes the subvocalized “he’s not hungry again is he?”.. The category is similar to Sonnenschein’s referential listening. This is also the body in social context (cf. Merleau-Ponty’s intentional
arc, Merleau-Ponty, 1945). Semantic listening to speech or other forms of audible communication would fall into this category, but are not of primary concern in this context. There are interesting parallels here with the three-layer formulation of sense of presence and self to be found in Riva, Waterworth, & Waterworth (2004) three-layer model of presence. This draws on Damasio’s theorisation (Damasio, 1999) of three aspects of self, the preconscious protoself and two aspects of the conscious self, the core self and the extended self. The three layers of this model adapted in relation to presence are proposed to be: • •
•
Proto presence: The embodied aspect of presence relating to the differentiation of the self from the world; Core presence: A process of selective attention to perceptual stimuli, supporting the discrimination of external reality from the contents of one’s consciousness, dreams or memories; Extended presence: Which serves to assess the relationship and significance of events in the world in the context of the memories and so forth which make up the autobiographical self.
However, our treatment of listening adds an aspect of being-in-the-world to the approach taken by Riva et al./Damasio, that of intentionality. We now turn to the empirical investigation.
T he Em pirical
S tudy
The work reported here is part of a larger study examining the relationship between sound, sense of presence, and sense of place in real and artificial soundscapes, of which other aspects have been reported elsewhere (Turner, McGregor, Turner, & Carroll, 2003) Our hypothesis in this instance was that the “throwness” of listening is such that
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all three forms of listening would be evident, even in conditions where the soundscape is clearly artificial. The part of the study discussed in this chapter had two conditions with 10 participants assigned to each: 1. Participants physically present in the Jack Kilby Computing Centre at Napier University (JKCC) (Figure 1.) The JKCC is a 500 seat, 24/7, very busy, open-access computing facility. 2. Participants located in a different room and seated at a table in the midst of eight speakers and four sub-basses reproducing the JKCC soundscape. See Figure 2. The soundscape itself was recorded in the JKCC. An eight-channel system was used. Omnidirectional tie-clip microphones, using suspension mounts, were placed in an ellipse, at 1.3 m in height (the approximate head-height of a seated listener). Spacing of microphones was chosen to correspond to the loudspeaker positioning during reproduction, so time delays would match. A 30-minute recording was made at 96 kHz, 24 bit. This higher recording rate enabled a wider range of harmonics and a greater dynamic range to be recorded than is possible with normal CD rates (44.1 kHz, 16 bit). This provides a theoretical frequency range of 20 Hz – 48 kHz and 0 – 148 dB, compared to 20 Hz – 22.05 kHz and 96 dB when using CD rates. The higher settings allow
Figure 1. 500 seat JKCC
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the recording of the more subtle aspects of the soundfield associated with the reverberation of the room, which is typically contained within the higher complex harmonics. The increase in the dynamic range also captured the quieter sounds that are normally lost in the noise floor of recording equipment. It also allowed the accurate capture of transient peaks without the requirement for compression. The result of this is that the increase in rates more accurately reflects the experience of actually being in the environment, as a listener’s hearing capabilities are typically well beyond that associated with any commercially available recording system. The reproduction system employed a compact loudspeaker in place of each microphone and four sub-bass monitors in order to extend the frequency range for lower frequencies. This was located in a quiet room and the positioning of each compact monitor matched exactly the original microphone positions. The system was calibrated to sound pressure levels during the recording. Participants listened to a continuous 15-minute extract from the recording whilst sitting on a height adjustable chair that raised their ears to height of 1.3 m, which allowed accurate alignment with the centre of the loudspeakers.
Listening, Corporeality, Place and Presence
Figure 2. Recreating the JKCC
Participants and Procedure Twenty participants were invited to participate in the study and were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. The participants varied with respect to their age, sex, and background. All participants took part in the study on a voluntary basis and all had a high command of spoken English. In both conditions, participants were seated and requested to verbalise what they heard, as they heard it, during the 15-minute session. They were informed that the session would last for about 15 minutes and that they could ask any questions afterwards. They were also told that they could end the experiment at any point. Verbalisation was recorded using a microphone attached to the participant’s collar. In condition 2 (artificial soundscape), participants were not informed of the location where the recording had been made. A
questionnaire intended to probe sense of presence, adapted from the widely used Slater-Usoh-Steed instrument (Slater et al., 1994) was administered at the end of the session.
A nal ysis and Resul ts Transcribed verbalisations were coded for one of the three forms of listening by the second and third authors, a sample of coding being crosschecked. There was evidence of all three forms of listening in both real and artificial conditions. Table 1 shows the number of participants making each type of verbalisation. All participants verbalised instances of object-event listening. In the real soundscape, the verbalisations of 1 of the 10 participants were limited to object-event listening and a further, four verbalised objectevent and sense-making listening only. In the
Table 1. Number of participants verbalising each type of listening in the real and artificial soundscapes Real soundscape
Artificial soundscape
Prelistening
5
3
Object-event listening
10
10
Sense-making listening
9
10
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artificial condition, three participants verbalised object-event and sense-making listening only. There was further variation between individual participants in the proportion of verbalisations for the different forms of listening. The following are representative examples of verbalizations of each type of listening: Prelistening “Slight peeping noise” (Real soundscape) “General background hum” (Real soundscape) “Full of ambient noises” (Real soundscape) “Lots of banging noises” (Real soundscape)
“General quite low noise” (Artificial soundscape) “Continual clicking” (Artificial soundscape) “I can hear tapping” (Artificial soundscape) “The elements of the background noise, they are changed from being such a low drone to being a higher pitched noise” (Artificial soundscape)
Object-event listening “But mostly it’s typing and keyboards” (Real soundscape) “Constant sound of paper being binned” (Real soundscape) “There’s a mobile phone somewhere and some laughing coming from back there somewhere” (Real soundscape) “Could be photocopier sounds as well” (Real soundscape) “I can hear people walking about now” (Artificial soundscape) “Sounds like someone opening curtains or blinds” (Artificial soundscape) “Must be walking downstairs… walking along a wooden floor and then onto a carpeted floor” (Artificial soundscape) 122
“Someone scrunching up a bit of paper and then throwing it away” (Artificial soundscape)
Sense-making listening “And a lot of coughing, as if everyone has a cold at the same time” (Real soundscape) “A girlie laughter – someone reasonably attracted to someone else” (Real soundscape) “Still talking to a pal... and the noise is annoying behind me... still making noise” (Real soundscape) “The beeping of the computer getting terribly upset” (Real soundscape) “It sounds like I am sitting in an office somewhere – some high-ceilinged office” (Artificial soundscape) “It’s really quite annoying actually” (Artificial soundscape) “Must be a place where everybody is very unwell... coughing and sneezing keeps going on.” (Artificial soundscape) “Sounds like people typing and just working in an office, I think” (Artificial soundscape) Both conditions also generated a number of verbalisations that placed the listener corporeally in the soundscape.
“I’m next to the stairs, so you can hear the people walking up and down as well” (Real soundscape) “More steps behind me” (Real soundscape) “Laughing on my left” (Real soundscape) “Somebody using a mouse on my left” (Real soundscape) “Just a few people behind me slightly to my left” (Artificial soundscape) “More hammering away on my right” (Artificial soundscape)
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“Someone exhaling… a low voice whispering directly behind me.” (Artificial soundscape) “More tapping to my left again.” (Artificial soundscape)
D iscussion The results suggest that the listening experience in this very high fidelity but artificial soundscape was very similar to the experience in its realworld counterpart. All three forms of listening were evident in both conditions, participants in the (very evidently) artificial condition still being able to make sense of the sounds, relate them to their bodies, their own experience and affective state, and the perceived intentions and affect of others. The nature of the comments suggests that to some degree, these participants found themselves in a real place, even though this was not always identified as that where the soundscape was captured. It is also striking that the “throwness” of listening compels people to interpret the soundscape about them despite the artificiality of the setting. Instances of prelistening are comparatively uncommon in both conditions. This is not surprising: (i) we were asking people to comment on something that is normally preconscious and (ii) the act of complying with a request to describe what they heard is likely to have prompted ascription of a source to the sound; object-event listening. We are considering how prelistening might be captured more effectively. Although almost all participants verbalized instances of sense-making listening, there are also relatively few instances of this mode, but (by inspection) no systematic difference between conditions. There is also a notable difference between individuals in the relative proportions of object-event listening and sense-making listening, and in egocentric localization of sounds. It is unclear how far this reflects differences in listening behaviour, verbal adeptness, expressive style, spatial ability, or
other cognitive characteristics. We have observed this effect before in analyzing free-form verbal responses in a similar context (Turner et al., 2003): disentangling the “nuisance” effect of individual differences remains an issue for place and presence research. In this instance, a within-subjects comparison between conditions would have been a possibility, but this would have in turn raised issues around the effects of familiarisation. More interestingly, the data from the presence questionnaire from the participants in the artificial condition suggests that a relationship may exist between forms of listening and degree of sense of presence; we would hypothesise that sense-making betokens a greater degree of intentionality, engagement, and hence, conceivably presence, but with only 10 participants, a further study is necessary before this can be more than a weakly indicative finding. Such further work would be facilitated by the development of a quantitative “listening scale” that would complement qualitative data collection.
C onclusion This work has argued that, as listening locates our corporeal selves in the world, and the “throwness” of listening is so compelling, a consideration of listening is a core element in presence research, and in particular, where the aim is to create virtual environments that evoke presence in a specific place. We have drawn on previous work to define a three-level classification of listening and applied this to an empirical study of real and artificial soundscapes, where evidence of all three forms of listening in each condition was identified. Further work is required to identify the relationships between dominant modes of listening, sense of presence, and sense of place, to operationalise the three-fold descriptions as a measurement scale, and to explore how best to support all three forms of listening in virtual “places.” The empirical work reported here used a high-fidelity record-
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ing, but the use of sound design techniques from film media have intriguing potential for virtual environments. Here comparative trials are likely to be fruitful. Finally, on a theoretical plane, we argue that the treatment of listening as an intentional phenomenon advanced in this chapter contributes to the more general understanding of presence and self.
A ckno wledg ment Thanks to Fiona Carroll, now of Swansea University, for a substantial contribution to running the experiment, data collection, and transcription. This work was, in part, supported by the EU-funded BENOGO project.
Refe rences Altman, R. (1992). The material heterogeneity of recorded sound. In R. Altman (Ed.), Sound theory/sound practice (pp. 15-31). New York: Routledge. Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press. Baños, R. M., Botella, C., Garcia-Palacios, A., Villa, H., Perpina, C., & Alcaniz, M. (2000). Presence and reality judgment in virtual environments: A unitary construct? CyberPsychology and Behaviour, 3, 327-335. Beauchamp, R. (2005). Designing sound for animation. Oxford: Focal Press. Bohme, G. (2000). Acoustic atmospheres. Soundscape, Spring, 14-18. Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (1985). Fundamental aesthetics of sound in the cinema. In E. Weis & J. Belton (Eds.), Film sound: Theory and practice (pp. 181-199). New York: Columbia University Press.
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Bormann, K. (2005). Presence and the utility of audio spatialization. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 14(3), 278-297. Brunart, D. S. (2002). Near-field virtual audio displays. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 11(1), 93-106. Burwell, C. (2003). Composing for the Coen brothers. In L. Sider,, D. Freeman, & J. Sider, (Eds.), Soundscape: The school of sound lectures 1998 – 2001 (pp. 195-208). London: Wallflower Press. Canter, D. (1997). The facets of place. In G. T. Moore & R. W. Marans, (Eds.), Advances in environment, behavior, and design, vol. 4: Toward the integration of theory, methods, research, and utilization (pp. 109-147). New York: Plenum. Casey, E. S. (1997). The fate of place. Berkeley; Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Chueng, P., & Marsden, P. (2002). Designing auditory spaces to support sense of place: The role of expectation. Position paper for The Role of Place in On-line Communities Workshop, CSCW2002, New Orleans. Coyne, R., & Parker, M. (2008). Voice and space. In P. Turner & S. Turner (Eds.), The exploration of space, spatiality and technology. IGI Global Press. Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Dinh, H. Q., Walker, N., Song, C., Kobayashi, A., & Hodges L. F. (1999). Evaluating the importance of multi-sensory input on memory and the sense of presence in virtual environments. In Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality 1999 (pp. 222-228). Doane, M. A. (1985). Ideology and practice of sound editing and mixing. In E. Weis & J. Belton
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(Eds.), Film sound: Theory and practice (pp. 5462). New York: Columbia University Press. Dreyfus, H. L. (1991). Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger’s being and time, Division 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Freeman J, Lessiter J, Keogh E, Bond F. W., & Chapman K. (2004). Relaxation Island: Virtual, and really relaxing. In 7th Annual International Workshop on Presence, PRESENCE 2004, at Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain, 13-14-15 October 2004. Gaver, W. W. (1993). How do we hear in the world? Explorations of ecological acoustics. Ecological Psychology, 5(1), 1-29. Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gilkey, R. H., & Weisenberger, J. M. (1995). The sense of presence for the suddenly deafened adult. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 4(4), 357-363. Haldrup, M., & Larsen, J. (2006). Material cultures of tourism, Leisure Studies, 25(3), 275–289. Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and time. (Translated by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson). New York: Harper Collins. Hendrix, C., & Barfield, W. (1996). The sense of presence within auditory environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 5(3), 290-301. Hull, J. (1990). Touching the rock: An experience of blindness. London: SPCK Publishing. Ihde, D. (1976). Listening and the voice. Athens: Ohio University Press. Insko, B.E. (2003). Measuring presence: Subjective, behavioral, and physiological measures. In G. Riva, F. Davide and W.J. Ijsselsteijn (Eds.), Being there: Concepts, effects, and measurements of user presence in synthetic environments. Amsterdam: Ios Press.
Jorgensen, B. S., & Stedman, R. C. (2001). Sense of place as an attitude: Lakeshore owners attitudes towards their properties. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, 233-248. Larsson, P., Västfjäll, D., & Kleiner, M. (2001). The actor-observer effect in virtual reality presentations. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 4, 239-246. Lessiter, J., Freeman, J., Keogh, E., & Davidoff, J. (2001). A cross-media presence questionnaire: The ITC-sense of presence inventory. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 10, 282298. Menninger, K.M. (1938). Man against himself. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Merleau-Ponty (1945). Phénomènologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Metz, C. (1985). Aural objects. In E. Weis & J. Belton (Eds.), Film sound: Theory and practice (pp. 154-161). New York: Columbia University Press. Murray, C. D., Arnold, P., & Thornton, B. (2000). Presence accompanying induced hearing loss: Implications for immersive virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 9(2), 137-148. National Geographic. (n.d). Retrieved August 17, 2007, from http://www.nationalgeographic. com/xpeditions/activities/10/gasounds.html Nichols, S., Haldane, C., & Wilson, J. R. (2000). Measurement of presence and its consequences in virtual environments. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 52, 471-491. N.P.R. (n.d.). Retrieved August 17, 2007, from http://www.npr.org/about/pitch/postcards.html Pressing, J. (1997). Some perspectives on performed sound and music in virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 6(4), 482-502.
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Ramsdell, D. A. (1978). The psychology of the hard-of-hearing and deafened adult. In H. Davis & S. R. Silverman (Eds.) Hearing and deafness (4th ed.) (pp. 499-510). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness, London: Pion Books Riva, G., Waterworth, J. A., & Waterworth E. L. (2004). The layers of presence: A bio-cultural approach to understanding presence in natural and mediated environments. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(4), 405-419. Robertson, J., de Quincey, A., Stapleford, T., & Wiggins, G. (1998). Real-time music generation for a virtual environment. In Proc. ECAI 98 Workshop on AI/ALife and Entertainment. Rodaway, P. (2001). Sensuous geographies. London: Routledge. Schubert, T., Friedmann, F., & Regenbrecht, H. (2001). The experience of presence: Factor analytic insights. Presence: Teleoperators and virtual environments, 10, 266-281. Serafin, G., & Serafin, S., (2004). Sound design to enhance presence in photorealistic virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Auditory Display, Sidney, Australia, July 6-9. Sheridan, T. B. (2004). Musings on music making and listening: Supervisory control and virtual reality. In Proc. IEEE, 92(4), 601-605. Slater, M., Usoh, M., & Steed, A. (1994). Depth of presence in virtual environments, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 3(2), 130-144. Sonnenschein, D. (2001). Sound design: The expressive power of music, voice and sound effects in cinema. Studio City, CA: Michael Wise Productions.
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Stanney, K. M., Mourant, R. R., & Kennedy, R. S. (1998). Human factors issues in virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 7(4), 327-351. Storms, R. L., & Zyda, M. J. (2000). Interactions in perceived quality of auditory-visual displays. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 9(6), 557-580. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2006). Place, sense of place and presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(2), 204-217. Turner, P., McGregor, I., Turner, S., & Carroll, F. (2003). Using soundscapes to create a sense of place. In Proc. Int. Conference on Auditory Display. Boston, MA, USA, 6-9 July 2003. Turner, S., Turner, P., Carroll, F., O’Neill, S., Benyon, D., McCall, R., & Smyth, M. (2003). Recreating the botanics: Towards a sense of place in virtual environments. In Proc. Of UK Conference on Environmental Psychology, Aberdeen. Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Witmer, B. G., & Singer, M. J. (1998). Measuring presence in virtual environments: A presence questionnaire. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7, 225-240. Zahorik, P., & Jenison, R. L. (1998). Presence as being-in-the-world. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7(1), 78-89.
E ndnotes
1
Coyne and Parker’s discussion of voice and space in this volume is a notable exception (Coyne and Parker, 2008).
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2
3
4
Much VR-based presence work is ultimately about persuading people that they are somewhere they are not, we intend here research whose primary aim is to (re)create specific places, whether real or imaginary. Many animals have the added luxury of being able to swivel their ears too. Winograd and Flores (1986) are usually credited with introducing a number of
Heidegger’s concepts including ready-tohand, throwness and present-at-hand to the computing world and Zahorik and Jenison (1998) have briefly discussed the concept in the context of presence. It should be said that in consulting the source material (Heidegger’s Being and Time) it is a little difficult to reconciled their interpretation with the original.
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Chapter X
Representing Space: The Pictorial Imperative Stephen Boyd Davis Middlesex University, UK
A bst ract The chapter is concerned with the relationship between the planar space of graphic representations and the world space that they represent. To achieve some coherence in thinking about the spatiality of different media such as film, television, and videogames, two opposed modes of composition, the configurational and the pictorial, are described, both historically and in current practice. The film theory concepts of diegetic and extra-diegetic are also unified with these two modes of composition. It is argued that the historical, developmental path to the spatiality of modern media suggests an almost irresistible pictorial imperative. So while we may at times regret the dominance of one particular mode of picture-making that, for some purposes, certainly has weaknesses in both informational and affective terms, in the end we must acknowledge its attraction and its power.
Int roduction This chapter is concerned with the relationship between the planar space of graphic representations and the space that they represent. The aim is to achieve some coherence or unity in thinking about the spatiality of different media such as film, television, and videogames; also, to trace continuities historically. It will be argued that the spatiality of modern media has discernible roots in much older forms of depiction, and that this historical, developmental path suggests an almost
irresistible pictorial imperative. Examples are taken from painting, film, television, computer games, and other forms of computer graphics.
Tw o Gr aphical
Modes
There are two ways of organising graphical images of the world (to speak very roughly): the configurational and the pictorial. These two modes can be differentiated as follows. In the configurational mode, the elements are combined in the space
Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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of the composition itself: the meanings of the picture arise from conjunctions in the image. For example, much factual television (especially news television) conveys its meanings by assembling disparate components on the screen, in a “hybrid reality composed of different spaces” (Manovich, 2001, p. 150). In the pictorial mode, by contrast, the elements are combined in a putative world space, real or imaginary, that is then depicted. In this category lie conventional pictures, photographs, virtual worlds, and most computer animation. The backbone of depictions of this kind has, for over 500 years, been the technology of perspective. Gombrich, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, characterised the two approaches as the pictographic and the photographic (Gombrich, 1999, p. 49). It is assumed, in this chapter, that picturemaking is an intentional activity. Whatever mode they adopt, picture-makers are not trying simply to copy the world. They are attempting to achieve certain objectives, objectives that vary by culture, subculture, and individual. Some of these objectives amount to consciously held intentions on the part of the painter, the filmmaker, games designer, and so forth, while others are embedded in the culture to which the picture-maker belongs; an idea pursued below in the context of visual culture. Very rarely, painters may have believed that their goal was simply to depict what they see. Ruskin famously instructed painters to “go to nature … rejecting nothing, selecting nothing” (Ruskin, 1851, p. 418), but this approach is highly unusual. In fact, even Ruskin only recommended simple imitation for young, inexperienced painters. As Gombrich pointed out (1980), the history of representation provides few examples of unselective monitoring of the pattern of light on the retina.
Fr o m Wo rld S pace t o Pictu re S pace It is worth looking briefly at the apparently obvious relationship between the world to be depicted and the depictions that are made of it.
The space of the real world is commonly described as three-dimensional. This way of conceiving space is a culturally specific one, and it has been objected that the Cartesian system little resembles our experience of the world (e.g., Lannoch & Lannoch, 1989, p. 41). In this view, it might be preferable to use spherical polar coordinates representing how far up or down, right or left, the observer must turn, together with the distance from the observer of the various parts of the environment, in order to see or reach some part of the scene. However, Cartesian three-dimensional space has a good fit with depiction on a two-dimensional surface. Indeed, it is almost certain that the idea that space is naturally measured on three orthogonal axes would not have occurred without the prior achievement of perspectival depiction. Descartes’ model presupposes just those kinds of graphical mapping of world space to picture space with which our culture is familiar: a picture has two dimensions, comprising marks on a plane that is orthogonal to the line of sight, and the world has an additional dimension: that of depth or distance from the observer. The pictorial surface itself requires consideration. Excepting qualities such as impasto brushwork, or the collage of items onto the surface of a picture, which might offer some slight extension in depth, the third dimension is, by definition, absent in pictures, and only appears through some illusion. The causes of this depth illusion vary. Though the discussion in this chapter is dominated by geometric perspective (such as the diminishing of apparent size with increased distance), it should be noted that there are many forms of depth cue; Gibson suggested that natural vision uses at least 12 (Gibson, 1950, 1979). It is customary to regard the depth seen in a picture as lying beyond the picture surface, that is, on the other side of the image, away from the observer. From the seminal work of Alberti (14041472) in the Italian Renaissance, this notion is often referred to as the “Albertian window” (Elkins, 1994, p. 46-7): the picture surface is equivalent to a windowpane, the depicted world outside. 129
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The relation between the two-dimensional surface of the depiction and the three-dimensional space of the depicted can also be considered in terms of process. Instantaneous technologies, such as photography, minimise our sense of this, but others, such as drawing, painting, or computer graphics, make it apparent. Crudely, it can be conceived as three consecutive phases: finding or constructing a real or imaginary model; viewing it from a particular location to produce a view; and finally rendering that view as some picture. In computer graphics, the independence of world construction from any particular pictorial representation is actualised: the three-dimensional model really is constructed in computer memory independently of, and prior to, its being viewed from a particular viewpoint and then rendered for the user (Foley, van Dam, Feiner, & Hughes, 1995, p. 806-9). The three-dimensional geometric data seem to imply nothing about either the viewpoint or the depiction that are computed after world construction. This is the essence of the pictorial mode derived from Renaissance perspective.
T he C onfigu rational
Mode
In the configurational mode, images of persons and objects are brought together in a way that relies not on depicting a single coherent world space, but on relationships within the picture surface itself. Examples abound in early Christian, Romanesque, and Byzantine art (Damisch, 1987, p.13), and also, in much western art of the twentieth century. For example, two figures, such as a saint and a worshipper, are semantically interrelated by organising them in the depictive space. To modern eyes, such images share characteristics with the diagram, with the principal difference that, unlike many diagrams, these represent things that can be seen in the world, rather than abstract entities. In our own time, the contrast between photomontage and straightforward photography is a
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good illustration of the difference between the configurational and the pictorial. Photography captures a view of a preexistent world, while photomontage combines pictorial fragments taken from their original contexts and assembles them in a composition (Ades, 1986). Film posters have often made use of such a montage approach. Each component of the image has its own viewing position (and therefore perspective geometry), but together they are organised in a meaningful conjunction. Even though the perspectives of size and geometry are not consistent with a natural scene, the internal pictorial relationships are often made to conform to everyday expectations. For example, one depicted character may be positioned to look towards another, though they were originally abstracted from separate photographs.
Wha t H appened Renaissance?
in the
Euclid enunciated the principles of perspective geometry (Lindberg, 1992, p. 105-6), and pictures that depict a three-dimensional world as though it lay beyond the painted surface exist from Roman times (Bryson, 1990, p. 17-59). However, the direct source of our own pictorial practices is the Renaissance, which witnessed a transition from the configurational to the pictorial use of space. This was not an overnight revolution, but it affected all subsequent depiction. For many kinds of pictures, it became obligatory to construct a single coherent space that seems to exist independently of the act of depiction. It has been suggested that, for a considerable period, the sense of the picture as a surface was so lost that the two-dimensional disposition of pictorial elements was simply not discussed in any manuals or theories of painting. Composition meant the designing of the world to be depicted (Puttfarken, 2000, p. 120). The transition from marking surfaces to depicting worlds is often illustrated by comparing two
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paintings of the Madonna Enthroned. The first, from 1285-86, is by Cimabue (c1240-1302), the second, from 1305-10, by Giotto (1266/67-1337). Cimabue was Giotto’s teacher. In the older man’s painting, saints and angels arranged around the central holy group seem, to modern eyes, to pattern the surface with a symbolic cluster of faces, each of which looks out at us, presenting a more or less iconic image of the human face. The architecture of the throne is used to divide the surface of the painting into zones so that, at its base, we seem to see three separate pictures, each within a little arch. In Giotto’s painting, although the holy group is still depicted out of scale, larger than the other figures, there is a real impression of a throne that occupies volumetric space. Now the surrounding figures look not at the spectator, but at the central figures, reinforcing the sense that all the elements occupy a single, prepictorial environment. Significantly, in the later painting, parts of the faces of angels are occluded by other angels’ haloes, an “accidental” outcome of the fact that some angels are standing nearer to us than others. If we were really to see a group of people clustered round a throne, this would be likely to occur. In the earlier painting, the angels standing further away are raised up more or less arbitrarily to ensure that their heads are completely visible. To modern eyes, the Giotto seems more like a transparent presentation of a scene than the Cimabue, one in which, in some respects, the painting, as an object, is concealed or negated: the world model beyond is what we see. We are heading towards the Albertian window. The rules of perspective construction were developed and codified from 1435 by Alberti, Viator, Dürer, and others, in what has been called the rationalisation of sight (Ivins, 1938). The novel tendency of this method to articulate the empty space between objects, as much as the objects themselves, has been linked to contemporary developments in fields as diverse as musical notation, account keeping, map making, and typography
(Crosby, 1997, p. 169-170). However, it is also worth noting that in the time of Uccello (1397-1475), a Renaissance master of perspective construction, perspective was still an “added feature” rather as it might have been for us in an early computer game. Aura attached to Uccello’s technological prowess for its own sake. Elkins suggests that, for most Renaissance artists, perspective was in paintings, rather than paintings being in perspective (Elkins, 1994, p. 55).
Pict o rial Prog ress and V isual C ul tu re The Renaissance transition, from configurational to pictorial approaches, has often been conceived as a success story of progress. Hogben, characteristically for his period, offered this view: What was essentially new in the fifteenth century was the investigation of the laws of perspective and their application; and the investigation itself was the signal of renewed interest in experimental optics. In the Greco-Latin murals and vases of antiquity, in Gothic art and in painting of the Byzantine tradition, we meet with various makeshifts to suggest depth... (Hogben, 1949, p.186-8 emphasis added). Hogben similarly deprecated the art of other cultures: The artist aloof from science, like the painter of this Chinese picture, is less concerned with objective reality than with the portrayal of atmosphere. His picture [...] reveals no incentive to apply the rules of perspective (Hogben, 1949, p.193). Such views are common in more recent times too, especially among computer scientists working in pictorial graphics. For example, Parsaye and Chignell suggest:
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The use of linear perspective to create 3D images was one of the achievements of the Renaissance. One can see just how revolutionary the use of perspective was by comparing pre- and post-perspective paintings of the same churches in Italy. It is like comparing pictures drawn by children and adult artists. In retrospect, one wonders how people could have accepted two-dimensional representations of people and objects (Parsaye and Chignell, 1993, p. 204). This conception of depiction, in technical terms, where success is defined as producing an image whose perspective seems best to accord with the geometry of natural vision, contrasts strongly with the approach taken by theories of visual culture (Evans & Hall, 1999, p. 5), a term coined by Baxandall (Alpers, 1983, p. xxv). An approach grounded in cultural history, its adherents tend to a relativist view, generally rejecting the story of pictorial progress. They argue that the visual artefacts that a society uses not only indicate, but also inform, its values and beliefs. Perhaps the earliest visual culture text predates the term itself. Perspective as Symbolic Form (1925), by Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), argued that perspective was not a neutral technical invention, but a cultural move that both reflected and altered attitudes to the world. Some have identified deleterious effects of perspectival depiction on the kinds of thought that society can sustain (e.g., Crary, 1990; Harvey, 1996; Jenks, 1995; Virilio, 1988/1994). They also propose that the pictorial mode (often associated with visual realism) became “hegemonic,” that it drove out other forms of graphic construction. It is simply not true that a single type of image extinguished imagery in other modes. For example, there has been a proliferation of other projection systems since the Renaissance, such as those used in engineering and architecture. However, there is something to be said for the idea that the pictorial mode became a kind of yardstick for all other picture types. It
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is difficult now for us to see the world other than through perspectival images.
T he Me rits of the C onfigu rational Mode There is contention, then, between two views: on the one hand, of modern depiction as the best job done so far in mimicking our vision of the real world (a task conceived in apparently acultural technical terms); on the other, of such depiction as entirely culturally informed; and therefore open to the many accusations that our culture itself is heir to. If the configurational and the pictorial mode are in some ways rival systems, with their own modern adherents, what are the merits of the configurational mode? A few points emerge from the comparison of Cimabue’s and Giotto’s paintings. In the configurational mode, size in the image can stand for importance directly. Looked at in this light, to make objects the size they happen to appear in the world, when viewed from a particular location, can seem perverse. Additionally, each object can appear in its canonical view. It is known that some views of objects are more significant than others, probably because they differentiate the object with greater efficiency (Bruce, Green, & Georgeson, 1996, p. 224). What is often needed is simple object identity without attention to momentary appearances (Hagen, 1980, p. 13). It is an aim of many visual representations, for example, road signs, airport signage, and icons in the digital interface, to eliminate the particular at the expense of a readily graspable identity. Configurational pictures are able to juxtapose such canonical views of persons and things. In the configurational mode, the accidental is minimised. Similarly, things that cannot be seen in the real world from some particular point of view, because of occlusion, extreme difference of scale, or some other factor, can be forcibly made
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visible (as with Cimabue’s angels). Items can be put into visual relations with one another that are not possible in the real world. In all cases, the accidents of vision are avoided. Greater expressivity may be achieved under these circumstances. The expressivity of a visual technology often arises from ways in which its spatial representations do not match vision. This expressivity has two aspects: the ability to convey meaningful information, and the ability to promote a particular relationship between the viewer and the representation, such as by altering their emotions. Informational expressivity is a measure of how much the user comes to know about the depicted scene, while affective expressivity reflects changes to the relation between the user and the depiction. These two kinds of expressivity are often closely intermingled. Omission may be as expressive as inclusion. For example, filmmaking relies on omission, the framing of images and selecting of shots, for its expressive power. In informational terms, the suppression of detail in a picture, or the adoption of a nonperspectival depiction, may make an image more informative as well as making it more affective. Other strategies than omission are used. For example, marks may appear in the artefact that are not visible in the scene: outlines in drawings are an obvious example; there are no outlines in what the eyes see of the world. To think in this way is to confront some of the limitations of perspectival images, both for practical and other purposes. William Blake (1757-1827), proponent of the imagination and enemy of Enlightenment rationalism and mensuration, wrote, “May God us keep/From single vision and Newton’s sleep’ (Blake, 1802). It is tempting to see the single vision he hated as pictorial perspective. Certainly, his graphical work exhibits a disinterest in conventional perspectival picture-making; many of his works are far closer to the configurational mode, organising symbols on the plane. Panofsky suggested that the window model of perspectival depiction militated
against the symbolic (Panofsky, 1964, p. 140). The filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who trained as a fine artist, also identifies a kind of loss. He complains, for example, of the harm caused by the move to using size according to the laws of perspective in place of sizing based on semantic significance: All those other things that the Renaissance taught us to forget – that Christ is this big [spreads arms] and the apostle is this big [much smaller], which a twelfth century Amiens peasant wouldn’t have had a problem with, but subsequent to the Renaissance we all have a problem with because the Renaissance taught us about illusionism and realism and all those other irrelevant phenomena (Greenaway interviewed in Melia and Woods, 1998, p. 30). Greenaway’s own films have increasingly rejected the pictorial mode, presenting instead multimodal configurations of photography, drawing, animation, and text, noticeably at odds with the visual practices of mainstream fiction filmmakers.
T he Pict o rial Mode and D iegetic S pace There has been endless argument about the truth status of perspective. Arnheim summed up one side of the argument: linear perspective does have a special relation to the visible world, since mechanically it can be a tracing of it (Arnheim, 1956, p.233). Using a pane of glass and a single, fixed viewpoint, it is possible to demonstrate that the geometry of perspective offers a correct fit to our view of the shape of things. However, here too, many visual culture theorists have inclined to a relativist view. The arguments are too complex to review here (an analysis can be found in Boyd Davis, 2002 p. 66-74), but perhaps few would disagree that pictures constructed according to
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perspectival geometry seem more like unmediated seeing than any other spatial form. In thus seeming to resemble vision, these pictures tend to be taken as “natural” and “transparent” representations. Conceived in this way, the idea corresponds well with the notion of diegetic space often used in relation to film. Diegetic space is that which is accessible to the characters within the film story. Whatever is unable to be witnessed inside the story is extra-diegetic. One of the most common extra-diegetic components in film is music, heard by the audience but not by the characters. Subtitles and inter-titles are also extra-diegetic. In the case of painting, the artist’s signature is usually in the non-diegetic space of the canvas surface, but occasionally is made diegetic by being incorporated into the scene itself. This example hints at ways in which the concept of diegetic space can be carried over into other forms of depiction. In a videogame, it has become standard practice to offer a diegetic world occupied by the scenery and characters, and a non-diegetic layer occupied by status indicators for variables, such as health, weaponry, and so forth. This divided relationship between the world and the interface, between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, is analogous to the configurational mode of graphics. There is a purely configurational relation between the pictured world and the set of controls and measures external to it. However, there are signs of a move to present every component of videogames as though within a unified world. For example, in the game War of the Monsters (Incog Inc for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 2003), menus that would at one time have been simple flat graphics were presented as giant animated billboards for a horror movie, positioned in a 3-D world. In Gran Turismo 3 (Polyphony Digital for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 2001), while many menus and other interface devices are conventional interventions in the graphic surface, the cars that each player chooses are inserted into an apparent prepictorial world that is then depicted. They are
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no longer part merely of screen space but of world space, even though this is not the same space in which the race itself is run. The Getaway and The Getaway: Black Monday (Team Soho for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 2002 and 2004) are videogames that entirely avoid presenting extra-diegetic material. Inspired by film, everything the player needs to know is conveyed diegetically. For example, the flashing of the indicators on the vehicle are the hint to the player which way to turn. Earlier games would have had a clearly nondiegetic arrow in the sky pointing the direction the player should go, as is still done by Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Rockstar Games for Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. 2002). In the Getaway games, none of the information about status, about how many bullets the main character has in his gun, his health, how many people he has killed, are presented extra-diegetically. It can be objected that the status information and other non-diegetic clutter of the traditional videogame screen have actually become transparent through customary usage: that the player in some sense no longer sees them, but uses them, as it were unconsciously; that, conceived as part of the player’s experience, they are effectively diegetic. This is an aspect of maturity within a depictive technology.
H yb ridity and Matu rity For a short period in the early Renaissance, spatially hybrid works appeared that were on the cusp between the configurational and the pictorial. Gombrich highlights the Tree of Jesse, by Geertgen tot Sint Jans c.1480 (Rijksmuesum, Amsterdam), which shows saints in a realistic pictorial mode, but distributes them in the branches of the eponymous tree according to the older configurational practice (Gombrich, 1999, p. 70). It is an awkward compromise. We are puzzled, even amused, to see solidly modelled bodies in fashionable Renaissance costume perched in the branches of a tree.
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frame, and to mark off, the African Magus, while the steep perspective of the roof-beam, cooperating with the diagonals of the African’s gown, seem almost to displace him to a wing of the altarpiece (Harvey, 1995, p. 104-5, describing Adoration of the Magi by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, c.1465, oil on panel, Národní Galerie, Prague).
In configurational pictures, it was traditional for the divine transmission from God to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation to be represented by a gilded line passing across the picture surface from its source to its destination, but in Crivelli’s Annunciation with St Emidius of 1486 (National Gallery, London), the dictates of a three-dimensional spatial world model force the absurd introduction of a little arched aperture in the building in order that the divine ray can pass unobstructed from the heavens to the Virgin; the diagrammatic, symbolic ray connecting the divine source to its target has had to be accommodated by the architecture of the space as though it were a physical rod. In the early Renaissance, then, the technology of perspective was as much a burden as an asset to the painter. It was not obvious how its spatiality might best be exploited, how to harmonise the requirements of traditional symbolism with the means of perspectivally viewed models. After a time, however, geometric perspective became so absorbed into spatial practice that a “double game” could be played with increasing conviction: perspective could be used, not as a gratuitous technological marvel, but as part of the articulation of meaning, benefiting both from organisation within the depicted space and from configuration on the two-dimensional surface of the work. Wollheim (1980, p. 224), Podro (1998, p. 9), and Puttfarken (2000, p. 79) all emphasise the interplay for the viewer between awareness of the depiction and of the depicted. Notice how, in the following description of the subordinate role of a man shown in a painting, his position in the two-dimensional composition and in the depicted three-dimensional world work collaboratively:
Pict o rial F il m and C onfigu rational T elevision
… the African Magus is behind the other two, both in the sense that he is the third or the last of them to enter the stable, and in the sense that they are nearer the foreground of the picture than he is. [In this painting] the upright beam at the corner of the stable comes down in such a way as both to
Chanan has drawn attention to the continuity between nineteenth century expectations of picture-making and subsequent cinematic practice: that is, conceiving the picture as a window not as a surface (Chanan, 1996, p. 161). However, this continuity can be overstated. It is clear that in the
Similarly speaking of the Rape of Helen by Paris by a follower of Fra Angelico, c.1450, Bann suggests that that painting presents a kind of expressive redundancy in which the elements that are most important in the depicted narrative are at the same time most important to the construction of the space (Bann, 1987 p87-9). Eventually, the new pictorial practice enabled new meanings to be created, as, for example, in the much discussed ambiguous perspectival play of Velasquez’s Las Meninas of 1656 in the Prado, Madrid (Foucault, 1966 p. 3-16; Searle, 1980). Perspectival picturemaking became a mature form, in which spatial practices evolved to allow a close match between the particular spatiality chosen for an image and the objectives that the image serves. Renaissance perspective offers an instructive example of transition, from a problematic new technology at odds with the pictorial practices that it invaded, to a thoroughly integrated informational and affective device. Later, such techniques came to be seen as meretricious, so that in modern painting, these devices are now largely neglected. However, other media have taken up where painting left off.
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early history of film, as when perspective was introduced into painting, many techniques were tried on a pragmatic basis, some to survive and others to atrophy. Salt emphasises that early filmmakers did not, as it were, know what they were doing: experimentation led to many inventions, only some of which survived in the mainstream (Salt, 1992, p. 40). Salt himself points out the parallels with Gombrich’s notion of how progress is made in picture-making, where ad hoc improvisation by each picture-maker lays a foundation for future practice (Gombrich, 1977, p. 304). It tends to be forgotten that early filmmakers explored configurational approaches to filmmaking as keenly as they experimented with the pictorial. This is perhaps surprising, given that pointing a camera at a scene effortlessly produced an image in pictorial mode, while to construct configurational images required difficult extra work. However, such images were certainly made. Williamson’s Are you there?, of 1901, was probably the first filmed telephone conversation in which both parties are visible at once, each appearing in their own half of the screen (Salt, 1992, p. 57). GA Smith’s Santa Claus of 1898 contrived to show dreamers, and what they are dreaming, by inserting a circular vignette into a scene of sleeping children (op cit p. 35). This would have been made by shooting one scene through a shaped mask, rewinding the camera, and shooting the other scene on the same negative using a mask of complementary shape. Similarly, in Porter’s Life of an American Fireman of 1902, a scene is imagined by the fire chief, whom we see, and this is included in a circular picture-in-picture (Musser, 1991, p. 224). Brownlow (1968, p. 23) notes probably the first use of a three-panel split screen (a triptych) by Phillips Smalley in Suspense of 1913, showing three simultaneous interrelated actions at once. Abel Gance used a triptych and also a three-bythree matrix of shots comprising a single image in his Napoléon of 1927. The latter involved nine laborious re-shootings of the same complex scene, rewinding the camera between each (Brownlow,
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1983, p. 70-71). Later, such nonperspectival assemblage of disparate views to form a single image became unacceptable. Techniques largely disappeared from mainstream cinema that drew attention to the image as an image: multimodal mixtures combining text, cinematography, and drawn graphics; frontal, symmetrical views; prolonged superimpositions of one shot on another; wipes, and other pronounced transitions from one image to another. As a general rule, nothing should remind the viewer of the characteristics of the medium. It must seem unmediated. There is, however, still something in common between mainstream fiction film and the configurational approach to representation. In order to convey its stories, film typically offers views of its subject matter that are designed, like the canonical views of configurational depiction, to provide the best possible view of events at each moment. This is done without regard for any consistent viewing position. Shots succeed one another that could not possibly all be seen by any person located in the scene. Remarkably, the film viewer generally does not notice. Engagement with the story, and the resulting desire to see what is happening, override any sense that the visual experience is inconsistent. Nevertheless, while a cavalier attitude to viewing position between shots is accepted, and thus largely invisible, this freedom does not extend to composition within shots. There, the post-Renaissance pictorial mode is dominant. There is much to be said for the idea that transparency is not inherent in the artefact, but arises instead from a developed relationship between forms of visual representation and their users. It may be that to the habitual games player, the non-diegetic material on screen is “invisible” in this way. However, if the history of film is considered, the fact that mainstream fiction films, having used a variety of multimedia components in the early days of the cinema, came later to convey their meanings almost entirely through the purely pictorial, argues that the pictorial
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mode will dominate. Oddly, Bolter and Grusin (1999) seem to regard modern media as outside history in this regard. They suggest that digital media will never acquire the transparency of their precursors, always remaining a hybrid of “remediated” elements from other technologies, but cinematic history offers little evidence for this ahistorical view. The medium of film is dominated by one genre, the classical fiction film, but in television, there is a far wider range of genres. They present a gamut of spatial practices extending from those broadly similar to the classical fiction film to those that are very different. News broadcasting perhaps provides the greatest contrast with the fiction film. Television news presents a complex graphical mixture with a distinctive spatiality, characterised by just those visual traits that have been expunged from the fiction film: split-screen and panelled displays, multimodality, frontality, symmetry, and the use of pronounced transitions from one image to another. If the classical fiction film’s use of space enables the viewer to largely ignore the fact of representation, increasing their engagement with the narrative (Thompson, 1985), that of news television achieves the opposite. It draws the viewer’s attention to the components in the configuration, the objects from which the ensemble is constructed. The result is to draw the viewer’s attention very strongly to the image as an image, to make the viewer aware of the objects. It presents the audience with a screen full of things whose main aim is to impress (Boyd Davis, 2003). Many of factual television’s spatial techniques have their counterparts in pre-Renaissance picture-making, while the emphasis on novelty of technique, “excessive stylisation and visual exhibitionism” (Caldwell, 1995, p. 352), might be likened to the novelty value of perspective as a technology at the beginning of modern depiction (Edgerton, 1991, p. 73). These traits were already present before digital technologies made them easy to achieve, and it would be a mistake to attribute
them deterministically to one technology. Factual television and fiction television, such as costume drama and soap opera, share a technology, yet have different spatial practices. Fiction film and factual television have, for some time, used similar technologies, yet their spatial practices have not significantly converged.
T he Pict o rial Impe rative Revisited So far, the argument has opposed the fiction film, which has adopted the pictorial mode, to the configurational mode of news television. However, there are signs of change; signs that even factual television may be moving towards the depiction of an apparently prepictorial three-dimensional world where all of the content of news and other factual television broadcasting will appear in unified spaces. In UK television coverage of the Iraq war, it became common for battles to be presented not as diagrams on screen, but as three-dimensional models with which the journalist would seem to interact. BBC Research has worked on mixed realities that allow live control by a presenter of synthetic components that are composited live into a real scene (Lalioti & Woolard, 2003). News broadcasts on all channels now use virtual sets that allow the presenter to walk among, and sometimes manipulate, three-dimensional data graphics. In recent documentaries, the journalist Peter Snow has been seen walking around a historic battle field carrying a portfolio. He opens the portfolio: inside there is a map of the terrain. Then, the map animates and little helicopters and planes start to fly over it, actually flying over the surface of the portfolio, apparently in the world that Snow himself occupies. In his 2004 documentary on the Battle of Britain, almost every scene was invaded by flights of aircraft integrated into the world space of the presenter (even when he was indoors). Thus, the spatiality of news broadcasting increasingly apes the single coherent perspectival
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space of classical filmmaking. It seems likely that news items will become objects in the same diegetic space as the newscaster, whose role will be to act as presenter, manipulator, and explicator of these objects. A final illustration of the battle between the configurational and the pictorial is provided by a controversy over the BBC’s redesign of its weather forecasts. The change, on 16 May 2005, epitomises the pictorial imperative, since maps were replaced by a virtual model of the United Kingdom. In the ensuing public argument, several weaknesses of the pictorial mode were alleged. Since a perspectival view requires a viewing position, and the BBC elected to view the nation from the south, Scotland was reduced to a distant blur (a higher viewing angle was later introduced to lessen this effect). Symbols of sun, rain, or clouds were replaced by pictorial cloud and rain, which many viewers found less rapidly accessible. Extradiegetic labelling was replaced by diegetic virtual weather. The defence of the changes was partly in terms of popular taste: “People’s expectations of computer-generated graphics on TV, in films, as well as in video gaming, are much higher now,” the project director at the BBC’s Weather Centre explained. A sentence in the widely reported article summed up the perceived advantages for information and affect: “[it] makes the topography of the ground look more accurate, and feels like a 3-D flying game” (BBC, 2004). In attempting to make sense of the pictorial imperative, this chapter has traced some of the commonalities between spatial practices across different media and technologies, and has integrated terms and concepts into a single framework. In so doing, clear signs have been discerned of a tendency towards a spatially integrated pictorial diegesis: the pictorial mode seems even now to be increasing its dominance. Nevertheless, spatial pictorial practice takes on different forms in order to achieve the wide-ranging objectives of different media genres. Though these genres are associated with distinct media technologies, in
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some senses it is another technology, the technology of perspective, that still exercises the greatest influence. This influence is profound, since the adoption of the pictorial mode operates reflexively, altering the very objectives that images are expected to serve.
Refe rences Ades, D. (1986). Photomontage. London: Thames and Hudson. Alpers, S. (1983). The art of describing – Dutch art in the seventeenth century. London: University of Chicago Press/John Murray. Arnheim, R. (1956). Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye. London: Faber and Faber. Bann, S. (1987). Art. In D. Cohn-Sherbok & M. Irwin (Eds.), Exploring reality (pp. 83-108). Boston: Allen and Unwin. BBC. (2004). Weather gets 3-D gaming makeover. Article credited to Jo Twist of BBC News Online science and technology staff on BBC Web site. Retrieved September 2005, from http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/technology/3572562.stm Blake, W. (1802). Letter to Thomas Butts of November 22, 1802. In G. Keynes (Ed.) (1966), Blake: Complete writings, with variant readings (p. 818). London: Oxford University Press. Bolter, D. J., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boyd Davis, S. (2002). Media space: An analysis of spatial practices in planar pictorial media. Unpublished PhD thesis available from the British Library (Shelfmark DXN063790). Boyd Davis, S. (2003). News from now where? – the digital spaces of television. In A. Bentkowska, T. Cashen, & H. Gardiner (Eds.), Convergent
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Practices. New approaches to art and visual culture, Proceedings of the CHArt Nineteeth Annual Conference held at Birkbeck College, University of London, 6th-7th November 2003. CHArt Conference Proceedings, volume VI. Retrieved from http://www.chart.ac.uk Brownlow, K. (1968). The parade’s gone by. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brownlow, K. (1983). Napoleon—Abel Gance’s classic film. London: Jonathan Cape. Bruce, V., Green, P. R., & Georgeson, M. A. (1996). Visual perception: Physiology, psychology and ecology (3rd ed.). Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press (Taylor and Francis). Bryson, N. (1990). Looking at the overlooked: Four essays on still-life painting. London: Reaktion Books. Caldwell, J. (1995). Televisuality – style, crisis and authority in American television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chanan, M. (1996). The dream that kicks: The prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crosby, A. W. (1997). The measure of reality: Quantification and western society, 1250-1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Damisch, 1987 Damisch, H. (1994). The origin of perspective. Translated by John Goodman from L’Origine de la Perspective, 1987, Flammarion, Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Edgerton, S. Y., Jnr. (1991). The heritage of Giotto’s geometry: Art and science on the eve of the scientific revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Elkins, J. (1994). The poetics of perspective (pp. 46-47). Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Evans, J. & Hall, S. (1999). What is visual culture?. In Visual culture:Tthe Reader. London: Sage Publications/Open University. Foley, J. D., van Dam, A., Feiner, S. K., & Hughes, J. F. (1995). Computer graphics: Principles and practice (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Foucault, M. (1966). The order of things (edn. of 1974, translated 1970 from Les Mots et les Choses published by Gallimard 1966). London: Routledge. Gibson, J. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. NY: Houghton Mifflin. Gombrich, E. H. (1977). Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation (5th ed.). London: Phaidon. Gombrich, E. H. (1980). Standards of truth: The arrested image and the moving eye. In W. J. T. Mitchell (Ed.), The language of images (pp. 181217). University of Chicago Press. Gombrich, E. H. (1999). The uses of images: Studies in the social function of art and visual communication. London: Phaidon. Hagen, M. A. (1980). Generative Theory: A perceptual theory of pictorial representation. In The perception of pictures: Vol II (pp. 3-46). New York: Academic Press. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Harvey, J. (1995). Men in black. London: Reaktion. Hogben, L. (1949). From cave painting to comic strip: A kaleidoscope of human communication. London: Max Parrish.
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Ivins, W. M. (1938). On the rationalization of sight (Edn. of 1975, originally published by Metropolitan Museum of Art 1938). New York: Da Capo Press. Jenks, C. (1995). The centrality of the eye in western culture: An introduction. In C. Jenks (Ed.), 1995 Visual Culture (pp. 1-25). London: Routledge. Lalioti, V., & Woolard, A. (2003). Mixed reality productions of the future. Paper given at IBC 2003 Conference, International Broadcasting Convention, 11-15 September 2003, RAI Convention Centre, Amsterdam.
Parsaye, K., & Chignell, M. (1993). Intelligent database tools and applications. John Wiley and Sons Inc. Podro, M. (1998). Depiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Puttfarken, T. (2000). The discovery of pictorial composition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ruskin, J. (1843). Modern painters. London: Smith, Elder, 1843 (Part II, Section 6, chapter III, paragraph 21) Ruskin, 1851
Lannoch, H., & Lannoch, H.-J. (1989). Towards a semantic notion of space. Design Issues, 5(2).
Salt, B. (1992). Film style and technology: History and analysis (2nd ed.). London: Starword.
Lindberg, D. C. (1992). The beginnings of western science. University of Chicago.
Searle, J. R. (1980). Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation. In W. J. T. Mitchell (Ed.), The language of images (pp. 247-258). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, K. (1985). Classical narrative space and the spectator’s attention. In D. Bordwell, David, J. Staiger, & K. Thompson, The classical Hollywood cinema (pp. 214-230). London: Routledge.
Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Melia, P., & Woods, A. (1998, undated). Peter Greenaway: Artworks 63-98. Manchester: Manchester University Press/Cornerhouse Gallery. Musser, C. (1991). Before the Nickelodeon – Edwin S Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press. Panofsky, E. (1925). Perspective as symbolic form (Edn. of 1991). New York: Zone Books. Panofsky, E. (1964). Early Netherlandish painting: Its origins and character, vol. I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Virilio, P. (1988). The vision machine (1994 edn. trans. by Julie Rose from La Machine de Vision, Editions Galilée, Paris 1988). London: British Film Institute. Wollheim, R. (1980). Art and its objects (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Chapter XI
The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative from Prehistoric Cave Paintings to Computer Games Fiona Carroll Swansea University, UK
A bst ract The art of the visual-narrative is not a new phenomenon. Artists and designers have been using images to tell stories for thousands of years. From cave paintings to computer animations, they have been manipulating visual elements and tailoring techniques to attract our attention, to stimulate our interest, and to entice us into a process of interpretation and story making. Indeed, it is a tradition that has worked its way successfully through time, adapting along the way to meet the advancements of each successive and increasingly visual generation. The aim of this chapter is to explore the spatial journey of the visual-narrative. In particular, it will examine how each new medium has brought with it a new treatment of space, and then how this has influenced the visual-narrative and the art of storytelling.
Int roduction The definition of a “work of art” is highly subjective: for some, it might be an Impressionist painting, for others an unkempt bed (cf. Tracy Emin’s bed, short-listed for the Turner prize in 1999), for still others it might be an interactive
installation. Art embraces not only the visual media but music, literature, dance, and so forth: it is a complex phenomenon that both fascinates and perplexes. Since classical Greece, scholars have been trying to understand how art “works” and what art “means” (Berleant, 1991, p. 9). Moreover, today, we are still no closer to that single unified
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definition; in fact, art is becoming more elusive and indeed is continually finding new ways of expression and new levels of communication. Yet, in many ways, this ambiguity is what adds to the fascination: the idea that art is constantly evolving generates much intrigue and excitement, especially as new technologies and social changes enhance and reshape our perceptual activities in the arts into new and different forms (Berleant, 1991, p. 33). This chapter concerns visual-narrative, that is, the use of pictures to tell a story. A visual-narrative comprises the arrangement of images in a space in order to engage people in a story. From prehistoric cave painting to modern day computer games, the aim of this chapter is to explore the spatial development of the visual-narrative. In particular, we examine how the visual-narrative has been influenced by the treatment of space.
Pictu re S pace The word “art” is from the Latin ars, meaning “arrangement.” As Arnheim specifies: “we see a painting, sculpture or building as an arrangement of definable shapes organized in a comprehensive structure” (Murray, 2000). Therefore, when we look at any work of art, whether it is a painting, a sculpture, or a building, we are, in fact, looking at different ways that an artist has arranged elements in a space. According to Andrews, when we look at a painting, “it is possible to imagine ourselves within a picture space moving throughout it over time, as if it were the real world, where several moments or episodes all remain in view, even as we concentrate our attention on the first one and then the next” (1995, p.117). Indeed, every picture, whether painted, photographic, digital..., is a collection of elements (dots, lines, shapes, forms, tones, textures, colours, etc.) arranged in a carefully planned composition. It is this careful arrangement and composition of elements that allows us to express, to communicate, or even to
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tell a story. As O’Toole demonstrates in the context of painting, the visual units, the characters and objects in a painting, together with their actions, gestures, and stance, all have the potential to carry important clues about what the people portrayed are doing and what stories are thereby created (p.7-12). By perceiving the visual units or elements in a carefully arranged and organised picture space, the viewer is able to piece together the whole story. As Boyd Davis (2004) notes, there are broadly two ways of organising graphical images of the world: the configurational and the pictorial. In the configurational, he states, the elements are combined in the two-dimensional space of the composition itself (as in early Christian, Romanesque, and Byzantine art). In the pictorial, meanwhile, they are combined in an assumed world space, real or imaginary, that is then depicted (as in Renaissance, Baroque and much later art). Both these modes of graphical representation offer interesting ways in which elements can be arranged within a picture space. However, what is of interest to us is the relationship between the inside picture space and the world space (i.e., the outside picture space), which actually varies according to the mode of representation and the arrangement of the elements within the picture. In many pictures, for example, the frame acts as a divider between the outside picture space and inside picture space; in others, it acts as mediator. Often, there might be one unit that attracts the viewer and draws them into the picture, with other units then engaging the viewer and leading the eye further around, and then in, or out of, the picture space. As Poore points out, every unit in a picture has a given value; the value of a unit depends on its attraction, and its attraction varies according to its placement (1967). This chapter explores the relationship between inside and the outside picture spaces, and in particular, the role they play in the visual-narrative, through examining artistic use of picture space through the centuries.
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Pictu re S paces T ha t T ell S t o ries And if you, oh poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and so that it is less tedious to follow (Leonardo Da Vinci cited in Andrews, 1995, p. 69). A visual-narrative can be defined as pictures that tell a story. These pictures do not depend on a literary component, but are made up of an image or a set of visual elements that are interwoven with a narrative intent (Coulter-Smith, 2000). Visualnarratives are driven by the content, form/style, and composition of the images, which, in turn, are very much influenced by both the materials and media that have created them and constructed by viewers themselves (i.e., it is the artist who frames the story in a space, but it is the viewer, through their own experience, who recreates it). The form has been in existence since prehistoric times. Many authors agree that to fully appreciate and understand a visual-narrative, a certain degree of what has been described as “visual literacy” is required. Visual literacy is the ability to differentiate and then interpret the visible actions, objects, and symbols, natural or man-made, that are [encountered] in the environment (Avgerinou & Ecrison, 1997 cited in IVLA, 2002). Yet as Lynton suggests (in the context of representational narrative painting), much also relates to familiarity with the content depicted and the background of the artist. In particular, he claims that given that familiarity, the narrative painting has the potential to appeal to our appetite for stories, to attract and involve our attention, thoughts, emotions, and our readiness to engage (Lynton, Smith, Cumming, & Collinson, 1995). Engagement is a term that has often been associated with the idea of flow, which is defined by Csikszentmihalyi as “the deep involvement in and effortless progression of the activity” (Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson, 1990, p.7). Nathan
Shedroff (2001) discusses engagement in relation to experience; he sees experience (in general) as requiring an attraction, an engagement, and a conclusion. An attraction is needed to initiate the experience, engagement is described as the experience itself, and the conclusion is what provides some sort of resolution, and hence, satisfaction. As Csikszentmihalyi notes, “artists have found many ways to use visual media to code pleasurable formal patterns, complex events, and subtle emotions,” (1990:2) and by decoding such information, viewers can share experiences that would otherwise not be accessible to them. By encoding works of art with selected meanings, artists aim to attract, engage, and provide their viewers with an experience. In terms of the visual-narrative, images are encoded with narratives within a picture space, and the viewer, through their own experience, creates the story. In the following pages, the discussion focuses on demonstrating how the use of space (i.e., the relationship between the inside and outside spaces) can shape this experience, and hence, the story created.
Fr o m Prehist o ric Paintings t o C o mpute rs Prehistoric Images and the art of storytelling have a lengthy and intertwined history: more than 30,000 years ago, humans were using images on cave walls to tell stories and to report on their own world and experiences. The purposes of these frameless picture spaces have been variously described as recording pleasant events, instructing the young, and illustrating folktales and even trance-like experiences. Lewis-Williams, discussing rock art, claims that such images exhibit depictions of spiritual trances that show us what these prehistoric people saw/experienced in their trance performances (cited in Brass, 1999). The images
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are generally abstract, yet still show a clear connection between the image and the object: the proportions are correct, the poses are realistic, and the outlines are defined. As an example, consider Figure 1. Here we see the story, presented in a cartoon like fashion, of a man with a bird face (with perhaps a mask) falling backwards to his death as a bison attacks him with his sharp horns. This particular example has been described as “one of humanity’s earliest narrative compositions” (Sanes, 2000), and it lies on a stone wall deep inside the vast chambers of Lascaux in France. These chambers are thought, by scholars, “to have been theatres for performance of rituals that integrated all forms of media and engaged all the senses” (Artmuseum.net, 2000). It is believed that the whole experience of being deep within these caves and surrounded by representations of hunting scenes and animals creates the illusion of being a part of the stories portrayed (Sanes, 2000). Further, the dots surrounding the animals depicted on the cave walls are thought, by some, to represent the images of clouds of dots that people experienced themselves when on the point of entering a trance (Lewis-Williams cited in Bower, 1996). This is interesting, as the painterly technique of dotting, combined with the
Figure 1. Sketch of a prehistoric cave painting at Lascaux, France.
Note: Original painting can be viewed at http://anthro. palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_5.htm
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flickering of light in the physical cave, not only adds to the visual aesthetic, but also helps to create the sensation of being in a trance and, hence, a new and different world. These cave paintings promote the sense that the inside picture space is melding with the outside surrounding physical space, thus, creating an entirely new experience and an exciting story.
L ate Medieval Moving forward to the later middle-ages (10001500 C.E), we find a world where, despite the advent of the written word, illiteracy rates are still very high, and where many people depend solely on images as a means of communication and storytelling. Nevertheless, the picture space, and the approach used to tell such stories, has changed substantially from those of the prehistoric cave dwellers. In Figure 2, for example, we see the Maestà by Duccio (1308-11), which is a good example of Christian narrative art. It is a very large double-sided altarpiece whose front, in a stylised and symbolic fashion, mainly depicts Mary, the mother of God, holding her son on her lap. The back, meanwhile, is subdivided into 26 compartments that illustrate the Passion of Christ, and is essentially a narrative cycle intended for closer observation. In all, there are 59 narrative scenes framed separately in rows, one after the other. These are flat paintings (or configurational, in Boyd Davis’ terms) that seem to focus on the inner and the more heavenly meaning of the image, rather than on any “realistic” depiction of time and place on earth. It is important for us to understand that this, and other such paintings, held great appeal for their contemporary audience, and that their function was primarily to inform and to enhance understanding of the religious story. It is generally agreed that, like a book, the painting presents a linear narrative, and that the scenes are to be read sequentially (the cycle beginning at the bottom left and ending at the top right). Indeed, each scene
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Figure 2. A sketch of the top left section of Duccio’s Maestà
Note: Original painting can be viewed at http://www.meredith.edu/art/research/Maestà_reconstruction.htm
tells its own story that, in turn, makes up the larger story of the passion of Christ. However, very unlike the cave paintings discussed previously, Duccio frames each scene in an architectural setting in order to identify each narrative scene, but also as a means of separating the inside picture space from the outside, surrounding space. This, therefore, gives the impression for the viewer of looking into a separate world. The altarpiece, interestingly, introduces the idea of two spaces, and, unlike the prehistoric paintings, it separates the spaces in order to tell the story of another more-transcendent world (Calter, 1998). The use of the frame enhances this idea of separation; it is used as a means to separate two worlds, but also as a way to identify and link many different narrative scenes within the inside picture space, thus, enhancing the story of the heavenly world.
E arly Renaissance The picture space continued to be used to communicate different stories, but after a time (about 1400 to 1600), a demand arose for stories that their audience could relate to directly and fit into their own lives. In response, the representation of people and objects in pictures became more realistic. Frey suggests that a Gothic painting must be read rather than seen because “it rolls off, as it were,
like a film before the observer, except that the successive pictorial impressions do not depend upon the mechanical movement of the film but upon the intellectual movement of the viewer” (Frey cited in Andrews, 1995, p.5). For example, The Tribute Money (see Figure 3) by Masaccio (c.1425), which is located in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence, is among the first paintings to introduce and develop “one point perspective,” a technique that introduced to painting a new, convincing illusion of depth and continuous space, often described as like looking through a window: “Perspective painting immerses a virtual body in an environment that stretches in imagination far beyond the confines of the canvas” (Ryan, 2001, p.3). This technique brought with it a form of narration, now referred to as continuous (or polyscenic) narrative: a picture has a number of actions, occurring at different moments, that are presented together in a single unified space. As in Duccio’s Maestà, the painting has a religious motif as it contained a biblical moral in the narrative (i.e., God would provide). Though dissimilar, it consists of three scenes linked in one space by the figures of St. Peter, Christ, and the tax collector. The story begins in the slightly off-centre position, where Christ and his disciples are approached by a tax collector. It then continues to the left of the painting, where St. Peter follows
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Figure 3. A sketch of Masaccio’s The Tribute Money
Note: Original painting can be viewed at http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/rprestia/1301/list_of_illustrations5.htm
the instructions of Christ and retrieves a coin from the mouth of the fish. The story then ends on the right, where St. Peter uses the coin to pay the tax collector. Our eyes are drawn to Christ’s head, as all the perspective lines running into the picture space meet here. It is the gestures of the hands, placing of the feet, expressions of these figures, and the eye-catching contrast between the red/orange and green robes, that guide the viewers through the narrative. As Lynton (ibid.) notes: “the pictorial construction and the intellectual focus are congruent.” In this form (the start of what Boyd Davis would describe as pictorial representation), Massacio has moved on from the heavenly space that had been dominant in previous paintings, such as Duccio’s Maestà, and instead uses perspective to develop an illusion of space on a flat surface. Through the use of these basic perspective techniques, colour, and composition, he starts to consider the idea of one space: that is, the idea of the space of the natural world both inside and outside the picture, and how they might work together to create an overall, unified experience. Indeed, the individual frames separating our world with that of the painting are eliminated and, instead, we feel the beginnings of presence in the drama. We see the start of the use of perspective, colour, and composition to help blend inside and outside
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picture space and thus, afford involvement and engagement. Some decades later (1470), the Passion of Christ was painted by Memling (see Figure 4). Again, it is a visual-narrative (with a similar theme to Duccio’s altarpiece), but here the painting depicts a topographic view of urban Jerusalem. It narrates the New Testament story of the Passion by picturing events as a series of scenes. Yet unlike the previous two paintings, the order of these scenes seems to be more of a “tortuous course” of events (Goodman cited in Van Den Berg, 2001). As Van Den Berg states, however, the painting could be described as “an early modern instance of visual-narrative,” especially as it uses the urban form as a unified narrative frame. The painting immediately engages viewers because it envelops out on to a vast imaginary expanse. It is divided randomly into different scenes, and each scene is divided into micro scenes that then feed back into the main narrative. For example, the porter figure, (lighting the gate torch in the foreground on the left), whose narrative function is to indicate a certain time and place in the city, acts as a link in the overall sequence. The story is plotted spatially as a series of scenic settings over the city, and characters are used in the painting to link these sequences: for example, the figure of Christ appears several times. Yet
The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative
Figure 4. A sketch of Memling’s The Passion of Christ
Note: Original painting can be viewed at http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html? /html/m/memling/1early2/04passi.html
as Van Den Berg points out, when we read this visual-narrative, we are prompted to appropriate and to alternate between two distinct narrative perspectives. He labels the viewers with two scenic roles: the first as a prospector, the second as a sightseer. “Prospecting” viewers, he notes, adopt an observer’s stance towards the expanse and the horizon with a surveying orientation towards the schematic layout of the city map. “Sightseeing” spectators, on the other hand, are faced with ground-level urban experience. This again reinforces the notion of the two different spaces, that is, the idea of the spectators inhabiting the painting’s imaginary story world and spectators before the painting. What is of interest here is the idea of the spatial plotting of the narrative: we are not looking at the linear but, instead, we are thrown into a space and left to ourselves to try and link the narrative cues as we explore. We are looking at narratives within narratives that are framed, not within the rigid architectural pillars as in Duccio’s altarpiece, but instead, a random arrangement within the overall urban composition. Nevertheless, in a similar manner to that painting, we are still struggling between inside and outside space and indeed, it is not until several hundred
years later that we begin to see a more intense effort to meld these spaces.
B aroque As Ryan points out, it was not until the 17th century that visual immersion reached its climax in the remarkable trompe l’oeil effects of the Baroque age (1600-1750). Here the distinction between the physical and pictorial/sculptural space is blurred by turning the latter into a continuation of the former. This is the source of Ryan’s claim that Baroque churches offer a better prefiguration of the virtual reality experience than the architecture of any other age (2001, p.3, p.291). In the Baroque period (1600–1750), we see a new concern for complex, dynamic motion and multiple perspectives. Gone is the limit of the frame and instead, we now have an invasion of space in every direction that combines both multiple viewpoints and narrative perspectives. We see “a space that illusionistically connects with, and infinitely extends from, our own” and one that has “a greater flow between the inside and the outside” (Ndalianis, 2000). When we look closely at Las Meninas (1656) by Velasquez (see
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Figure 5), we can begin to understand why it has been described as one of the best and also most puzzling paintings in the western world. It is a painting about representation, where the artist challenges the viewer by making them both the model to be viewed and, at the same time, part of the audience. The painting uses several visual techniques to grab and keep our attention, and also raises many questions about reality and the illusion of reality. Simply, it is about a group of people gathered together, and the narrative lies somewhere in determining “what is happening?”. We are confronted with the mystery embodied both in the subject matter of the painting (what is this painting about?), by the artist’s canvas (what is on the canvas?), and the mirror (who is in the mirror?). It is then up to us to determine, to solve, these enigmas in the painting. In every sense, we are implicated in the picture space; the gaze signals from within the picture that we, the viewer outside, are seen. As Huddleston states: “Baroque art unites the painting and the viewer in a single space, creating the illusion that the image is as real as its beholder and that the pictorial space extends infinitely” (2001, p.1). Using trompe l’oeil devices (i.e., tricks of light and endowing objects with a sense of weight and mass), we not only begin to get the illusion of one space, a combination of the image, and its surrounding physical space, we also start to look at the visual cues, and are led around the space. Indeed, the whole composition and arrangement of visual units leads us to believe that we are all together, we are looking at the little ensemble of people, and also, for some reason, the artist is looking at us. But why? It is that feeling of puzzlement that is important; looking at this painting, we become engaged in trying to figure out what is going on. Why is the artist looking at us? Who is in the mirror? Where are these people? Are they next to us? What is the man at the door doing? It is these questions that draw us into the painting and extend our world into the world of the painting to create a single space.
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This idea of illusion is exciting: the whole notion of fooling the viewer into believing and appreciating the art object as if it was real. This was further developed with the introduction of the panorama (coming from the Greek words pana [all] and rama [view]). In fact, “no other space of illusion created with traditional techniques developed this degree of illusionism and suggestive power” (Grau, 2003). The panorama was patented by Barker, an Irishman, and keen painter of portraits and miniatures. He was sketching on the summit of Calton Hill (Edinburgh) one day, in 1787, when he was struck by the idea of reproducing the view on a large cylindrical painting that would encircle the viewer. A good example of this type of work is the Mesdag Panorama (see Figure 6), which was painted by Mesdag, one of the most famous painters of the Hague School. A cylindrical painting that is more than 14 metres high and 120 metres in circumference, it allows the viewer to look 360 degrees around, and to appreciate (as if real) the sea, the dunes, and the then small village of Scheveningen. It gives the
Figure 5. A sketch of Velasquez ‘s Las Meninas
Note: Original painting can be viewed at http://www.ibiblio. org/wm/paint/auth/velazquez/
The Spatial Development of the Visual-Narrative
Figure 6. A sketch of the Mesdag Panorama
Note: Original painting can be viewed at http://www.panorama-mesdag.nl/index.php?page=/home_en.php
illusion of an unlimited view from the top of a sand dune, and the feeling of life as it was in 1881. This panorama is basically a continuous narrative scene, or landscape, painted to conform to a flat or curved background that then surrounds, or is unrolled before, the viewer. It has also been described as a development from the Baroque painted ceilings and stage sets, which both played on the notion of creating convincing illusions. The panorama is interesting, as a technique, as it is a perfect example of how a medium can be intentionally manipulated to create a particular illusion (i.e., that of believing one is in the image space). It takes our previous painting (Las Meninas by Velasquez) one step further, and we are now actually in the image space. In Baroque, the two spaces are blended together to form one (i.e., our world extends into the Baroque world), but in the panorama, the artist has plucked us up from our physical world and actually placed us into the middle of this image space. As Ijsselsteijn states: “trompe l’oeil and panorama paintings have been able to engender experiences that many ‘modern’ media still aspire to produce” (2003).
N ineteenth C entury In 1895, however, techniques began to change more radically. Two brothers, Auguste and Louis
Lumiere, were amongst the first to pioneer these innovations in their invention of the “moving image system” or, as we know it today the “cinema.” This huge development in the history of the image presented us with familiar and realistic images, arranged within a rectangular frame, and offered the combined experiences of painting, music, literature, theatre, and architecture. For the first time, we were presented with images in illusory motion, engendering a much greater sense of realism. The early films were more of a “spectacle,” which seemed to cross into the viewer’s own space (Elsaesser, 1990, p. 57-59). For example, one of the first films shown by the Lumiere brothers, in Paris in 1895, includes a train entering a station. When this was shown, many people from the audience ran from the room, as they feared the train was going to run them over: they shared the same space as the train. With subsequent explorations of the potential of film as a storytelling art, came the recognition that it could also offer a window into a new world, and a new illusionary space. The viewer can experience this new world as a narrative evolving from a chain of cause-and-effect events occurring in time and space (i.e., we watch the moving images, pick up cues, recall information, feel curiosity, suspense and/or surprise, etc., and then anticipate what will follow). “When we see
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a film, though we do not engage with only a narrative or a nonnarrative pattern … we experience a film – not a painting or a novel … consequently our understanding of a film must include features of the film medium” (Bordwell & Thompson, 1990, p.126). Bordwell and Thompson claim that, in order to appreciate the form of a film, we must understand how the formal system of film works, in this case, how the narrative interacts with the stylistic system-patterned use of techniques, editing, mise-en-scene, sound, cinematography. They believe that the picture space must be filled up in ways that cue the viewer to notice and feel certain things (and, indeed, not to notice and feel others). For example, through the use of visual cues that encourage us to look at particular things, sound (i.e., diegetic and non-diegetic sound1) and editing and so forth, the film director has the power to place us either on the outside looking into a separate world or in the picture and part of the story. The following example, Red Desert (see Figure 7), has been described as one of the most extraordinary and riveting films of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni’s entire career. Made in 1964, it shows a decisive move away from realism and more towards the aesthetic. In it, he shows “an interest in aesthetic experiences
associated with spatial disorientation” (Gandy, 2003). The story is centred on the character of Giuliana who, after a nervous breakdown, finds herself estranged from everyone and everything. The story unfolds in the grey industrial city of Ravenna, where we see Giuliana trying to cope with her situation and those around her. We, the viewer, are on the outside looking into the disconcerting industrial landscape of Ravenna, but through various tricks of the eye (the flattening of space by telephoto lenses; the strange scale, placement, and colour of objects; out of focus foregrounds and backgrounds [Brown, 2002]) we are, at the same time, able to jump into the troubled mind of Giuliana. The strong use of colour in the film is meticulously calculated and arranged to correlate with Guiliana’s emotional state. Antonioni uses colour throughout to tease the viewer with further possibilities and into new spaces. For example, when Giuliana tells a story to her sick son, the film leaves the iridescent grey real world of Ravenna and moves entirely into her fantasy of a young girl on a beautiful bright and colourful beach. This is interesting in that Antonioni’s visual manipulation not only presents us with a rich, aesthetic experience of different landscapes, it also gives us a representation of spatial psychosis2. The screen
Figure 7. Red Desert (1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni
Note: Original image can be viewed at http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/articles/redesert3.htm
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frames these industrial landscapes and separates us from the dull streets of Ravenna; but it is the use of colour that captures us and allows us to get inside the interior space of Giulana’s mind: into a space within a space.
Modern D ay In the last few decades, picture space has acquired the possibility of interactivity: as Manovich observes “The logic of replacement, characteristic of cinema, gives way to the logic of addition and co-existence” (2002). Metal Gear Solid is “one of the most important and most distinctive titles in video game history” (Games critic, 2002). It was first released in 1998, and has since been the source of much discussion on whether the creator Hideo Kojima over-emphasises story and at the expense of game play. Nevertheless, what is of interest to us is how he challenges the way people experience video games. The story has been described as a fairly standard action/espionage type, to which Kojima has skilfully added numerous narrative presentation techniques from the world of film (e.g., cut scenes).
Figure 8. A sketch of a scene from Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid
Note: Original image can be viewed at http://www.armchairempire.com/Reviews/ps2/metal-gear-solid-2.htm
In the game, a player finds themselves in control of the retired agent Solid Snake, and it is their task to enter a base overrun by terrorists, check up on hostages, and find out if the terrorists have the ability to destroy the world. In terms of the visual-narrative, the player is positioned inside the picture space (i.e., inside the world of Solid Snake), which Kojima ingeniously makes realistic by using graphic details, such as textures on the characters, that add to the story line. Of particular interest is how he subtly creates the illusion of other places and, in doing so, encourages the player’s suspension of disbelief; this is done by placing the action in a real-world location by using a radio device to communicate with contacts in other places. This gives the player the illusion of another place, a place apart from the one they are in. In narrative film, place is usually an important factor: “…the place of a story is usually that of plot, but sometimes the plot leads us to infer other locales as part of the story,” thus, as Kojima achieves with the radio device, “the narrative may ask us to imagine spaces and actions that are never shown” (Bordwell & Thompson, 1990, p. 61). In a manner similar to that of the panoramas previously discussed, the player jumps into the picture space and is presented with not only the defined role of game player, but also a more subtle role of storyteller. The player is confronted with many different situations and choices and, as with the open structure and spatial narrative in Memling’s Passion of Christ, there are multiple routes by which the game and story can advance. By incorporating and adapting techniques from other media into the video game, Kojima successfully adds to the standard game experience and in doing so, he adds to the story being told. Indeed, whether we are experiencing the latest video game, virtual reality environment, or art installation, the computer poses new challenges for the visual-narrative. It adds a new versatility that allows us to combine “informationally dense visual narratives of Renaissance and Baroque painters with ‘atten-
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tion demanding’ shot juxtapositions of twentieth century film directors” (Manovich, 2002) and, as in the case of Kojima’s work, to create exciting new modes of storytelling.
C onclusion Following the spatial development of the visualnarrative, from prehistoric paintings to modern day computer games, has allowed us to explore the relationship between inside and outside picture spaces. In doing so, we have identified their importance in each development of visual-narrative in reinforcing underlining themes through the different treatments of space. Each new technology has brought with it new possibilities for the representation of space, which in turn has influenced and added new depth to the story being told. As we have seen in the Lascaux paintings, the prehistoric artist primarily intended to capture and tell the story of a hunt. By melding together outside and inside spaces, the artist has not only told, but also created an illusive and convincing narrative experience of a hunting scene. This melding of inside and outside spaces allows the viewer to play an active, yet convincing part in the narrative. Likewise, in his Maestà, Duccio tells the story of Christ but, unlike the prehistoric artists, he wanted to emphasise to his viewers that these events happened in another lifetime and that they (the viewers) had no part to play in it. He achieved this by separating the space through the use of frames, to divide the viewer on the “outside” from this “inside” heavenly space. A little later, Memling’s Passion of Christ and then Massacio’s Tribute Money start to break down these divisions (through the use of perspective and spatial narrative) and, as the prehistoric artists, aim to promote involvement in the story being told. In Las Meninas, Velsaquez has successfully
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achieved this. He wanted his viewers to play an active part in the story, and by melding the two spaces together, he has enhanced the feeling of being part of the story: the viewer is there amongst the little ensemble of people, and is unsure why the artist is staring at them. This technique was further developed in the panorama painting, where the viewer is plucked from the outside space and placed into the inside picture space, resulting in the narrative emerging from the experiences within. Next, with the advent of film and computers, artists opened up narrative by investigating new spaces and combinations of space. Film can encompass many traditional uses of space: it can explore not only the idea of the frame and two separate spaces and the blending of these spaces, but also spaces within spaces, as exemplified in the film Red Desert. Similarly, artists are increasingly choosing computers as a creative medium for the exploration of different treatments of space in storytelling. People have been telling stories for thousands of years and today, more than ever, the emergence of new technologies opens up many new challenges for these storytellers. In terms of the visual-narrative, the future brings much excitement. The computer is a relatively new medium in the arts, and affords great versatility to support new ways of storytelling. Indeed, as we have seen, each new technology brings with it something new and exciting; yet, whether a cave wall, a wooden panel, a canvas, or a screen, when it comes to successful storytelling, it is not so much the advances of each new technology that are important, but how these relate to the artistic message and the story being told.
A ckno wledg ment Thanks to Rhydian Lewis for his helpful comments.
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Refe rences Andrews, L. (1995). Story and space in Renaissance art, the rebirth of continuous narrative. Press syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Artmuseum.net. (2000). Through the looking glass. Retrieved January 18, 2006, from http:// www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/overture/looking. html Aylor, B. (2002). Descending into hidden worlds: Aesthetic experience and the art of seeing. Retrieved July 27, 2005, from http://gseweb.harvard. edu/~t656_web/Spring_2002_students/aylor_ britt_aesthetic_experience_seeing.htm Berleant, A. (1991). Art and engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (1990). Film art: An introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Bower, B. (1996). Visions on the rocks. Retrieved January 12, 2006, from http://www.sciencenews. org/pages/sn_arch/10_5_96/bob2.htm Boyd Davis, S. (2004). Representing space: The pictorial imperative. In SST2 Workshop Proceedings. UK, Napier University, December 2004. Brass, M. (1999). The antiquity of man. Retrieved January 5, 2006, from http://www.antiquityofman. com/Trance_Lewis-Williams.html Brown, J. (2002). Michelangelo Antonioni. Retrieved December 16, 2005, from http://www. sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/antonioni.html Calter, P. (1998). What shape is the frame? Retrieved January 24, 2005, from http://www. dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit12/ unit12.html Coulter-Smith, G. (2000). The visualnarrative matrix. Southampton: Southampton Institute.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow – The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row. Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Robinson, R. (1990). The art of seeing – An interpretation of the aesthetic encounter. J. Paul Getty Museum. Elsaesser, T. (1990). Early cinema, space frame and narrative. London: British Film Institute. GamesCritic. (2002). Metal gear solid. Retrieved February 22, 2005, from http://www.gamecritics. com/feature/greatgame/mgs/page01.php Gandy, M. (2003). Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. Retrieved December 16, 2005, from http://66.102.9.104/ search?q=cache:9Fe7tyGHVlsJ:www.geog.ucl. ac.uk/~mgandy/pdf3.pdf+antonioni+%27s+red +desert,the+use+of+space+and+colour&hl=en &ie=UTF-8 Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art – From illusion to immersion. MIT Press. Gray, W. S. (2003). Aesthetics of computer graphics. Retrieved July 27, 2006, from http://www. auzgnosis.com/art/essay.htm Huddlestin, S. (2001). The theatrical Baroque: European plays, painting and poetry, 1575-1725. Retrieved January 24, 2005, from http://www. fathom.com/course/10701023/session2.html Ijsselsteijn, W. (2003). Presence in the past: What can we learn from media history? Retrieved May 6, 2004, from http://216.239.59.104/ search?q=cache:of K DynUPNt4J:w w w.vepsy.com/communication/book4/4_02IJSSELS. PDF+Presence+in+the+Past:what+can+we+lea rn+from+media+History%3F&hl=en I. V. L. A. (2002). What is visual literacy? Retrieved July 27, 2005, from http://www.ivla. org/organisation/whatis.html Lynton, N., Smith, A., Cumming, R., & Collinson, D. (1985). Looking into paintings. Milton Keynes: The Open University. 153
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Manovich, L. (2002). Spatial montage, spatial imaging and the archaeology of windows: A response to Marc Lafia, Rhizome .org. Retrieved April 28, 2004, from http://rhizome.org/thread. rhiz?thread=4572&text=8914 McLuhan, M. (1967). The medium is the message . Bantam Books. McLuhan, M. (1968). McLuhan hot and cold. Penguin Books. Murray, K. (2000). Lecturer notes: Balance. Retrieved December 16, 2005, from http://www. svcc.edu/academics/classes/murray/hum210/arnheim.html
Shedroff, N. (2001). Experience design. Retrieved June 3, 2005, from http://www.webreference. com/authoring/design/expdesign/index.html Van Der Berg, D. J. (2001). Spectators in Jerusalem: Uban narrative in the scenic tradition. Retrieved April 27, 2004, from http://www.imageandnarrative.be/illustrations/dirkvanderberg.htm
E ndnotes
1
Ndalianis, A. (2000). Baroque perceptual regimes. Senses of cinema, 2004. O’Toole, M, (1994). The language of displayed art. London: Leicester University Press. Patton F. (No date). Reflections on Red Desert. Retrieved February 19, 2005, from http://www. dvdbeaver.com/film/articles/redesert3.htm Poore, H. R. (1967). Composition in art. New York: Dover publications. Ryan, M. L. (2001). Narrative as virtual reality. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sanes, K. (2000). Transparency. Retrieved February 18, 2005, from http://www.transparencynow. com/Overview/fantasy.html
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2
Sound has a spatial dimension because it comes from a source, and that source itself may be characterised by the space it occupies. If the source of a sound comes from a character or object in the story space of the film, we call the sound diegetic. On the other hand, there is nondiegetic sound, which is represented as coming from a source outside the story space (Bordwell & Thompson, 1990, Pg 254). Spatial psychosis has been described in Red Desert as the exploration of ‘the landscapes of fear and the topographies of despair created as a result of modern technological and capitalist development’ (Vidler cited in Gandy, 2003).
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Chapter XII
The Interactive Spectacle and the Digital Situationist Shaleph O’Neill University of Dundee, UK
A bst ract The Situationists defined the increasingly spectacularized society (The Society of the Spectacle ) as the alienation of the individual by an increasingly mediated and commoditised modern world that has spread across the globe, pacifying and alienating its audience with the manufacture of lack and the control of desire. Set dead against this spread of spectacular culture, the Situationists sought to free themselves from the commoditisation and mediation of everyday experience. By employing direct action and the creation of “situations,” they attempted to make clear the restrictive boundaries, both intellectual and environmental, that the habituated processes of modern capitalism (in the form of production and consumption, work and leisure) had placed upon society. In the era of the emerging digital or interactive Spectacle that now permeates every aspect of our culture, what has been added to the Spectacle is the illusion of agency administered through the new technological conduits. Virtual environments, for example, deliver visitation and visualization of places that, despite attempts at access by the viewer, remain remote. However, in our new digitally enhanced cultural spaces, despite restrictions, Situationist style interventions can still be made. Views can be expressed that had no outlet in previous media forms, allowing for the development of communities and exchange of ideas that require, at least in some part, the agency of the individuals taking part in them. Situationist theory takes its place in helping to describe such activities, even though, in some cases, the polemic is often watered down. Here we shall consider a number of examples of this kind of intervention, in relation to the Situationist practices of the dérive and détournement, to help give some structure to the critical analysis.
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The Interactive Spectacle and the Digital Situationist
Int roduction Between 1957-1972, The Situationist International (SI) developed a coherent and incisive critique of modern society, the major tenet of which was a reaction to the alienation of the individual by an increasingly mediated and commoditised modern world that surreptitiously encroached upon felt life. “The Society of The Spectacle,” by Guy Debord (the main Situationist protagonist), is perhaps the most infamous example of this critique. In it, Debord outlines how the commoditisation of modern life has moved through the media and spread across the globe, pacifying and alienating its audience with the manufacture of lack and the control of desire. This extension of Marxist critique is the culmination of Situationist thought, but should not be read alone. Within the publications of the SI journals there is much discussion of how to combat the rise of the Spectacle by constructing ones own situations with the aim of reclaiming direct control over ones life. The performance of activities, such as the “dérive » and “détournement, » are focused on the reappropriation of places and things in order to transform everyday subjective experience and highlight the spectacular nature of modern life. The purpose of returning to Situationist ideas here is not only to highlight the level to which the Spectacle has now permeated our everyday lives, in the form of computer-enhanced spaces, virtual environments, and convergent technologies, but to critically reengage, using Situationist tools, with the problems of living within the newly evolving digitally interactive Spectacle. Indeed, what is presented here, as much as an overview of Situationist ideas, is a review of emerging digital works that are informed by Situationist practice.
T he S ociety
of the S pect acle
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself
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as an immense accumulation of Spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation (Debord, 1995, p. 12). For Debord, writes Douglas Kellner (Best & Kellner, 1998), “the Spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life- recovering the full range of their human powers through revolutionary change.” The Situationists theses were grounded in the very idea of reclaiming lived experience from the clutches of the Spectacle, which in their eyes, was passifying the population into consumers whose only role in life was to “spectate” on the reproduction of life through images. By advocating direct action and the creation of “situations,” they attempted to make clear the restrictive boundaries, both intellectual and environmental, that the habituated processes of modern capitalism (in the form of production and consumption, work and leisure) had placed upon society. In “The Production of Space” (Lefebvre, 1991), Henri Lefebvre produces a detailed exploration and analysis of the complex issues of inhabitable space from a critical Marxist perspective that was deeply intertwined, both theoretically and personally, with the Situationists (Hussey, 2002; Knabb, 1981). With the view that “Consciousness is produced through the material practices in the conduct of everyday life” (Shields, 1988, p. 2). Lefebvre highlights the repression of the ludic aspects of existence in favour of rationality and productivity. The key to understanding Levebvre’s critique of the production of space is in understanding his explanation of how this focus on rationality and productivity has resulted in not only the alienation of the ludic, but also the alienation and exclusion of the body and its extensions. Lefebvre sees the body and its extensions as central to the production of space. Moreover, he explains that this production of space is, in its natural state, a playful and social activity. He suggests the example of the spider and its web. The spider has no logic or intellect,
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it cannot understand Cartesian space, and yet it extends itself out into the world by producing a web, full of angles and intricacy. The web is a natural extension of the spider. The web is the space that the spider produces naturally. Continuing in this vein, Lefebvre points out how the social activities of people and their bodies are central to producing natural human spaces. He goes on to elucidate how this naturally produced space has been lost as mankind has evolved and produced new ways of existing that are based on philosophical and scientific positions that exclude the body (particularly Descartes). Lefebvre traces the evolution of produced space from a naturally social body-space, through the development of settlements and cities as images (spaces of representation, e.g., the Lascaux caves, sites of artistic expression), and on to images as cities (representations of spaces, e.g., the Roman pantheon of the gods, Christian churches). His history of produced space arrives at the production of a fragmented postmodern abstract space, where the image of space has all but taken over in the form of the “spectacular” space that continues to further exclude the body. Essentially taking a Situationist perspective, like Guy Debord, Lefebvre calls for a realisation of the difficulty of living in this kind of space, by focusing on understanding how this space is produced, and how we live in it. The Situationists make us understand how to reclaim that space by reappropriation through acts of détournement and dérive. The dérive, for example, is a technique of aimlessly wandering through cities, experiencing them first hand, free from preconceived notions about social practices. Détournement is the Situationist practice of subverting imagery and slogans to make the alienation of the Spectacle evident, again reclaiming them for their own ends. Against the creeping sleep of the Spectacle, the Situationists championed the notion of “living without dead time,” in which the active creation of their own constructed “situations” propelled them into the production of their everyday lives,
resulting in the reclamation of their own poetic existence. The main Situationist aim was to reclaim their own agency in the production of their own spaces, freeing themselves from the illusions and Spectacle of abstract space, foisted upon them by the ruling elite capitalist class. Ultimately, the Situationists realized that this was only possible through a revolutionary impulse that, in May 1968, left Paris reeling after several weeks of rioting by various political factions.
T he Inte ractive
S pect acle
In the era of the Spectacle theorised by the Situationists, media and technology were considered to be powerful control mechanisms of capitalism maintaining the status quo by pacifying its audience through the manufacture of “want” and the control of “desire.” In the era of the digital or interactive Spectacle, none of this has gone, but what has been added is the illusion of agency administered through the new technological conduits of the evolving Spectacle . While television maintains its hold on the top spot of pacification medium, the subtleties of new technology have provided new spaces of interaction with viewers. Arguably, the most interesting of these phenomena are the, so called, reality TV shows, where viewers are coerced into taking part by voting for the elimination of contestants (who may or may not be TV “wannabes” or minor celebrities). Of course, it is not entirely possible to tell how much the viewers can influence the program, as it is still firmly in control of the producers. The position of power offered to the viewer is, in fact, a “sop” to maintain silence, a bribe that is paid for by the viewer who foots the phone bill to call or text the program. Similarly, other interactive spaces are also being made for interaction through e-commerce and shopping channels. In these spaces, the continual spiral of commodity culture is reinforced by the use of combinations of technological devices that
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simultaneously advertise products and provide the means by which to purchase them from the comfort of your own home. One particularly interesting aspect of the technological evolution of the Spectacle is “the inevitable and incalculable loss of context and connotation involved in getting objects into the computer” (Van Alstyne, 1994). While this can be viewed as merely a technical problem regarding the thresholds of resolution and bandwidth, the more insidious problem of further separation from the world arises with it. For as all information moves towards digitization, that which is left undigitized, or that which remains outside digital space, ceases to have a value. While this is perhaps most obvious in the gap between those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not, there are other more subtle manifestations of spectacularization.
T he S pect acula r S pace of V irtual Reality Technologies, such as virtual reality, rely on promises where individuals are offered better access to spectacular reality through the realm of spectacular interaction in which the “illusion of nonmediation” aims to produce the experience that one is really interacting with the environment projected by the device. Virtual worlds essentially combine rhetorical elements of spatial organization with the logic of the image. They offer the possibility of occupation and inhabitation of technologically localised places, manifest as a sense of “presence.” However, as Turner and Turner have pointed out (Turner & Turner, 2003), virtual environments continue to be spaces where bodies are excluded. Most virtual worlds offer an excellent representation of a place or remote location, referred to here as “backwards presence” (Floridi, 2004). However, very few offer excellent ”forward presence” that is, bodily representation and agency within the displayed environment. In general, virtual environments deliver visitation
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and visualization of places that, despite attempts at access by the viewer, remain remote. Turner and Turner go on to critique the lack of contextualisation in virtual environments, exploring the role of the body in understanding and turning spaces into places. Further consideration of these problems are explored in O’Neill (2005); suffice to say that Turner and Turner arrive, as Lefebvre does, at the exclusion of bodily agency, as a major factor in the uninhabitable nature of spectacular spaces, virtual reality being the latest manifestation. Essentially, virtual environments are like Lefebvre’s “images as cities” they are totally abstract and representational and, as a result, alienating to their inhabitants when presented as alternative spatial realities. A Situationist critique of virtual reality reveals “the illusion of nonmediation” as the development of new mediating technologies that promote a higher level of fidelity and reality that, while they cannot be distinguished from the mediated experience, continue to alienate the user as the spectator of noninteractive Spectacles. The illusion is no longer in just trying to hide the technology, it is in trying to hide the fact that we cannot act in these types of environments that are presented to us as the highest forms of mediation available to us. Thus, virtual reality technologies merely seduce the viewer into an even deeper tie to the Spectacle, offering only impoverished interactions that treat the body as mere “meat” and the psychology of mind from a purely constructivist perspective.
T he D igit al S itua tionist There is no media substitute for actively taking part in ones own life in the real world. However, it is important to distinguish between two different aspects of todays digitally spectacular situation. Using Debord’s conception of the construction of situations, Kellner suggests that: “A creatively interactive Spectacle is one that the individual herself has created, whether it be
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one’s Web site, computer-mediated space, such as chat room, or discussion group. In these self or group-constructed environments, individuals themselves create both form and content, using the site technology to advance their own interests and projects, to express their own views and to interact in the ways that they themselves decide.” (Best & Kellner, 1998) By contrast, in pseudointeractive Spectacles, “one is limited by the structures and power of the usually corporate forces that themselves construct the Spectacle in which one is merely a part.” Such pseudointeractive Spectacle s would include reality TV shows, Web sites, or discussion forums that are firmly in the hands of production corporations. Of course in interacting with or through the Spectacle, one is never totally free of its influence, all technologically mediated communication is structured to some extent by protocols, codes, and programs; thus, both the form and content of any digitally constructed situation is tainted by the Spectacle. While access is restricted to those with new technology, the permeation of computers in everyday life has allowed for the creation of alternative cultural spaces that can attack and subvert established culture. In these new cultural spaces, views can be expressed that had no outlet in previous media forms, allowing for the development of communities and exchange of ideas that, at least in some part, are under the control of the individuals taking part in them. This is evident mostly in the work of artists and designers that are exploring the potential of new media technologies for social comment. While many of them actively draw on the Situationist legacy, others remain unaware, developing their own sense of “hacktivism”’ to modify existing technologies for their own ends. In either case, Situationist theory seems at least to have a place in helping to describe their activities, even though, in some cases, the polemic is often watered down. Here we shall consider a number of examples of
this kind of work, taken from the perspective of the dérive and détournement to help give some structure to the critical analysis.
D igit al D é rive The “dérive” (or “drift,” according to its literal translation from the French) became one of the major methods of SI activity in the early years. As Debord writes, the Dérive was “A technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The dérive entails playful- constructive behaviour and awareness of the psycho-geographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll” (Knabb, 1981, p. 50). In a dérive, one or more persons, over a certain period of time, cease their usual motivations for activity, such as work or leisure, and let themselves be drawn into the attractions of their surrounding environment and the possible encounters there in. According to Debord, they are best conducted in small groups, where the affects of the psycho-geographical encounter can be discussed and should last on average about a day. The purpose of the dérive is to open oneself to the particular, and hitherto usually unnoticed, affects of ones surroundings. Moving from home to café, to viewpoint to tram, to depressed neighbourhood to the Latin Quarter, from safety to danger, laughter to melancholy, the aim is to take control of the city and experience it at first hand. Therefore, truly letting the world slide by, the Situationist participating in a digital dérive would be most concerned with rambling through opportunities afforded by new technologies without direction or under the guidance of outmoded, inadequate, or even alternative navigation methods. Indeed, Debord writes of a comrade drifting through Germany with only the guidance of a map of London to aid his navigation. Surfing the Internet, seeking no information but experiencing what one finds through random encounters, is entirely in the spirit of the Situationist. However, even better
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would be the use of digital technology to create situations to be encountered in physical spaces. A number of research projects have already been conducted that explore Situationist theory in relation to ubiquitous computing, three of which are discussed next.
F iasco Fiasco is a location-based physical game that employs the use of digital technology and the Internet. Drawing on Situationist theory, Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman have developed a mixed reality game that is played on the Web as well as on the streets, the purpose of which is to explore the effects of pervasive gaming on social life and urban spaces (Chang and Goodman, 2004). Pervasive gaming includes the use of handheld devices, objects embedded with microprocessors, wireless networks, and the crossover of data from real and virtual worlds. In Fiasco, New York City is the game board and a networked telecom system is the dice. To take part in the game, players, must attempt to gain control of “turf” by performing and documenting “stunts” out on the streets, the documentation of which, for example, mobile phone picture messages, are combined with a tag and uploaded onto a virtual map of the game space. The players then rate each stunt and the highest rated stunt takes control of the space marked on the virtual map. Fiasco is not only inspired by the Situationist dérive, but actively promotes, for its players, new ways in which to engage with urban spaces as well as the community that surrounds the game. Street corners become active spots where new and often incongruous situations can be constructed. Often the most unusual “stunts” are the ones that are rated highest. In this respect, Fiasco can look like an utterly bewildering Spectacle to passersby that witness the stunts, but passersby need not be excluded from the game. The option is always there for them to join in. Everyday experience is thus never far away from being transformed by
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the ludic portal of Fiasco. Chang and Goodman extend their work in the realm of human-computer interaction (HCI) to engage with the problems of creating “hackable” spaces and systems (Galloway, Brucker-Gohen, Gaye, Goodman, & Hill 2004), as well as considering how digital technology can be better designed to improve access, authorship, and agency for citizens within the public interfaces of civic institutions (Chang, Jungnickel, Orloff, & Shklovski, 2005).
C ityN ova Rune Jensen and Tau Lenskjold also draw on Situationist theory in their work, where they are interested in developing the notion of “social friction” for designing ubiquitous computing applications (Jensen & Lenskjold, 2004). Social friction is, thus, defined as a fundamental aspect of everyday life, where the various different encounters between people are considered as the driving force behind social and cultural phenomena. While Jensen and Lenskjolds explication of social friction as a design tool draws on Situationist theory, they do not ally themselves with the stringent polemic of Debord. Instead, they focus on the use of Situationist ideas in combination with other theorists’ perspectives, most notably de Certeau and Lefebvre. From the combination of these ideas, Jensen and Lenskjold go on to expound social friction in relation to considering the everyday activities of individuals in social spaces as a starting point for designing ubiquitous computing systems. From this perspective, they develop two scenarios around a fictional system called CityNova. CityNova is based on the idea of using radio frequency identification (RFID) type tags called Nova-tags. These tags can be attached to any surface within an environment and can hold digital information, such as text, pictures, and sound, as well as time codes and positional coordinates. Users can thus position and reposition Nova-tags as they see fit. They can also access and store information on them
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via technologies such as PDAs or mobile phones. Nova-tags can then become either localised or mobile message boards, where layers of information can be deposited over the lifetime of the tag. For example, one of their scenarios considers the life of a Nova-tag as it is moved across a city as a mobile conduit for a debate on public transport. An infrequent traveller who moans about the overcrowded condition of buses initialises the tag. A woman, who uses buses everyday, defending their importance in her life, continues the debate. Finally, a cyclist takes pictures of his bike and adds them to the tag, leaving it at the nearest bus station to be picked up by the next contributor. The scenarios developed by Jensen and Lenskjold highlight the different kinds of social dialogues that can be encouraged by Nova-tags, as well as the positioning and paths that tags take through the urban environment. Working the RFID tags immediately opens up the problems of data protection and freedom of information. While Jensen and Lenskjold concentrate on the positive aspects of loose community building and anonymous interaction from a distance, they fail to engage with the more insidious problems of data and identity protection. Neither do they consider the nature of the possible surveillance culture that comes hand in hand with RFID tags. However, they do stress the possibility of misinformation, all be it from a negative angle, which opens the possibility.
.walk Utrecht-based arts collective Social Fiction received the Transmediale ‘04 software award for their “.walk” (dot-walk) project. Dot.walk combines computer code and “psycho-geographic” streetwalking in another example of the Situationist dérive combined with digital technology. To take part, participants follow instructions written in a kind of computing pseudo-code that gives algorithmic instructions on how to navigate a city. For example, “Your export code is 2. Repeat the
following instructions; walk the first street left, second street right, then you take the street left that is indicated as your export code. Every time you meet another psycho-geographer you exchange export codes. This new code will change the 3rd turn. Remember how often you exchange export code. When you have walked for one hour you return to the place you are supposed to meet. Once arrived there report the number of encounters to socialfiction.org.” (Socialfiction, 2004). This reappropriation of computer programming as the basis for interaction in the real world amounts to what Socialfiction call “algorithmic psycho-geography” (Tuters, 2004). Their ultimate aim is to collect as many participants’ experiences as possible in relation to each algorithm, attempting to develop a “universal psycho-geographic computer.” Clearly, Socialfiction’s work is strongly influenced by Situationist practice. So much so, in fact, that they are essentially doing exactly what the Situationist did 40 years before. The one crucial difference is the focus on their algorithmic approach.
D igit al D ét ou rne ment Another tool in the situationist armoury against the pervasiveness of the Spectacle is the détournement or recontextualisation of preexisting aesthetic elements to be integrated into a construction of a higher order (i.e., plagiarism, or the use of readymades in the Duchampian sense). Debord writes in “Methods of Détournement,” “Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations…the mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supercedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organisation of greater efficacy.” (Knabb, 1981, p. 8). Where détournement differs from derive is in the scale of its application. Derive occupies the grand scale of the urban, where the given aesthetic element is the city itself, and the transformation takes place subjectively from a
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“psycho-geographical” perspective, where the only thing produced is the effect on the person participating in the drift across the city. Détournement inevitably also starts with a given. However, that given is always on a smaller scale. Rather than focusing on the city itself, the mediating elements of the Spectacle become the focus for transformation, with subversion the ultimate goal. Unlike Duchamp’s use of the ready made, where the effect is a repartee with the bourgeoisie gallery clientele, the Situationist détournement is focused on highlighting the spectacular nature of existence in all forms of media. Initially, the Situationist focused on plagiarising the ideological and political statements of their rivals, quickly moving to advertising slogans and whole scenes from films. Juxtaposing original elements with slogans of their own, the Situationist reappropriated the Spectacle for their own ends highlighting the alienating function of media communications. Taken to it’s logical conclusion, the ultimate détournement would be scaled up to the level of the reappropriation of the city and its institutions, which manifested itself in the revolutionary fervour of the Paris riots of 1968, where the Situationist played a central role in fanning the flames of discontent. In relation to today’s digital media, the technique of détournement is obviously well supported by digital technology in relation to the copying, cutting, and pasting of images and text in computer software. However, these are only surface manipulations of the technology. Such is the advanced state of the Spectacle in digital times that the cut and paste of 1960s Situationist activities has become commonplace in many of our digital applications. From word processing to editing film and composing music, we live in a culture saturated by the remix and recontextualised media. In short, arguably détournement has itself succumbed to spectacularization. While our new tools offer us new ways to modify and arrange our media, few people are actually engaging on the level of reappropriating these media entirely. Few people are actually taking entire pieces of software and
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reassembling them according to their subjective desires to create their own novel experiences. The work of various hacker arts groups, for example, JODI, I/O/D, and M9ndvirus, are the notable exception that, arguably, have taken Situationist ideas to this new level of engagement.
U ntitled G ame Perhaps the most famous example of software détournement is “Untitled Game” (Yuil, 2001). Here JODI takes the game’s engine of Quake as the basis for a radical reworking, where the remixed versions of Quake offer an entirely new entity. Replacing variables with functions and rewriting generous portions of original Quake code, JODI reappropriates Quake as a “work of art” rather than a games engine. Their concern is not to eradicate every vestige of the original “shoot’em” up format, but to replace sections of it with unrecognisable abstract forms that remain in some way playable and yet utterly removed from its original purpose. “Untitled Game” becomes about exploring abstract visualisations, drawing on notions of modernist abstract painting, but utilising the materials of computer software and hardware rather than paint and canvas. Each version of Untitled Game thus becomes a formal study in its own right. The manufacturers opting for Open Source code made JODI’s reappropriation of Quake possible. This decision was largely driven by games manufacturers realising that amongst their audiences, there are many hackers that like to “mod” (modify) or “patch” sections of code to their games. The naked Lara Croft, in Tomb Raider, being a famous example. Thus, games manufacturers realised that leaving these possibilities open for gamers to change left more room for the development of their games and the communities that surround them. Indeed, much of the software in the open source community evolves by the process of collective authorship among a worldwide development team, hundreds
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strong. However, it is unlikely that the activities of groups, such as JODI and others, could have been anticipated. These types of détournement go far beyond the game itself and become manifestations of something entirely different. They become manifestations of a critical engagement with the material of code itself, once again highlighting the spectacular nature of media relations, and uncovering the sophistication of educated consumers that are prepaired to go beyond the constraints they are confronted with to produce commentary.
Velvet S trike Anne-Marie Schleiner, has emerged as a “hacktivist” commenting on the relationship between first person “shoot ‘em up” games and real military conflicts that are ongoing in the world (Schleiner, 2002). A self-confessed fan of “shoot ‘em ups,” Schleiner became concerned with the warped view of reality that was being portrayed in these games. While manufacturers and gamers alike tended towards games that offered “realistic” game play, in the likes of “Counter Strike,” Schleiner became concerned with revealing how one dimensional this 3-D view of reality really was. With the background of the “War on Terror” and with American troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Schleiner sought to subvert the possibilities for interaction within the game. Understanding that CounterStrike, in particular, portrayed a world dominated by white male soldiers whose only goal was to kill other examples of stereotyped enemies such as middle eastern terrorists. A particular aspect of Counter-Strike is the possibility to mark a territory that you control by spraying an insignia on the virtual walls of the game. Schleiner uses this as her point for transformation. She created her own versions of insignia that, rather than claiming territory within the game, subvert its agenda by introducing a critique of the games limitations. Images such as two soldiers kissing (Figure 1), or statements such as “Hostages of military fantasy”
are thus made available to players that can partake in subversive activities within the game. The aim for the subversive element is then to dodge bullets while spraying messages of “peace” or instructions on “how to drop weapons.”
O .U .T . Another of Schleiner’s major works is OUT (Operation Urban Terrain), which is derived from MOUT, a military term that stands for Military Operations in Urban Terrain (Schleiner, 2004). Schleiner here is again concerned with the blurring of the boundary between entertainment and reality. Like her previous work, she focuses on the nature of military simulations, disguised as games, that are in effect training civilians in the art of MOUT combat. OUT takes these gaming environments out onto the streets where they are played in urban locations similar to those depicted in the game. Connected via a wireless network, five participants intervene in live games by performing noncombat-related activities, such as dancing and self-destruction. All the while, the game play is projected onto the real urban environment, often attracting a crowd to watch the Spectacle. Figure 1. A “Spray” by Brody Condon from Schleiner’s Velvet-Strike
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From a Situationist perspective, Schleiner’s work can been as an example of détournement, much as the situationsits themselves coopted the slogans and badges of their political and ideological opponents in order to subvert them for their own ends. Schleiner reappropriates the domain of military games as the arena for her antiwar activism. In doing so, she highlights the insidious way in which military combat simulation has become part of the everyday fabric of many game players’ lives.
Q uake F riends A variation on this combat-related theme is Quake Friends, performed by Joseph DeLappe and his fellow players. Like Schleiner, DeLappe coopts the violent “shoot‘em” up game world of Quake, a future fantasy frenzy of super weapons and ultraviolence. Within the game domain, DeLappe and his cohorts subvert the game arena by taking on the roles of the characters in the popular TV comedy show Friends. Each character appears as a Quake warrior, but by using the game’s text messaging system, players in disparate networked locations can effectively recite lines from the show (Mirapaul, 2003). A performance is then presented of the absurd reenactment of episodes of Friends in a completely alien environment. This not being enough, like Schleiner, the game world is open to the public so that any number of “normal” Quake players can come into the Friends world with their guns blazing. For DeLappe, this juxtaposition of bloodshed and laughter highlights the fake nature of the fantasy worlds that are portrayed in both Quake and Friends. Each one exists in a tightly defined location, and is predicated on a set of predefined rules, and neither of them have any major consequences of action. Interestingly enough, DeLappe and his online theatre group have been hit by threatened legal action by Warner Brothers (the makers of Friends) for copyright infringement. Significant compromise has had to be reached, and DeLapped has promised not
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to perform any more Friends-related material in such a fashion.
C onclusion Clearly, human agency is central to the Situationist theses. The aim of reclaiming everyday experience for ones own ends is, without doubt, a radical proposition. It is also a proposition that, as realised by Lefebvre, relies on the body. It is not enough to watch or to reflect upon the nature of the Spectacle. What is important is to be able to take part. As many of the examples mentioned here show, there is a great deal of concern within some digital communities about the level of access that is given to the users of modern digital technology. While the politics of power and media relations are still very much the central focus of critical analysis, the continuing advancement of technology into every avenue of our lives begs the question of “how we interact with it.” The discipline of HCI has long sought to uncover theories that help in the development of usable interfaces and devices. However, a new level of interaction is upon us. While interface communicability and human factors still remain relevant to the design of computer systems, new questions emerge as we interact through computers, not only with the contents of media, but also the mediation of the contents of our lives. Banking, shopping, and learning are all quickly becoming subsumed by the digital revolution. The question is “how do we maintain our agency within these new spectacularised domains?” As Ann-Marie Schliener has already asked, “what happens when the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to blur?” As game players, are we simply enjoying shooting up the fictional enemy, or are we being seduced by a digital military training regime? In the not too distant future, it is entirely possible that warfare might be conducted using game-like environments to control robot warriors out in the field. Remote controlled warplanes are already a
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reality. While not all the work mentioned here is focused on such a specific aspect of hactivism as Schleiner’s, they do all share a common root in exploring our relationships with the continuing development of digitised cities. More and more technology is becoming embedded in our culture and in our physical surroundings. Situationist critique brings with it many interesting ideas that highlight the daily struggle for agency and control of these spaces and the effects they have on our lives. Focusing on how this agency becomes manifest in hybrid technologically enhanced spaces, such as VR, AR, and mixed reality, is undoubtedly important in relation to issues of designing good and useful technology, as well as ethical and political implications. Similarly, designing for adaptability or “hackability” for end users to develop their own situations also seems important, as in the example such as JODI, seem to show. In some respects, returning to Situationist ideas might seem outmoded, as they reflected a specific place in time and a specific political perspective on the world that has now very much dissipated in our hyper-capitalist society. However, precisely because of this situation, and precisely because of the entrenchment of the Spectacle in our culture, Situationist ideas can be used as a starting point for a continuing critique of our ever-evolving and increasingly complex, digitally spectacular world.
Chang, M., Jungnickel, K., Orloff, C., & Shklovski, I (2005). Engaging the city: Public interfaces as civic intermediary. CHI extended abstracts 2005, 2109-2110
Refe rences
Knabb, K. (1981). Situationist anthology. Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, California.
Best, S., & Kellner, D (1998). Debord and the post modern turn: New stages of the spectacle. Retrieved from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/ kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell17.htm Chang, M., & Goodman, E. (2004). Fiasco: Location-based, physical gameplay with a digital interface. In CHI 2004 Conference Proceedings CHI, Vienna
Debord, G. (1995). The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Floridi, L (2004). The philosophy of presence: From epistemic failure to successful observability. Presence: Special issue on legal, ethical and policy issues associated with Wearable Computers, Virtual Environments and Computer Mediated Reality. MIT Press. Galloway, A. Brucker-Gohen, J., Gaye, L., Goodman, E., & Hill, D. (2004). Design for hackability. In Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (pp. 363-366), Cambridge, MA, USA, August 1-4, 2004. ACM 2004. Hussey, A. (2002). The game of war: The life and death of Guy Debord. London: Pimlico. Jensen, R. H., & Lenskjold, T. U. (2004). Designing for social friction: Exploring ubiquitous computing as means of cultural interventions in urban space. In M. Agger Eriksen, J. Malmborg, & J. Neilsen (Eds.), CADE2004 Web Proceedings of Computers in Art and Design Education Conference. Copenhagen Buisness School, Denmark and Malmö University Sweden. Retrieved from http://asp.cbs.dk/cade2004/proceedings/
Lefevbre, H. (1991). The production of space (Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith). London: Blackwell Publishing. Mirapaul, M. (March 3, 2003). Take that, Monica! Kapow Chandler! New York Times. Retrieved from http://friends.tktv.net/friends.quake.html
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O’Neill, S. J. (2005). Presence, place and the virtual spectacle. In Psychnology, 3(2), 149-161, special issue on Space, Place & Technology: Presence in Mediated Experiences. Schleiner, A. (2002). Velvet-Strike: War times and reality games. Retrieved from http://www.opensorcery. net/velvet-strike/about.html Schleiner, A. (2004). Operation Urban Terrain. Retrieved from http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2004/OUT/ Shields, R. (1988). An English récis of Heni Levebvre’s La Production de L’Espace, University of Sussex, Brighton. Retrieved from http-server. carleton.ca/~rshields/prodspac.txt Socialfiction. (2004). Programming .walk for Dummies. Retrieved from http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk/dummies.html
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Turner, P., Turner, S., & Carroll, F. (2005). The tourist Gaze: Contextualised virtual environments. In P. Turner& E. Davenport (Eds.), Spaces, spatiality and technology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Tuters, M. (2004). The locative commons: Situating location-based media in urban public space. Retrieved from http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/pdf/Locative_Commons.pdf Van Alstyne, G. (1994). Cyberspace and the lonely crowd, in Span 2. Retrieved from http://library. nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display_printable/77 Yuill, S. (2001). Everyone a programmer. Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. Retrieved from http://www.agile-process.com/jodi.htm
Section IV
Cognition, Language, and Space
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Chapter XIII
Spatial Language in Computer Mediated Communication Shaun Lawson University of Lincoln, UK Emile van der Zee University of Lincoln, UK Laura Daley University of Lincoln, UK
A bst ract People use spatial language in everyday face-to-face conversation, and we also now use such language during everyday computer-mediated interactions. Commonly, such interactions can take place over mobile phones or in shared virtual environments such as multiplayer games. However, to date, very few academic studies have looked at how people’s use and understanding of spatial language might differ when it is computer mediated. Our own experimentation has investigated the relation between the uses of route, survey, and also gaze perspectives in a simple virtual environment.
Int roduction Spatial language is used by people to describe the spatial relationships between objects in an environment. For instance, we often use phrases such as “the mobile phone is to the left of the coffee mug,” or “I am standing in front of the church.” In order to guide another person to a goal, people can give each other directives that
also make use of spatial language such as “take the next turning right” or “wait under the big blue sign.” Spatial and directional language has been studied extensively in cognitive psychology when given verbally or in writing (e.g., Levelt, 1982; Taylor, & Tversky, 1992 1996; Tversky, Lee, & Mainwaring, 1999), and even when given in sign language and iconic gesturing (e.g., Emmorey, Tversky, & Taylor, 2000). There is no easily de-
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finable set of grammar that is used to construct spatial language, though it frequently makes use of prepositions: “the phone is on the table,” or “I am under the sign,” for instance. We are also flexible in the way that we use spatial language: when viewing a scene, for instance, people necessarily have a perspective on it (Tversky, 1994), but we can free ourselves from this and we are able to put ourselves in other perspectives, such as that of another person. This can be useful (for instance when giving directions), but how, when, and why we switch between perspectives is an open research topic, as we shall discuss later in this chapter. We use spatial language everyday in abundance and in many contexts, for instance, we are all familiar with giving people directions to our home, office, or a mutual meeting place. Sometimes these interactions take place off-line, such as when we wish to give directions to someone who we are to meet at a particular location later that day, or just as frequently, they can take place online or in real time, such as when we are a passenger in a car and are directing the driver to a location that is unfamiliar to them. Following on from the latter scenario, many people are now also familiar with in-car locative GPS satellite navigation systems that use prerecorded, though location aware, segments of spatial language to direct drivers to unfamiliar locations. Indeed, examples of how technology is now being used as a platform to support interactions that use spatial language are commonplace. For instance, many people will have experienced the scenario in which, whilst waiting at a rendezvous point in a public space, the person whom we are waiting to meet actually calls on their mobile phone and a renegotiation of the meeting point takes place in real time. Such exchanges often feature phrases such as “I’m walking east towards the big white statue” and usually culminate in statements such as “can you see me now?”. This particular scenario was identified by Ling and Yttri (2002) as one of their four forms of microcoordination that people
take up during mobile phone use. Mobile locative services that use spatial language are also under development for people with visual impairments, for instance, the Italian Easy Walk system generates verbal instructions for blind people based on their GPS-derived location. Another common example of discourse featuring spatial language occurs between two parties when one is driving to the other’s location; quite often in this case either one or both parties might have a two-dimensional map with them that could be referred to in their verbal exchanges. The advent of locative technology also of course makes it possible for maps to be presented on handheld digital devices in such scenarios (e.g., Kray et al., 2003). However, despite the ubiquitous established use of mobile phones, the emergence of locative applications, and a general acceptance that such technology has had a profound impact on human behaviour (e.g., see Ling, 2004), very few studies have examined conversations on mobile phones that feature spatial or directional language. In addition to mobile phones, there is another technology that has rapidly emerged in the last decade as a platform for mediating verbal interactions that often feature discourse regarding space and directions, that of networked multiplayer video games. Such games typically allow players, or users, to converse with each other, usually using text boxes but often also using Voice Over IP (VoIP) technology. A common requirement in such games is that players communicate their own whereabouts and/or intended future location to other players;in order to do this, they must use aspects of spatial language. However, once again, this is an area that has been devoid of academic research despite the millions of people currently playing such games on a daily basis. The intention of this chapter is to give an overview of why spatial language is important, first of all, in everyday human communication, and to give a summary of the relevant psychological literature that has led to an understanding of the ways in which we use such perspectives and
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spatial language in everyday human-to-human interactions. However, we also wish to elucidate the importance of gaining an understanding of how people might use spatial language in newly emerging contexts and scenarios, specifically those involving computer-mediated interactions, such as over mobile phones, and when viewing each other’s characters in shared virtual environments (VEs), such as multiplayer computer games. It is important, we believe, to gain an understanding of the use of spatial language in such scenarios in order to gain insight into how people might use and understand such language in critical situations such as those encountered by law enforcement or armed forces participating in team activities under duress. We will first examine the literature regarding how people formulate spatial language when giving each other directions, particularly with regard to perspective taking. We will then review relevant previous work on use of spatial and directional language in computer-mediated communications before summarising a series of experiments, which we are currently undertaking, that are investigating people’s use of spatial language in a task that involves giving directions in a shared virtual environment (a maze). Finally, we will give a summary of our own perspective on this field and outline topics worthy of further research.
Pe rspective L anguage
T aking
in S patial
As already mentioned, when viewing a scene, people necessarily have a perspective on it (Tversky, 1994), but we can free ourselves from any one perspective and, usually, are able to put ourselves in other perspectives, such as that of another person. However, it is not well understood when and why we change perspectives, and in what contexts it is appropriate to do so, that is, how does changing perspective have a positive effect, such as clarity of directions, on the communication
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exchange. Many studies have established that the terms people use when giving directions can have different meanings, depending on the perspectives involved. For example, “go left”’ can mean something completely different when interpreted from one person’s perspective compared to another’s, depending on the positions they occupy with respect to each other. Taylor and Tversky (1996) distinguish between a route perspective, a survey perspective, and a gaze perspective. Figure 1, which shows a screenshot from the virtual maze used in our experiments described later in this chapter, can be used to illustrate the differences between these three perspectives. In moving from the labelled point-1 to point-2 in Figure 1, the blue Figure can be described as going from “left” to “right” (a gaze perspective), from “West” to “East” (a survey perspective), or “straight” (a route perspective). A gaze perspective interprets directional terms in relation to the directions in which the eyes of the speaker or hearer move. A survey perspective assumes a neutral point outside of the environment, and uses fixed landmarks to interpret directional terms, such as cardinal directions, buildings, signs, and so forth. Finally, a route perspective assumes that we identify ourselves with a moving entity, figure, or avatar and thus, interprets directional terms as if, for example, we would move around in the body of the avatar, and would describe direction (changes) from the avatar’s perspective. Categorizing directional terms in relation to a particular perspective is not always a straightforward task. Even though spatial terms in isolation may appear to relate to a particular perspective, such as “West” and “East” to a survey perspective, and “left” and “right” to either a route or a survey perspective, this is not always the case if we take into account the linguistic context in which these terms are used. For example, terms like “West” and “East” can acquire a gaze meaning when talking about Figure motion on a local scale (thus not taking into account cardinal directions).
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Perspective selection is influenced by many factors. The influence of feedback on perspective selection has been shown for perspective use in descriptions of object locations. Speakers who have evidence that their partners have poor spatial abilities take their partners’ perspectives (see, e.g., Schober, 1998). Speakers select more egocentric perspectives and less other-centered perspectives when a conversation partner is present and when feedback suggests that addressees understand what is said, compared to when speakers imagine the presence of a communication partner, and no such evidence is available (Schober, 1993). Schober (1995) argues that in feedback situations, where a speaker and addressee try to comprehend each other’s perspective, selection is dependent on the amount of effort involved for the speaker, the addressee, or both. He states that egocentric descriptions are easiest to comprehend and produce, but shows that in a complex task, speakers tend to use an addressee’s perspective (however, see also Stutterheim & Kohlmann (1998), who show that speakers may decide to give more information, instead of changing perspective if the task
becomes more complex). Schober’s ideas can be applied to giving directions as well. Gender has also been shown to have an influence on perspective selection in route descriptions. In an Internet survey in which participants were asked to give directions to a target location in their home area, Lawton (2001) reports that women use landmarks more often than men ,who more frequently use cardinal directions (North, South, East, and West) (see also Lawton & Kallai, 2002, and MacFadden, Elia, & Saucier, 2003). This difference is supported by studies on sex differences in, for example, route learning, where it is shown that women remember more landmarks than men (e.g., Galea & Kimura 1993). In the route direction task described, landmarks are absent, thus making it impossible for women to focus on landmarks when giving directions. It is therefore unlikely, in our reported work, that differences in the use of perspectives between men and women will be found. There is also evidence to show that culture has an influence on spatial language use, for instance, Haun et al. (2006) show significant
Figure 1. A screen shot of the virtual environment used in the experiments described, with a blue Figure with a nose and eyes, a relatively large round red goal, and a pink colored dotted path as used in the experiment. Numbers refer to direction changes that are neutral from any of the three perspectives discussed above.
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perspective taking differences between western Europeans and a set of hunter gatherer people from Namibia, whilst there have been a number of discussions regarding the origins of language and spatial cognition (e.g., Sinha & Jensen de López 2000). Special groups of people have also occasionally been investigated for differences in spatial language ability, for instance, Landau and Zukowski (2003) have suggested a reduced level of spatial cognition and language abilities in people with William’s Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that produces learning difficulties. People with William’s Syndrome, at least outwardly, may show similarities to people with autistic spectrum disorders, such as Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), and it is possible that in both sets of people, the ability to put oneself in another’s perspective, in social terms, could be related to spatial ability as well. Little work has been done in this area, though Rajendran and Mitchell (2006) have investigated how people with AS differed in their communication skills in a simple map deduction task. Participants were required to find out the path a person had already taken through a simple map containing different landmarks. Two communication methods were used, on screen text, when the participant and receiver (experimenter) could only see one line of text, and via a phone. Participants used a combination of reference points and intrinsic language in order to negotiate the map. Finding showed that participants with AS took longer over the task and asked more questions in order to complete the task, however, it is not clear whether a direct link can be made here between social and spatial perspective taking.
S patial L anguage in C o mpute r-media ted C o mmunica tion Whereas the previous discussion indicates that there is still much to learn about how language and spatial cognition interact, in today’s networked and
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interconnected world, where computer-mediated communications are pervasive, we are faced with a further complication in that many conversations that take place between humans are frequently no longer performed face-to-face but are mediated by technology. This technology could feature: • •
• •
Voice (as in a phone or two-way radio conversation, or using VoIP), Text (as in an SMS text message, e-mail or chat room, or in tools provided in shared VEs), Video (via Web camera and TV links) or A combination of all modalities, even coupled with face-to-face interaction, or at least a colocated observation of the same scene.
However, to date, few, if any studies have addressed how computer-mediated communication affects the use and understanding of spatial language, for instance, do people alter their perspective use when interacting with each other using mobile phones, or is one perspective better understood than another in such cases? We consider this surprising, given the now ubiquitous nature of mobile technology coupled with the natural and well-reported (see next discussion) willingness of people to talk about location and place during phone calls. The emergence too of mobile applications that are locative in their very nature, such as ones that make use of cell mast ids or GPS to provide information or tags about local environments, as well as social networking movements, such as Twitter1, that encourage people to continuously report on their activity, also suggest that an understanding of how people might use spatial language to describe their own (and others) location and place, using interactive technology, is cause for investigation. Additionally, the establishment of hugely popular real-time shared environments, such as chat rooms, shared virtual environments (such as Second Life), and multiplayer online games, as well as the emergence
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and touted importance of mixed-reality experiences and games should also raise an awareness of the need to better understand spatial language in computer-mediated settings.
C ommunicating S patial and D irectional L anguage U sing Mobile T echnology The situations and scenarios in which a user might need to use directional, locational, or spatial language when engaged with computer-mediated communications already seem abundant. Indeed, mobile phone users seem naturally driven to state their geographical whereabouts, movements, and activities to their remote companion, even if not prompted to do so, or furthermore, even if such information is, at least on the face of it, irrelevant, meaningless, or annoying; hence, the well known “I’m on the train” phenomenon. Laurier (2001) argued that location is used in mobile phone conversations in order to establish a mutual understanding of context. Specifying one’s location is certainly a common issue in mobile phone usage that, for obvious reasons, was not a problem with previous “land line” phone technology. Indeed, Arminen (2006) reports, in fact, that “most mobile calls involve a sequence in which location is reported,” and goes on to suggest that location reporting is usually a precursor to subsequent mutual face-to-face activity. Weilenmann (2003) used conversation analysis (CA) to determine that users often combine both location and activity in mobile phone conversations, and also drew a similar conclusion to Arminen (2006) that location typically only gains importance on its own if it can give relevant information about a future face-to-face meeting. Arminen (2006) also concludes that “strict geographical information” (which we presume to be constructed from spatial language) is only relevant in a few cases, such as instructing a remote caller on how to find a place, perhaps the very place at
which the other person is located. We consider, however, that this is exactly the kind of task that users want to do all the time, as recognised for instance by Olofsson et al. (Olofsson, Carlsson, & Sjolander, 2006), who describe people’s desire to use phone technology to locate friends at large public events such as music festivals. Similarly, Nakanishi et al. (2004) have defined a need for a system to allow a set of knowledgeable users (administrative staff) to effectively help naïve users (visitors or tourists) navigate large-scale public spaces. Nakajima et al (2007) also describe a prototype system that can provide individualized directional instructions to each person involved in an emergency evacuation procedure; the instructions are sent to each person’s mobile phone. However, none of these studies have investigated the language people typically use when directing other people to a location using a mobile phone. Perhaps the nearest work, to date, in this area is by Weilenmann and Leuchovius (2004) who, again, take a conversation analytic view of the subject and describe several scenarios in which spatial language is clearly used (“Hey, I’m under the Nordstan sign,” for instance). However, Weilenmann and Leuchovius do not take their analysis any further, as their goal was to identify how it might be best to deliver location information in ways relevant to people (and particularly their previous experiences) rather than in ways that make use of geographical information. In linguistics, the issues associated with referring verbally, and gesturally (for instance using pointing), to objects or landmarks, or even part of a map, whilst our conversational partner is unable to see such artefacts, are collectively termed the deixis resolution problem. For example, if we are speaking to a remotely located person on the telephone whilst referring loosely to “that big building over there,” it is pretty likely that the partner in such a conversation will have difficulty understanding our meaning. This issue is bound up generally in the problem of communicating copresence, which has been written about at
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length by the human-computer interaction community for a number of years. However, whilst it is generally well accepted that computer-mediated interaction, and mobile phones in particular, pose numerous deictic problems, it is relatively uncommon to see researchers addressing these issues head-on (though see Barnard, May, & Salber, 1996, who investigated deixis in videophone conversations). In conclusion to this section, our understanding is that although people appear to use spatial language in everyday conversation on mobile phones, there have been no substantial works that have investigated whether the use of mobile phones has altered either the use or understanding of spatial language. However, it is also true to say that no substantial usage problems appear to have emerged in this area either; people seem to be able to effectively utilise a range of language to cope with everyday scenarios. Additionally, whilst locative applications are continuously predicted to be an important part of ubiquitous technology, the emergence of any significant commercial applications, aside from satellite navigation, has yet to happen.
C ommunicating S patial and D irectional L anguage in S hared G ames Aside from mobile phones, there is another technology that has rapidly emerged in the last decade as a platform for mediating verbal interactions that often feature discourse regarding space and directions, that of networked multiplayer video games. Many multiplayer games are now referred to as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and build on earlier roleplaying ideas and the concept of MUDs (multiuser dungeons, for instance, see Turkle, 1995), in which individual players take on the identity of a fantasy character and then interact with other players’ characters in a shared, persistent VE. There are a number of hugely successful examples of this game
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genre, including World of Warcraft and Everquest, each with literally millions of subscribed players2. MMORPGs have some things in common with the phenomenon of Second Life; this, again, is a persistent, shared VE in which players see their own character in a third-person perspective, the difference being that Second Life cannot be described as a game in that it is truly open ended in what it allows its players to do. Of course we are aware that spatial orientation and interaction has been studied for some time in the context of the design of research-driven collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) (e.g., see Hindmarsh, Frazer, Heath, Benford, & Greenhalgh, 1998) and in so-called general information spaces (e.g., see Hook, Benyon, & Munro, 2003), but it is only recently that the popularity of shared games like MMORPGs have brought these type of environments into general everyday use. Aside from MMORPGs, the other most common example of games that feature real-time mediated communication between players in shared spatial environments is the first person shooter (FPS) game. FPS games, such as Unreal Tournament, the Half-Life series, Counter-Strike, and Halo, also allow users to interact with each other in a shared VE, usually with the intent to “kill” other characters that are either computer generated or controlled by other players. Modern FPS games are characterised by their attention to visual realism and their exploitation of cutting-edge graphics acceleration; often this can be lacking in MMORPGs, and is certainly not a priority for Second Life. However, one thing MMORPGs, Second Life, and FPS games all have in common is they allow players, or users, to converse with each other, usually using text boxes but often also using voice over IP (VoIP) technology, which allows for direct spoken communications. The academic study of computer games has only recently found credibility (see Ondrejka, 2006, for an assessment of this) and unsurprisingly, the number of studies that have addressed
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the language used by players in games is limited. Manninen (2001) was perhaps the first to attempt to provide, using ethnography, a holistic analysis of interaction strategies in a multiplayer FPS game (Counter-Strike), and also gives a short observation of the communications styles used by players when either typing text or using spoken language. More recently, Thon (2006) recognises multiplayer games as examples of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in which many social cues are lost, and attempts to examine the resultant communication processes employed by players of FPS games by grounding this in the gaming situation as well as the social context of such games. However, Thon does not make any analysis of any communications that specifically make use of spatial language. Halloran et al. (Halloran, Rogers, & Fitzpatrick, 2003) also describe work on MMORPGs in the context of reduced social cues, and compare language communications using different delivery mechanisms (face-to-face, VoIP, and text). However, once again their emphasis was not on spatial cognition, but concentrated on enjoyment, social experience, and presence. Additionally, Gorniak and Roy (2005) describe a means for segmenting and visualising natural language used in multiplayer games, whilst some work on the transferal of wayfinding techniques using landmarks to game environments is described by Bidwell et al. (2005). An important aspect of communication between players in most multiplayer game scenarios is to describe the spatial whereabouts of oneself and other participants in relation to the environment and, more importantly still, to use directional language to tell another character how to get to a new location, or to describe to someone else the movement of a third party. In even very basic multiplayer FPS games, game-play scenarios, such as “capture the flag,” require collaboration between teams of players in order to reach a specific goal, such as a three-dimensional location within the virtual game world. With the rise of MMORPGs, in which a very large number of players can interact
together or against one another in the same game, the need to communicate location and directions effectively with team members is of paramount importance. However, despite the routine daily use of spatial language in such scenarios by millions of players worldwide, at least in MMPORGs, almost no studies of the adoption and/or effectiveness, for instance, of different spatial language traits adopted by players in shared games have appeared in the literature. A final game genre that deserves mention here is so-called pervasive-locative gaming (Benford, Magerkurth, & Ljungstrand, 2005), in which the physical world is used as the game board and players, equipped with, for instance, GPS-enabled hand-held devices (such as PDAs or SmartPhones), collaborate with each other to move towards goals at real geographic locations. This type of game is of interest here as almost the entire game-play scenario is often devoted to people expressing directional language to each other. At present, such games remain very much in the research domain rather than in the commercial arena (though the pioneering pervasive-locative game Botfighters (Sotamaa, 2002) was a genuine commercial release) though interest in the area continues to grow. However, no investigations of the spatial language used by players in such games have been made.
Pe rspective S election in G iving O nline D irections We have been surprised by the lack of investigation into computer-mediated spatial language use and have set out to make inroads in this area. Our initial investigations have not focussed on mobile phone technology but upon computer game environments. As scenarios in this area, they are much easier to simulate and control in a repeatable fashion. We wished to examine, from first principles, how people use spatial language, in general, and perspectives, in particular, when
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Figure 2. A screen shot of the virtual environment used in our experiments showing the view of experienced by participants in the experiment as well as showing the Figure (or avatar) during the “nofeatures” condition.
describing routes through environments to other people or players. It is apparent that most studies on human-human spatial language have focused on participants’ use of a route perspective, a survey perspective, or a mixture of both perspectives. However, the use of gaze perspective has not been systemically studied in relation to the use of the route and survey perspectives. We are currently engaged in a set of experiments that consider the ways in which speakers give directions to addressees to move a figure, or avatar, through a maze (depicted in Figure 1 and 2), as people may do when they, for example, interact with each other in a shared virtual environment such as a simple three-dimensional computer game. It is apparent that our virtual environments to date bear little resemblance to “real” game environments such as those of, for instance World of Warcraft, Half Life, or even Second Life. However, we have limited our environments (and characters) purely on the grounds that we wish people only to be able to use aspects of the environment that we want them to. For instance, if we made our maze environment more “realistic” by inserting trees around the maze then participants in our
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experiments may start using such artefacts as landmarks for navigation.
Initial E xperiment: N ative E nglish S peakers Our initial experiment investigated the influence of adding facial features to a moving figure, the feedback provided by the addressee (who is also the person moving the figure through the maze based on the speaker’s directions), and the gender of the speaker. Adding facial features to a figure, such as a nose and two eyes (as shown between Figures 1 and 2), or even meaningless features such as a small triangle to a square, induces the mental representation of a front-back axis in such a Figure (Harris & Strommen, 1974; Landau, 1996). We predicted, therefore, that the presence of features in a Figure going through a maze should have a positive impact on selecting a route perspective. Additionally, the use of a route perspective invites a speaker or addressee to identify themselves with the figure. Having a clear front-back axis would help such a speaker or addressee to project themselves onto a figure
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in the correct orientation, and would thus make it easier to use the route perspective, compared to a situation when the figure does not have any added features. It was predicted that if the addressee in the maze task makes a (deliberate) mistake in carrying out the speaker’s instructions, the speaker will use the survey perspective more than before. The terms related to a survey perspective are less susceptible to interpretation problems than the terms related to a route or gaze perspective. For example, terms like “left” and “right” feature in both a route and gaze perspective, whereas terms like “north” and “south” are more uniquely associated with a survey perspective. Therefore, a survey perspective requires the least amount of effort for a speaker and an addressee to comprehend each other. A computer-generated maze was produced for the experiment, which is shown in Figures 1 and 2. The maze was presented simultaneously on two linked computers screens that were at right angles from each other in the same room. The desks on which the computer screens were located were separated by a partition so that the participant (sitting at one screen) and the experimenter (sitting at the other screen) could not see each other or each other’s screens, but could communicate with each other verbally. A Dictaphone was used to record verbal output. The participants saw the maze with a path (Figure 1), while the experimenter saw the maze without a path (Figure 2). In condition 1, the figure had eyes and a nose (as in Figure 1), thus giving the figure an intrinsic axis, whereas in condition 2, the figure had no such features (as in Figure 2), and thus no intrinsic axis. In conditions 1a and 2a, the experimenter made no mistakes and moved the figure exactly as instructed by the participant. In conditions 1b and 2b, the experimenter made an error at the start position by moving the figure in the opposite direction as instructed. In conditions 1c and 2c, the experimenter made a deliberate error at both the start position and at direction change 5 by
also moving the figure in the opposite direction as instructed. In all conditions, participants were instructed to give verbal commands to the experimenter to bring the figure from the start position to the goal position along the path on their screen. Participants were explicitly asked to give separate instructions for each step, and to give their instructions in the form of directions (without giving examples). They were also asked to direct the figure to the last correct position if the experimenter would make a mistake, and then continue again from there. The experimenter would move the figure in single steps through the maze as instructed by the participant. The participant would be able to see each move on their screen. Each experiment took no longer than 5 minutes. For each of the 32 steps in the maze, the term used by a participant was categorized as belonging to a particular perspective. Since it is not possible to distinguish, for example, between a conventional route or gaze meaning of “left” and a temporary contextual survey meaning of “left”, all expressions were categorized as belonging to one of the following three categories: gaze/survey, route/survey, and (only) survey. For ease of reference, these categories will be referred to as gaze, route, and survey perspective, respectively. For the purpose of analyzing the effects of the experimenter making a mistake at the start position and at direction change 5, only the expression used after returning to the correct dot was taken into account for the analysis. One hundred and twenty three native Englishspeaking students from the University of Lincoln participated in the experiment. The analysis of the participants’ descriptions revealed that in the majority of the cases, participants used a route perspective, followed by a gaze perspective, and then a survey perspective. The use of a gaze perspective for giving directions in relation to a map-type like task was thus empirically confirmed. Perspective selection was influenced by
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the presence or absence of features: a nose and two eyes. The presence of features enhanced the chance of a route perspective, but suppressed the use of a survey perspective, whereas there was no effect on the use of the gaze perspective. In those cases where facial features were present, route perspective was used most, followed by gaze perspective, and then survey perspective. In those cases where facial features were absent, only gaze perspective was used more than survey perspective. These results are in agreement with those reported by Landau (1996) on object location descriptions. As predicted, gender did not have an influence on the use of perspective. This confirmed the suspicion that an absence of landmarks in the maze did not make it possible for women to focus more on route descriptions compared to men. At direction changes, it was observed that all perspectives are used in equal measures, but that a route perspective is preferred most, followed by a gaze perspective, and finally a survey perspective when the figure goes straight. This suggested that direction changes induced speakers to just select any possible perspective. It is tempting to explain this in terms of Schober’s (1995) minimum effort principle, which predicts that a speaker would select a perspective that requires a minimum of cognitive effort. It is possible that although speakers do receive response feedback from their addressees, showing that their addressees understand the directions given, that verbal feedback plays a more important role in establishing whether the mental representations of both are aligned, thus inviting the speaker to randomly select a perspective, thus enhancing the chance that the addressee may comprehend the instruction. In order to support this idea, it would be necessary to investigate how perspective selection at direction change points impacts on a normal addressee’s ability to match a move to an instruction, given that perspective selection appears to follow a more consistent pattern when a figure goes straight.
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Our results also showed that errors made by the experimenter decreased the use of the route and gaze perspectives, while increasing the use of the survey perspective. In accordance with Schober’s (1995) minimum effort principle, a survey perspective requires less effort for a speaker and an addressee to comprehend each other, compared to the use of a route or survey perspective, since the terms associated with the former perspective uniquely identify this perspective, whereas terms such as “left” and “right” do not. It appears that the need to (re)align the mental representations of the speaker and addressee (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) disappears soon after a mistake has been made, as witnessed by the absence of any long-term effects of the errors committed on perspective selection.
S ubsequent E xperiments As described, in our first experiment with native English speakers we found that route perspective was used mostly, followed by gaze and then survey perspective. As predicted, directional figure features increased route perspective use, making mistakes increased survey perspective use and, due to landmark absence, perspective use did not depend on gender. We then tested Swedish and Finnish native speakers, both living in Finland, as in the initial experiment, with only directional figure features, and with the experimenter making mistakes. The results showed that English, Swedish, and Finnish native speakers shared the same tendency of perspective use, thus suggesting that grammar does not impact on perspective use. We then tested Finnish speaking children (mean age 10.4) and found that they mostly used gaze perspective, followed by route and then survey perspective, thus showing that Finnish speakers start out by mostly using gaze perspective, while mostly using route perspective as adults. We then went on to test Finnish adults and children with Asperger’s syndrome. For those individuals failing to pass the
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Sally-Anne test for autism (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), indicating an inability to take a social perspective; the same results were found as reported in previous experiments, thus suggesting that spatial perspective taking is independent of social perspective taking (an experiment with William’s Syndrome individuals is under preparation, further testing this dissociation). Most recently we have conducted an experiment in which English native speakers were presented with the same maze as before, but were either given route, gaze, or survey instructions to go through the maze. Participants made more errors and took longer to complete the route perspective instructions compared to the other two sets of instructions (between which no differences were found). This shows that route perspective is used mostly when giving instructions, but it is the most difficult perspective to understand when receiving instructions.
S u mma ry and O ngoing
Wo rk
People use spatial language in everyday faceto-face conversation, and we also now use such language during everyday computer-mediated interactions. Commonly, such interactions can take place over mobile phones or in shared virtual environments such as multiplayer games. However to date, very few academic studies have looked at how people use and understanding of spatial language might differ when it is computer mediated. Our own experimentation has investigated the relation between the uses of route, survey, and also gaze perspectives in a simple virtual environment. The results show that in different Western European countries, route instructions are used most, followed by gaze and then survey instructions, that this tendency is stable across unrelated grammars, independent of the ability for social perspective taking, is not yet established in 10-year old Finnish children, and is the most difficult perspective to receive as an addressee.
In future work we aim to investigate progressively more “realistic” game environments in which participants can use any the normally available channels of communication (face-toface, text, VoIP) to address each other. Following on from our work at investigating how people reacted to deliberate navigation errors, it is also our intention to look in more detail at how usage, and understanding, of spatial language might change whilst participants are under stress. We also plan to begin to investigate the spatial language used by participants in pervasive locative games. Outside of the game environment, we believe that a better understanding of all aspects of spatial language use aspect might be of benefit, for example, to law enforcement or armed forces participating in team activities under duress. Finally, it seems an anomaly to us that no studies to date have examined how people use spatial language during everyday mobile phone conversations, especially given the predicted increase in locative applications for this technology platform.
Refe rences Arminen, I. (2006). Social functions of location in mobile telephony. Personal & Ubiquitous Computing, 10, 319-323. Barnard, P., May, J., & Salber, D. (1996). Deixis and points of view in media spaces: An empirical gesture. Behaviour & Information Technology, 15(1), 37-500. Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37-46. Benford, S., Magerkurth, C., & Ljungstrand, P. (2005). The disappearing computer: Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming. Communications of the ACM, 48, 3 March 2005. Bidwell, N.J., Poyner, D., Irving, J., Putna L., & Wold, A. (2005). Make it through with another
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point of view: Landmarks to wayfind in gameworlds. In Proc. Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment 05 (IEO5), Sydney. Emmorey, K, Tversky, B., & Taylor, H. A. (2000). Using space to describe space: Perspective in speech, sign, and gesture. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 2(3), 157-180. Galea, L. A. M., & Kimura, D. (1993). Sex differences in route-learning. Personality and Individual Differences, 14, 53-65. Gorniak, P., & Roy, D. (2005). Speaking with your sidekick: Understanding situated speech in computer role playing games. In Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Entertainment. Halloran, J., Rogers, Y., & Fitzpatrick, G. (2003). From text to talk: Multiplayer games and voiceover IP. In Proceedings of Level Up: 1st International Digital Games Research Conference (pp. 130142). Harris, L. J., & Strommen, E. A. (1974). What is the “front” of a simple geometric form? Perception and Psychophysics, 15(3), 571-580. Haun, D.B.M., Rapold, C.J., Call, J., Janzen, G., & Levinson, S.C. (2006). Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in Hominid spatial cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, (pp. 17568-17573). Hindmarsh, J., Frazer, M., Heath, C., Benford, S., & Greenhalgh, C. (1998). Fragmented interaction: Establishing mutual orientation in virtual environments. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW’98. ACM Press, New York. Hook, K., Benyon, D., & Munro, A. J. (2003). Designing information spaces: The social navigation approach. Springer-Verlag. Kray, C., Elting, C., Laasko, K., & Coors, V. (2003). Presenting route instructions on mobile devices.
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In: Proceedings, Intelligent User Interfaces (pp. 117-124), Miami, Florida, ACM Press. Landau, B. (1996). Multiple geometric representations of objects in languages and language learners. In P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel, & M. F. Garrett (Eds.), Language and space (pp. 317-363). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Landau, B., & Zukowski, A. (2003). Objects, motions, and paths: Spatial language in children with Williams syndrome. Developmental Neuropsychology, 23(1/2), 107–139. Laurier, E. (2001). Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2001, 19,.485-504. Lawton, C. A. (2001). Gender and regional differences in spatial referents used in direction giving. Sex Roles, 44(5/6), 321-337. Lawton, C. A., & Kallai, J. (2002). Gender differences in wayfinding strategies and anxiety about wayfinding: A cross-cultural comparison. Sex Roles, 47(9/10), 389-401. Levelt, W. J. M. (1982). Cognitive styles in the use of spatial direction terms. In R. J. Jarvella & W. M. Klein (Eds.), Speech, place and action: Studies in deixis and related topics (pp. 251-268). Chichester: Wiley. . Ling, R. (2004). The mobile connection. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Ling, R., & Yttri, B. (2002). Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring: Micro and hypercoordination through the use of the mobile telephone. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.), Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manninen T. (2001). Virtual team interactions in networked multimedia games - Case: “CounterStrike” – multiplayer 3-D action game. In Pro-
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ceedings of PRESENCE 2001 Conference, May 21-23, Philadelphia, Temple University. Martin, G. F (1989). The utility of speech input in user-computer interfaces. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 30, 355–375. McTear, M. F. (2002). Spoken dialogue technology: Enabling the conversational user interface. ACM Computing Surveys, 34(1). Nakajima, Y., Shiina, H., Yamane, S., Yamaki, H., & Ishida, T. (2007). Disaster evacuation guide using a massively multiagent server and gps mobile phones. Proc of IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT-07), Hiroshima, Japan. Nakanishi, H., Koizumi, S., Ishida, T., & Ito, H., (2004). Transcendent communication: Locationbased guidance for large-scale public spaces. Proceedings of CHI 2004 (pp. 655–662), Vienna. Olofsson, S., Carlsson, V., & Sjolander, J. (2006). The friend locator: Supporting visitors at largescale events. Social functions of location in mobile telephony. Personal & Ubiquitous Computing, 10, 319-323. Ondrejka, C. (2006). Finding common ground in new worlds. Games and Culture, 1(1), 111-115. Pickering, M., & Garrod, S. (2004). Towards a mechanistic theory of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169-226. Rajendran, G., & Mitchell, P. (2006). Text chat as a tool for referential questioning in Asperger syndrome. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 49, 102-112. Schmandt, C. (1994). Communication with computers: Conversational systems. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Schober, M.F. (1993). Spatial perspective-taking in conversation. Cognition, 47(1), 1-24.
Schober, M. F. (1995). Speakers, addressees, and frames of reference: Whose effort is minimized in conversations about location? Discourse Processes, 20(2), 219-247. Schober, M. F. (1998). Different kinds of conversational perspective-taking. In S. R. Fussell & R. J. Kreuz, (Eds.), Social and cognitive psychological approaches to interpersonal communication (pp. 145-174). Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah NJ. Sinha, C., & Jensen de López, K. (2000). Culture and the embodiment of spatial cognition. Cognitive Linguistics, 11, 17-41. Sotamaa, O. (2002). All the world’s a botfighter stage: Notes on location-based multiuser gaming. In CGDC Conference Proceedings (pp. 35-45) (June 2002), Tampere University Press. Taylor, H. A., & Tversky, B. (1992). Descriptions and depictions of environments. Memory and Cognition, 20(5), 483-496. Taylor, H. A., & Tversky, B. (1996). Perspective in spatial descriptions. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 371-391. Thon, J-N. (2006). Communication and interaction in multiplayer first-person-shooter games. In G. Riva, M. T. Anguera, B. K. Wiederhold, & F. Mantovani (Eds.), From communication to presence: Cognition, emotions and culture towards the ultimate communicative experience. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. Simon and Schuster. Tversky, B. (1994). Spatial perspectives in descriptions. In Bloom, Peterson, Nadel, & Garret (Eds.), Language and Space. MIT Press. Tversky, B., Lee, P., & Mainwaring, S. (1999). Why do people mix perspectives? Spatial Cognition and Computation, 1(4), 399-412.
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von Stutterheim, C., & Kohlmann, U. (1998). Selective hearer-adaptation. Linguistics, 36(3), 517-549. Weilenmann A. (2003). I can’t talk now, I’m in a fitting room: Formulating availability and location in mobile-phone conversations. Environment & Planning, 35(9), 1589-1605. Weilenmann A. H., & Leuchovius, P. (2004). I’m waiting where we met last time: Exploring everyday positioning practices to inform design. Proc of NordiCHI ‘04, October 23-27, 2004 Tampere, Finland.
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E ndnotes
1
2
“Twitter – What are you Doing?” at http:// twitter.com/. “World of Warcraft’s worldwide subscriber base now numbers more than 8.5 million” according to a press release by its publisher Blizzard Entertainment in March 2007 – see http://www.blizzard.com/press/070307. shtml
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Chapter XIV
Space, Place, and Memory Prosthetics Phil Turner Napier University, UK
A bst ract Recent years have witnessed a number of initiatives to develop technology (“memory prosthetics”) to enhance and extend human memory. Typical of these is “Memories for Life,” which is one of the Grand Challenges in Computing identified by the British Computer Society in 2004. So far, the emphasis has been on the development of psychologically informed technology. This chapter, in contrast, proposes a conceptual framework based on the Heideggerian concepts of being-with and being-in for the development of such technology.
Int roduction People have always striven to address the deficiencies of individual human memory. Recognising the limits of human memory (and wishing to transcend them), we have long sought to augment and otherwise improve upon it by means of technology. Burke and Ornstein (1997) have suggested that the alphabet (the sequential ordering of phonemes) made “a special contribution to the human ability to dissect and reshape the world” (1997, p. 71). With the Greek alphabet we had, for the first time, an easy to use external storage medium replacing oral traditions (and the much
more difficult to use hieroglyphic systems) that allowed us to separate thinker from thought and within this, the beginnings of philosophy. Less dramatically, many of us support our memories of events with photographs and souvenirs of various kinds (mementos, reminders, keepsakes, bric-abrac, and knick-knacks, the wealth of synonyms is quite revealing). The idea of memory augmentation through digital technology in itself is not, of course, new. Most commentators credit Bush (1945) with the origin of the concept, with his speculations about a “memex” system (which sounds a little like a cross between a personal computer, the Web,
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Space, Place, and Memory Prosthetics
and an odd looking piece of furniture). Let us consider an extended quotation for this famous paper for a moment. Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely. While the description of the memex presents an interesting vision of the augmentation of human memory, the real focus, despite a statement to the contrary, appears to be the issue of storage. Memex is where “all his books, records, and communications” are kept on “improved microfilm” with a project storage capacity of less than 400GB1. In essence, memex was the first vision of an electronic memory prosthetic. Realisations of different aspects of this concept are readily available. For example, Microsoft’s SenseCam technology, which lies at the heart of their MyLifeBits programme (Microsoft, 2007), is a device that captures up to 2,000 images per day together with contextual data. MyLifeBits can, in principle, store a lifetime’s worth of anything that can be
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digitised. Advances in storage technology have removed the barrier to collecting “everything”; as a Microsoft Research spokesperson has recently observed “you can store every conversation you’ve ever had in a terabyte. You can store every picture you’ve ever taken in another terabyte. And the net present value of a terabyte is $200.” So, a lifetime’s worth of data may be stored for as little as $400 (FutureWire, 2005). Whether this optimism is realised remains to be seen. However, among the first technological attempts to augment memory were Memoirs (Lansdale & Edmonds, 1992), which used data about events at the time a document was produced to cue its retrieval from the filing system and the Forget-me-not project (Lamming & Flynn, 1994), who created an aid that was designed to help with everyday problems such as locating lost documents, recalling someone’s name, and how to operate a piece of machinery. Interestingly, and unlike many later developments, it was designed to exploit some features of (human) episodic memory in providing alternative ways of retrieving information that was once known, but has now been forgotten. Most significantly, Forget-me-not identified the importance of context as both an index and retrieval key, for example, the indexes for “the place where the document was received” might include the people present when it was handed over and the task being carried out at the time. Indirect support for memory in the form of location information was also envisaged as a feature of the various work-based electronic badge or tag systems of the early 1990s, of which the Active Badge (Want, Hopper, Falcao, & Gibbons, 1992) was typical. Other studies that have sought specifically to support memory in the working environment include the “conference assistant”(Dey, Salber, Abowd, & Futakawa, 1999), which was designed to support the organization of a conference visit, annotation of talks and discussions, and retrieval of information after the visit. The cooperation and communication between different wearables and the environment is an essential
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part of the system. Similarly, Rhodes proposed a text-based remembrance agent (Rhodes, 1997) to help people to retrieve notes they previously made on their computer. Personal details of peoples’ everyday lives are now being regularly blogged. Blogging, the creation and publication of “Web logs,” involves the recording and publishing details of our day-today activities, thoughts, and experience. Camera phones, which have achieved near ubiquity, are often used to augment these logs with photographs and movie clips. There is evidence that most photographs are taken for the purposes of recording meaningful personal events, objects, or places: “a momentary slice of a viewpoint on everyday life” (Okabe, 2004). Other reasons include sharing experiences, such as funny moments, to support a shared or individual task, or simply to maintain virtual copresence with other people (Kindberg, Spasojevic, Fleck, & Sellen, 2005; Okabe, 2004). Nokia’s Lifeblog application (Nokia, 2007) integrates support for blogging with a digital album that organises images, documents, and multimedia messages across mobile phones and PCs, using an “organic timeline.” More radically, both software vendors and publicly funded researchers have initiated research programmes into systems that automatically take snap-shots of the entirety of a lifetime (e.g., Gemmell, Bell, & Lueder, 2006). Prominent among these, as we have already seen, is Microsoft’s MyLifeBits. Their system relies on a SenseCam (Hodges, Williams, Berry, Izadi, Srinivasan, Butler, Smyth, et al, 2006) to collect images. The SenseCam is worn at chest level and comprises a camera with a wide-angle lens that captures still images regularly while other sensors record other environmental variables such as levels of illumination, temperature, and movement. MyLifeBits attempts the life-long collection and storage of digital information generated by, or related to, a person, and is further designed to facilitate automatic tagging by data such as location and by time and date stamping (Aris, Gemmell, & Lueder, 2004). The entries may also be annotated
manually to aid retrieval. Automatic annotation has been further developed in work reported by Kern et al. (Kern, Schiele, & Schmidt, 2007). DARPA’s LifeLog initiative was a similar venture aiming to gather together an individual’s entire life history, with the aid of wearable sensors and the intention of automatic identification of events and episodes. Items captured would have included data as varied as television programmes watched and plane tickets bought, providing an individual with “an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past.” DARPA was subsequently cancelled over concerns regarding privacy. While the technology is impressive enough, we must also be mindful of the nature of everyday memory itself. Is taking a picture, annotating it with time, date, and temperature sufficient to facilitate recall, recognition, or enhancement? Does it actually correspond to the psychological processes involved in memory? With that in mind, we now turn to a discussion of what is it that we need help to remember.
E ve ryda y Me mo ry The study of memory, a centrally important cognitive faculty, has been largely concerned with such things as how many items can be remembered or how quickly they are forgotten. These laboratory-based studies have broadly followed the protocols established by Ebbinghaus (1895), that is to say, controlled, context-free experiments that seek to quantify memory. Ebbinghaus famously used nonsense syllables, such as “jad,” to study “pure memory.” However, an earlier and largely forgotten memory experiment was conducted by Galton in 1880 (this work is described by Brewer (1988 p. 23), who invited people to recall the appearance of their breakfast tables (“Galton’s breakfast questionnaire”). In striking contrast to Ebbinghaus’ studies, Galton was interested in both the functional aspects of memory (i.e., what it is for and how it is used, rather than how
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it is measured) and what is remembered (what are memories about rather than “pure memory” as such). However, despite this early appearance of an alternate memory paradigm2, laboratorybased studies have predominated. Then in the late 1970s, Ulric Neisser, a leading and distinguished cognitive psychologist, dismissed the work on memory of the previous 100 years of research as worthless for failing to answer “the important questions about memory,” and called for a shift to the “realistic” study of memory (Neisser, 1978). His criticism focussed on many of the very things that Ebbinghaus had established, namely, contextfree, laboratory studies. This criticism also saw a rebirth in interest in everyday memory. Everyday memory research has been characterised by its attempt to understand “the sorts of things people do every day” and by its choice of topics, having “obvious relevance to daily life” and in particular, by its concern with the practical applications of memory research (Klatzky, 1991, p. 43). This is, in contrast to the alleged irrelevance of traditional memory research, which has “chiefly focused on explicit recognition or recall of isolated items from lists” (Neisser, 1991, p. 35). Thirty years after Neisser’s outburst, everyday memory research is well established, though the laboratory-based variety still persists. In all, as powerful as laboratory studies are, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness in that they isolate the very thing they are studying from the context in which it operates. Since Neisser’s call, there has been a growing number of studies on such varied topics as autobiographical memory, eyewitness testimony, prospective memory, “flashbulb” memory, memory for action, memory for faces, memory for places, and so forth. (e.g., Cohen, 1989; Davies & Logie, 1993; Neisser & Winograd, 1988). In short, everyday memory relates to all aspects of our everyday lives but it is autobiographical memory, which we now consider, as this is a focus of much of the memory prosthetics research.
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A utobiographical Memory Autobiographical memory is not just another storage area with our memories, and it is not just those memories relevant to oneself, it is, according to Conway (2001) “a transitory mental representation: it is a temporary but stable pattern of activation across the indices of the autobiographical memory knowledge base that encompasses knowledge at different levels of abstraction, including event-specific sensory perceptual details, very often – although by no means always – in the form of visual mental images.” Bluck (2003) identifies three functions of autobiographical memory as concerning the self, its role in maintaining social relations, and its directive function. Of the first she writes, “knowledge of the self in the past, and as projected into the future has been seen as one critical type of self-knowledge.” She also notes that Conway regards autobiographical memory as contributing to the self in terms of its continuity and development. A further, hypothesised function is the personal past may preserve a sense of being a coherent person over time. Bluck, like Neisser, regards the most important role of autobiographical memory as having a social function. This social function primarily maintains social relationships through the exchange of personal stories and memories. Finally, Bluck also notes that autobiographical memory has a directive function too, particularly with respect to problem solving (old information being used to solve current problems); and more generally, to use previous experience as a means of directing or predicting the results of future behaviour for both ourselves and others. Conway has, perhaps more than any other researcher, created an account of memory in which personal goals are an important component. These goals not only contribute to the creation of new memories but in their maintenance and retrieval (Conway, 2001, p. 1376). Turning now to the structure of autobiographical memory, Conway and Rubin (1993) have
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identified three types (or strata) of autobiographical memory, namely, lifetime periods, general events, and event specific knowledge. Of these, the first category is the least relevant to the current discussion, but may be thought of in terms of memories “when I was a child,” “memories of being at university,” and so forth. General events are more specific and more heterogeneous than lifetime periods. Summarising the work of others, Conway describes general events as follows: (a) they encompass both repeated events (treating a patient, giving a lecture, processing a claims form) and single events (seeing that rare form of cancer, giving the keynote address at a conference), and (b) they may also represent “mini-histories” such as learning to drive a car, which may contain a number of vivid memories related to specific goal attainments (first time driving solo, first successful three-point turn).
T echnology
Meets
Me mo ry
Conway has concluded that autobiographical memory is predicated on life-goals, for example, going to college, getting a job, having children, retiring to a villa in the sun, and so forth, whereas the indexing and retrieval mechanisms of memory prosthetics remain steadfastly technologically driven, treating memory as a storage repository of unchanging items that can always be found, dusted off, and put to use, provided that they are properly labelled. However, our thinking on both memory and technology may require a reformulation if these prosthetics are going to work and be acceptable to us, and here is one way in which this might be done.
B eing-in While autobiographical memories are undoubtedly predicated on life goals, we propose that another way of “indexing” them is in terms of where they were formed. Most memories are cre-
ated as a consequence of real-world events that occur somewhere, the place they happened providing an immediate index or cue to the memory itself (cf. Abernathy, 1940). The place where the events occurred (more usually we would say “took place”) also have a significant effect upon how and whether they are remembered. Memories are formed in places but more than this, our sense of self, of identity, of belonging are predicated on different places. Places are not just the location for past events: our relationship to remembered places is an intrinsic element of who we are and the autobiographical narratives by which we define ourselves. Further, the philosopher Martin Heidegger is perhaps best known for recognising a basic (primordial) truth about us, and that is that we are in the world (“being-in-the-world”). The choice of place (as a means of indexing or referencing memories) was also prompted by Heidegger’s treatment of being-in-the-world as dwelling and his discussion of the nature of “in.” Heidegger identifies the existential character of being-in-theworld with human beings propensity of inhabiting and dwelling. He notes, “‘In’ is derived from ‘innan’ – ‘to reside’, “habitare”, “to dwell”. ‘An’ signifies ‘I am accustomed’, ‘I am familiar with’, ‘I look after something’ … The expression ‘bin’ is connected with ‘bei’, and so ‘ich bin’ [‘I am’] means in its turn ‘I reside’ or ‘dwell alongside’ the world which is familiar to me in such and such a way. “Being” [Sein], as the infinitive of ‘ich bin’ (that is to say, when it is understood as an existentiale), signifies ‘to reside alongside …’ ‘to be familiar with … ’ ‘Being-in is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as it essential state.’” Heidegger holds that human beings (who he refers to as Dasein) and world are not two distinct entities but only one, which results from Dasein’s involvement in the world. Dasein’s way of being-in consists in dwelling or residing, that is, being “alongside” the world as if it were at home there. Thus, the in of being-
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in-the-world is unrelated to ideas of Aristotelian containment, instead in is better understood in terms of involvement. Heidegger characterises everyday life as being an engaged, absorbed involvement in an undifferentiated world. (The ideas of the phenomenological geographer Relph, discussed later in this chapter, draw heavily on these concepts). Finally, from our work on the recreation of real places using virtual reality technology, it is apparent that the dimensions of place offer a means of “interfacing” human memory and technology (e.g., Turner & Turner, 2003; Turner, Turner, Carroll, O’Neill, Benyon, McCall, & Smyth, 2003; Turner & Turner, 2006). We found that the experience and dimensions of place offer an extremely rich vocabulary of concepts that could be used to advantage in memory research.
B eing-with The concept of being-with is also found in the work of Heidegger, specifically his essay The Question Concerning Technology. He begins by observing that technology is usually treated as merely as a means to an end or as human activity, in short, instrumentally. He writes, “The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance – in Latin, an instrumentum.” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 312). However, given the intimacy of interactive devices in our everyday lives, appearing as they do in almost every aspect of what we do, perhaps it is time to consider whether instrumental use or interaction adequately describe this relationship. It is not so much a matter of how we use them but the recognition that we coexist with them. In identifying the relationship beingwith,3 we are potentially faced with a whole host of new challenges for the designer, evaluator, and theorist, not least because technology has been
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shown to have a significant effect upon the ways in which we think and act (Burke & Ornstein, 1997; Heidegger, 1977; Nye, 2006). If we draw a parallel with the motor car, we simply do not use (drive) cars, we have also learned to live with them, affording them significant proportions of our towns and cities; we drive them despite the fact that they kill thousands of us each year and contribute pollutants to the environment, and some of us use them to signal our status to others. Similarly for interactive technology: this year’s mobile phone announces one thing about us while last year’s model says something else (e.g., Lui & Donath, 2006), and being a Mac person is different from being a Windows® user (e.g., Kahney, 2006). There are, of course, myriad other examples of this nonneutrality of technology. However, to understand being-with may well require a fresh vocabulary or a new theoretical/explanatory framework and perhaps new practical design and evaluation tools. A potential starting point might be the work of Albert Borgmann, an American philosopher of technology, who has developed a number of interesting concepts drawing upon the work of Heidegger. This research has also found empirical expression in Scandinavian Informatics (e.g., Croon Fors, 2006; Croon Fors & Nyberg, 2002; Croon Fors & Stolterman, 2003) to which the interested reader is directed. So what is meant by being-with? A number of philosophers have noted that technology does not simply make tasks more efficient, it changes the underlying human practice. Zimmerman (1990, p. 205-7), for example, writing on Heidegger’s attitudes to technology notes that he objected to the use of typewriters to produce personal letters. Heidegger argued that as handwritten letters take longer to both read and write, they necessarily require more conscious thought and involvement. The introduction of this technology has changed the human practice of putting pen to paper and with it, many of its intellectual and affective components. Borgmann has made similar comments on the subject of domestic heating by contrasting
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the difficulty of maintaining a fire with the convenience of a modern domestic furnace (central heating). The former practice is contingent, cutting wood according to the changing needs of the household, as compared with setting a thermostat and timer. In all, new technology is often treated with suspicion. Zimmerman neatly describes this, in this case of air travel, in the following terms, “If god had wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings” (2007). Nye (2006, p. 199) makes a similar point when he notes that “a child born since 1950 finds it ‘natural’ to use electric lights, to watch television […] and to use satellite-base communications. That child’s grandparents regard such things as remarkable innovations that had disrupted the normal.” In addition to this loss of these “authentic” practices, technology, it has been argued, forces us to treat the world and everything in it as a resource to be exploited. A memory prosthetic, enhancing memory and bolstering our sense of self, will neither be neutral nor instrumental but will exist with us. The consequences of such technology are far from clear. Their openness to abuse, for example, the digital altering of memories, is a matter of grave concern.
Places Places are not just the location for past events: our relationship to remembered places is an intrinsic element of who we are and the autobiographical narratives by which we define ourselves. As Giddens observes, in late modern society people, are continually engaged in the reflexive business of constructing personal narrative: “The self today is for everyone a reflexive project – a more or less continuous interrogation of past, present and future.” (Giddens, 1992, p. 30). The important role of place in (re)constructed identities means that the experience of their reconstructions may be very potent.
What is a Place? A real place is a particular space that is overlaid with meaning by individuals or group. This has been expressed succinctly as “place = space + meaning” (Harrison & Dourish, 1996) and in the words of the pioneering humanistic geographer, Relph (1976, p. 29) “Places are sensed in a chiaroscuro of setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other people, personal experience, care and concern for home and the context of other places.” To create a place thus poses a considerable challenge to virtual reality. Technology alone cannot create places, but may be used to help recreate actual places. The prospect of being able to recreate actual places is, of course, very appealing. The recreation of ancient or fragile sites (e.g., the cave art in the caves of Lascaux), which one could explore freely, is very attractive, not only to the would-be virtual tourist, but also to the anthropologist or archaeologist. Making such experiences available to the physically disabled or elderly adds to this. Another strand of application lies in the recreation of public buildings or workplaces for training purposes (as in the recent EU-funded DISCOVER project, which used virtual ships and offshore oil platforms to train officers in emergency management, Turner & Turner, 2002). Finally, environmental psychology researchers are using virtual reality to model the appearance of real places. This review of the established place literature has been divided into three themes: the phenomenological, the sociological, and the psychological.
Phenomenological Perspectives: Relph and T uan Perhaps the earliest text is Relph’s (1976) monograph Place and Placelessness, a work informed by introspection, experience, and observation. Relph identifies three broad dimensions of “place identity.” In his own words (our italics):
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…the static physical setting, the activities and the meanings – constitute the three basic elements of the identity of places. A moment’s reflection suggests that this division, although obvious, is a fundamental one. For example, it is possible to visualize a town as consisting of buildings and physical objects, as is represented in air photographs. A strictly objective observer of the activities of people within this physical context would observe their movements much as an entomologist observes ants, some moving in regular patterns, some consuming objects and so on. But a person experiencing these buildings and activities sees them as far more than this – they are beautiful or ugly, useful or hindrances, home, factory, enjoyable, alienating; in short, they are meaningful (Relph, 1976, p. 47). Tuan’s work (1977) has been a parallel source of inspiration for place researchers. For Tuan, place entails a continuing relationship: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” (1977, p. 6). Tuan explores how the freedom and threat of unknown space acquires the security and stability of place as the environment acquires meaning for the growing child, the fundamental relationship between concepts of place and the human body (an aspect that again poses issues for the more constrained forms of virtual environments), and the connections between space, place, and time. Above all, spaces need to become meaningful to become places. The work of environmental psychologists includes the study of place. For example, Sixsmith (1986), in a study of the meaning of “home,” identifies a number of personal, social, and physical dimensions. She concluded that home is a multifaceted concept with no single attribute making a place a home but conversely, the absence of any one potentially rendering a home a “non-home.” Similarly, Canter (1997) has developed a “facet theory” of place that includes activities (one of the facets), physical characteristics, the individual,
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social, and cultural experience, and the scale of the place. More recently, Jorgensen and Stedman (2002) nicely illustrate the empirical approach in this domain. The authors propose that the interpretation of sense of place could benefit from treatment as an attitude. Just as any other attitude, sense of place has cognitive, affective, and conative (or behavioral) components. Supporting data was obtained from a questionnaire survey of over 200 owners of rural second homes. It is suggested that the attitudinal components of sense of place are (1) beliefs about the relationship between self and place (the cognitive component), (2) feelings towards the place (the affective component), and (3) behavioral exclusivity of the place compared with alternatives (the conative component).
A D ata-D riven Perspective Gustafson (2001) provides a representative example of a more data-driven approach to place. This is now outlined because it is a particularly detailed and relatively recent instance of the genre, rather than a framework that needs to be understood for the purposes of the current discussion. Gustafson’s model for understanding the mapping of meaning to places is reproduced in Figure 1. The model is based upon a semistructured interview survey of 14 people, who were asked about places that were important to them and a review of related work by other authors. Using a grounded analysis of these data and aiming at “analytical not statistical generalization” (p.9), Gustafson identified three main themes comprising self, environment, and others. Self includes an individual’s life path, emotions, self-identity, and one’s own activity. Environment takes in the physical features of the place and its institutions and events. Finally, other people (others) comprises their characteristics and behavior. Further factors, such as social relations and atmosphere, belong to the relationship between these dimensions4. While it is interesting to note the recurrence of Relph’s three key dimensions of physical set-
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Figure 1. A three-pole model of the meanings attributed to place, redrawn after Gustafson, 2001
ting, activities, and meaning, it is equally clear that the sheer comprehensiveness of Gustafson’s model poses a number of opportunities for the design of memory prosthetics.
Place as a T emplate for D igitally S tored Memories From this brief review, it is apparent that irrespective of organizing framework, methodological and philosophical differences, the components of sense of place generally comprise (a) the physical characteristics of the environment; (b) the affect and meanings including memories and associations, as well as connotations and denotations; (c) the activities afforded by the place; and (d) the social interactions associated with the place (considered by some authors as a subclass of activities). Downing’s discussion of the role of designers’ memory of significant places in creat-
ing meaningful environments is also helpful here. She observes: “Although each individual image of place is unique, patterns of recurring domains emerged from this process; the secret place, the Arcadian place, the ancestral place, the shared place, the alone place, the intimate place, the gregarious place, places that stretch to meet the horizon line, and places that enclose and protect. Domains are symbolic of a quality of life; contact, retreat, participation, identity, love, grace, sensuousness, intelligence, fear, intimacy, growth, expansiveness, reflection, communing, and loss.” (Downing, 2003, p. 216). The opening clause of this extract emphasizes another key element of the experience of place: its essentially personal nature. Most authors stress that while some generalizations are possible, sense of place remains an emergent property of interaction between an individual and the environment, and while there are some shared elements, the experience of place is fundamentally unique to each of us.
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Place results from our experience of a space, our memories, and emotional attachment to that space and the meanings we attach to it and, as such, offers an ideal “orienting schemata” or conceptual framework for the ordering and retrieval of digitally stored memories. Such a framework allows us to reason about and design for “being-with” memory technologies in a manner that is both psychologically and sociologically plausible.
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& Wood, K. (2006). SenseCam: A retrospective memory aid. In Proceedings of Ubicomp 2006, LNCS 4206 (pp. 177–193). Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Janin, A., & Morgan, N. (2001). Speechcorder, the portable meeting recorder. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication (pp. 1-7), San Diego. Jorgensen, B.S., & Stedman, R. C. (2001). Sense of place as an attitude: Lakeshore owners attitudes towards their properties. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, 233-248. Kahney, L. (2006). The cult of Mac. San Francisco: No Starch Press. Kern, N., Schiele, B., & Schmidt, A. (2007). Recognizing context for annotating a live life recording. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(4), 251-263 Kindberg, T. Spasojevic, M., Fleck, R., & Sellen, A. (2005). The ubiquitous camera: An in-depth study of camera phone use. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 42-50. Klatzky, R. L. (1991). Let’s be friends. American Psychologist, 46, 43-46.
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Microsoft. (2007). http://research.microsoft.com/ barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx Moar, I., & Bower, G. H. (1983). Inconsistency in spatial knowledge. Memory & Cognition, 11(2), 107-113. Neisser, U. (1978). Memory: What are the important questions? In M. M. Gruneberg, P. Morris, & R. Sykes, R. (Eds.). Practical aspects of memory (pp. 3-24). London: Academic Press. Neisser, U. (1991). A case of misplaced nostalgia. American Psychologist, 46, 34-37. Neisser, U., & Winograd, E. (Eds.) (1988). Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nokia. (2007). Retrieved November 29, 2007, from http://r2.nokia.com/nokia/0,,71739,00.html Nye, D.E. (2006). Technology matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Okabe, D. (2004). Emergent social practices, situations and relations through everyday camera phone use. In Proc. International Conference on Mobile Communication and Social Change (pp. 1–19). Proshansky, H. M. (1978). The city and self-identity. Environment and Behavior, 10, 147–169. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness, London: Pion Books.
Spagnolli, A., Varotto, D., & Mantovani, G. (2003). An ethnographic, action-based approach to human experience in virtual environments. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 59, 797-822. Stevens, A., & Coupe, P. (1978). Distortions in judged spatial relations. Cognitive Psychology, 10, 422-437. Thorndyke, P. W. (1981). Distance estimation from cognitive maps. Cognitive Psychology, 13, 526-550. Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and place: The perspectives of experience. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2002). Contextual grounding in CVE design. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 11(6), 665-676. Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2003). Two phenomenological studies of place. People and Computers XVII – Proc. HCI Conference (pp. 21-35). Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2006) Place, sense of place and presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(2), 204-217. Turner, P., Turner, S., & Tzovaras, D. (2005). Reliving VE Day with activated schemata. In M. Slater (Ed.), Proc. 8th International Workshop on Presence (pp. 33-38). London, September 2005.
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E ndnotes
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Want, R., Hopper, A., Falcao, V., & Gibbons, J. (1992). The Active Badge location system. ACM Trans. on Information Systems, 10(1), 91-102. Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104. Zimmerman, M. E. (1990). Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
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Assuming the pages of material are largely textual, then a page will hold perhaps 2500 characters or 2 kilobytes. 5000 pages is then 10MB, which is 3.65 GB per annum or less than 400 GB total. A 500Gb hard disc at the time of writing can be purchased for €100. This everyday investigation predates the more familiar work of Bartlett (1932) by more than half a century. It should be understood that being-with is conceptually different from ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991) refers to an account of HCI in which information processing has been embedded into everyday objects and activities. In contrast being-with is the recognition that our everyday lives are filled with technology. Sitting here in my study, I can see my laptop, laser printer, external DVD writer and a wireless router. None of these could be described as examples of embedded (and hence ubiquitous) computing but all of them are everyday items. To take the self-environment relationship as an example, Gustafson observes that in some cases places acquire meaning to their inhabitants through activities such as land cultivation, or through the particular activities which the place affords.
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Chapter XV
Materializing Communication Concepts: Linearity and Surface in Linguistics and Information Theory Julian Warner Queen’s University of Belfast, UK
A bst ract This chapter is concerned with exposing the material basis for the concepts of the syntagm and paradigm from linguistics, and the message and messages for selection from information theory. The priority, given to abstract concepts over their material basis when cutting paper is conceived as a pedagogic technique to illustrate the distinction of syntagm from paradigm, is reversed. Materialities of linearity, of surface, and of store or reservoir, are revealed to lie behind the abstractions of linguistics and of information theory. The paradigm is regarded as generated from the immediately present material reality of the syntagm as the line of writing. The understanding of the word, as a cohesive group of letters with strong statistical influences, is understood as more explicitly revealing the material basis for communication, and to correspond to the instantiation of the word in paper- and computer-based systems. A rematerialization, rather than a dematerialization, of communication is discerned in current transitions in information technologies and practices.
Int roduction Our everyday interaction with modern information technologies is permeated by activities that involve transformation of spaces, from surfaces to line and surface, and from line to line. Direct
composition of a message at a computer, using word processing, involves selection of characters from the surface of a keyboard to accord with the lexical constraints of the language, with the possibility of correction with a spell-checker, and for semantic cohesion. The selection is automati-
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cally transformed into a line and arranged across the surface of the screen, and then of the printed paper, progressing down the screen in a continuous sequence, broken by directly humanly made word boundaries and computationally generated line breaks. A semantically cohesive and, for many authors, acutely memorable, linear sequence could be chosen as the basis for a password, with the password derived from the opening letters of words from selected portions of the sequence: When I am dead, I hope it may be said: [Password 1] ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’ [Password 2] The password could be regarded as a further line derived from the earlier linear sequence. The passwords might not be even fully known to their user as sequence of letters, but recreated by repetition of the appropriate phrase at each use 1. The process both echoes and parodies traditional pedagogic techniques of mnemonics and may have deeper, although converse, roots in acrostic prayers. A contrasting activity to the transformation of one line into another would be disruption of linearity, for instance, selecting the third and then the second character of a known password. The process is more subjectively difficult and its difficulty, and the greater variety selections for entry, has recently begun to be exploited by real-world systems. Dyseidetic dyslexia involves a failure to recognise the pattern of the written word (Audiblox, 2007): full linearity would have to be painfully reconstructed at each iteration, analogous to the subjective difficulty for non-dyslexic subjects of guided selection from linearity. The modern technologies used in such interactions themselves work on the basis of a correspondence between semiotic and material processes, with concepts and the actuality of line and surface often also invoked. Computation rests on a precise analogy between mental and material processes, and would classically be modelled as
operations on a line extended across a surface. Signal transmission, the province of information theory, is diagrammatically represented, and is concerned with the transmission of signals across communication channels or lines. A fuller understanding, of user activities and experience, of the technologies themselves, of the theories that underlie the construction of the technologies, and of those that impinge on their use for writing, can be obtained by examining their material basis and their connection with the line of space and of time, and with the extension of the line of space across a surface. Partly hidden, but powerful, elements of materiality in communication concepts can be revealed, exposing a common material basis for separately developed theories. A rematerialization rather than a dematerialization of communication can also be suggested as a basis for understanding current transitions in information and communication technologies and communicative practices.
C o mmunica tion C oncepts Concepts central to understanding communication, specifically from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in general linguistics (Saussure, 1916/1983) and from the information theory initiated by Claude Shannon’s A mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948/1993), can be materially represented or illustrated. The intention of such material representations has classically been to clarify concepts in the mind of a learner, adding a practical to a theoretical grasp, through engaging with materiality. An established pedagogic technique for exemplifying the Saussurean linguistic, and semiotic, distinction of the syntagm, or linear sequence of spoken or written utterance, from the paradigm, or the network of associations a word acquires when considered outside its context in discourse, is to cut words from a sheet of written paper. The process is more complex than it might first appear,
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and engaging in it acutely reveals the materiality of written communication. First, the syntagm can be isolated by cutting the line of writing as a single, physically continuous ribbon from paper with conventionally arranged writing on one side or surface of the sheet of paper. A zigzag cut has to be adopted to form a continuous material ribbon. The semiotic sequence of the line of writing is already broken, in modern practice, at the end of each line of writing, and these breaks are retained in the continuous ribbon isolated. Historically earlier forms of writing, such as the boustrophedon, or the way the ox-drawn plough moves, would have yielded a simpler line of writing for cutting; semiotically continuous and more readily materially isolated. Once the syntagm has been cut as a continuous material ribbon, units of the paradigm can then be isolated and removed from it by cutting words from the line of writing. In the modern line of writing, words characteristically have boundaries indicated by spaces or punctuation marks. Earlier forms of writing, including the boustrophedon, did not necessarily separate words and appeared as an unbroken line of writing, more strongly analogous to the continuity of oral speech extended over time. The operations of cutting can be based upon visually detectable patterns alone, without reference to meaning or semantics. The concepts of the messages for selection, and of the message from information theory, can be similarly materially illustrated, if the process of cutting papers is considered as reversed in temporal sequence and the cut words are assembled into the line of writing. The cut words would correspond to the messages from selection from a source, conceived at the level of granularity of the word rather than the character. The assembled line of writing would correspond to the message, which could then be transformed into a signal for transmission. The selection of messages would have to incorporate semantic considerations, if the assembled message were to have a deliberately intended specific meaning. Selection could be
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conducted on the basis of patterns alone, if there were no concern to produce a particular meaning for the message. Material reality is conceived as the basis for an example or for a pedagogic technique, in accord with the priority often given to abstractions or Platonic ideals, for inculcating concepts from linguistics or semiotics and from information theory. The possibility of a single process being used to illustrate concepts, from diverse and largely unconnected fields, points to a common historical inheritance from material reality, a reality which preexisted the abstractions. A further recognition of the significance of materiality would be to regard the concepts, both of the syntagm and the paradigm, and of the messages for selection and the message, as abstractions from their material basis, with their production in consciousness partly motivated by that material basis. A full and deliberate reversal of the relation of concepts to their material basis could then be accomplished, beginning with concrete and deriving the abstract. Recognizing the material basis for such concepts has peculiar current significance, given the dependence of computation and signal transmission on the modelling of semiotic or informational processes in material or physical terms. Cutting paper can also be used to exemplify full text indexing2. A further, previously unnoticed, analogy between the material forms for writing and concepts, in information theory rather than computation, would be between the arrangement of the boustrophedon on the surface for writing and the efficient mapping of a line into a square, when the mapping of the message space into the signal space is conceived in geometrical terms (Shannon, 1949/1993, pp.164-165). Understanding the material basis for concepts from linguistics and information theory, and locating them precisely in relation to current material realities, might then yield a basis for a fuller understanding of the effects of computational procedures, themselves constrained by a common and inherited material
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reality. To correspond with these intentions, the material elements in the concepts, from linguistics and information theory, can be isolated and emphasised. The immediate concern here is with the material basis for the linguistic concepts of syntagm and paradigm, and for the message and messages for selection from information theory, and with some exposition of these concepts themselves. The analogies between the concepts from linguistics and from information theory, which may stem from their common material basis, are a secondary concern. The understanding of semantic issues, especially the substantial understanding of transformations of meaning in computational processes, such as full-text indexing, which could be obtained from studying the interaction of syntagm with paradigm, is deliberately largely excluded. Understandings of line and surface are continuous with a previous study of space and spatiality (Warner, 2005). The line is primarily understood as humanly made by purposeful activity on a surface; the line of the plough on the earth or of writing across a surface. The primary concern will be with the line of written language. Surface is understood as a surface for inscription, which can be either naturally given, such as the surface of earth or rock, or humanly constructed from natural materials, such as a clay tablet, vellum, or sheet of paper. The surface of tapestry, produced by weaving lines together, is not the focus of concern. The Euclidean plane is regarded as an abstraction from the natural or humanly created surface, preserving the historical order in which geometry as land surveying preceded philosophical concerns with ideal geometric forms. Physical and semiotic space can also be distinguished from each other. Physical space is primarily understood as the distance between human communicators, while semiotic space is conceived as the configuration of marks upon a surface, again in continuity with the previous
study (Warner, 2005). The primary concern is with semiotic space, but the exclusion of physical space is methodological, not substantive, and its underlying significance is acknowledged. Similarly, the absence of substantial attention to the material basis of being does not imply a lack of recognition of its significance or an isolation of the materiality of communication from its broader basis.
L inea rity and S ynt ag m L inearity Linearity, for Saussure, followed from the spoken nature of language, extended over time: The linguistic signal, being auditory in nature, has a temporal aspect, and hence certain temporal characteristics: (a) it occupies a certain temporal space, and (b) this space is measured in just one dimension: it is a line. (Saussure, 1916/1983, pp.69-70) The principle of linearity is of comparable significance to the “first law” of linguistics, the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign (pp. 68-70). The whole mechanism of linguistic structure depends upon it [linearity]. Unlike visual signals (e.g. ships’ flags) which can exploit more than one dimension simultaneously, auditory signals have available to them only the linearity of time. The elements of such signals are presented one after another: they form a chain (p. 70). Despite the significance given to linearity by Saussure, it has attracted considerably less critical attention than the principle of arbitrariness (Harris, 1987, p. 69).
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S yntagm Saussure, in the Course in General Linguistics, is more concerned with the paradigm and with language than with the syntagm and utterance (Harris, 1987, p.125; Saussure, 1916/1983). Giving priority to language and to the paradigm implies a degree of objectification of human activity. In the earlier, neglected, and difficult, Anagrams, the syntagm, and patterns of variation in the syntagm, conceived at various levels of granularity, had received preferential attention (Starobinski, 1979). In this context, the usual order of mention and consideration, of the paradigm before the syntagm, is reversed, and the probable order in human history of activity and perception is preserved. The utterance is given priority over language (Vološinov, 1986), and the syntagm is regarded as an abstraction from its prior practical and material instantiation, in oral speech occurring over time and as the line of written language extended across space. The paradigm, particularly as a network of associations, could be regarded as a further abstraction, produced by the variety of syntagmatic occurrences of words. A degree of objectification of language is implied in the discussion and in the concept of the syntagm adopted, but with an explicit reference to the congealing of language in its written form. The presence of physical space, a separation of the utterance from its place and situation of production, is assumed. For Saussure, the “spoken word alone constitute[d]” the object of study of linguistics (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 24-25), although the perception and understanding of the spoken word has been regarded as influenced, both consciously and unconsciously, by models in written language (Harris, 1987, p.78). Both explicit and implicit influences from models in written language can be found in Saussure’s treatment of linearity. An explicit analogy is made when it is noted that
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linearity of speech becomes more evident when it is transformed into written form: This feature appears immediately when they are represented in writing, and a spatial line of graphic signs is substituted for a succession of sounds in time. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 70) The particular conception of time as a sequence, with strong analogies to extension in space, is only one conception for time (Harris, 1987, p. 77), which could itself be reinforced and made to appear natural by the diffusion of graphic representations of temporal sequences, founded on the analogy of time with spatial linearity and directionality. Saussure’s idea that the linearity of the sounds of speech is most clearly evident when speech is transcribed to writing has been regarded as highly revealing, exposing the “hidden premise” of Saussurean linguistics … that the spoken word is “invisibly” organized on exactly the same lines as the “visible” organization of the written word’ (Harris, 1987, pp. 77-78). Implicit influences from written language on the understanding of linearity can be discovered in metaphors of spatial extension, “a line, a continuous ribbon of sound” (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 102), for the temporal linearity of the spoken signal. The auditory signal is implicitly conceived as abstracted from its producer and its visible supports, and partly objectified. For the purposes here, the analogy between the extension of oral speech in time and writing in space, with its partly covert premises, is replaced by an explicit concentration on the line of writing. The line of writing is materially embodied and extended across a surface, which gives the possibility of moving backward as well as forward along the line, compared to the normal direction of writing and reading. The line of writing, in which language is fully detached from its producer, provides the closest material realization from which the concept of the syntagm can be abstracted.
Materializing Communication Concepts
The syntagm is produced in accord with the constraints of linearity: Words as used in discourse, strung together one after another, enter into relations based on the linear character of languages. Linearity precludes the possibility of uttering two words simultaneously. They must be arranged consecutively in spoken sequence. Combinations based on sequentiality may be called syntagmas.(Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 121) Traces of objectification, particularly in the view of words existing prior to their instantiation in discourse, can be discerned in this passage. The constituents of the understanding of the syntagm, discourse and the word, demand consideration, including contrasts between written and spoken discourse. Analogies and contrasts can be made between the realization of the syntagm in oral and written discourse. The syntagm is extended in time in oral speech and in space with written language, although this contrast can be qualified. Perception, including reading, of written language may take place over time. Written utterances, such as private and published correspondence and issues of a journal, may take place successively and be syntagmatically related to each other. A further transformation of the relation between space and time occurs with the written text of a computer program: the program is spread out in text space and the computing process occurs over time (Dijkstra, 1968; MacKenzie, 2001, p.38). The medium of discourse in which the syntagm is realized has further effects. There are biomechanical limitations on combination of distinguishable sounds in the continuous or analogue medium of oral speech. Saussure noted that, “freedom to link sound types in succession is limited by the possibility of combining the right articulatory movements,” and suggested that, “[t]o account for what happens in these combinations, we need a science which treats combinations rather
like algebraic equations” (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 51). With writing, by contrast, with its more discrete alphabet of symbols and potentially digital rather than analogue nature, restrictions upon transitions between symbols are not inherent in the medium, but can be imposed for certain communicative purposes, for instance, to provide an analogue to the sounds of oral speech or to incorporate redundancy to enable the reconstruction of messages disturbed by noise. The word is an essential constituent of the syntagm, and its definition has been repeatedly disputed in linguistics. For Saussure, “what a word is usually taken to be does not correspond to our notion of a concrete unit” (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 103): To convince oneself of this, it suffices to consider the singular form cheval (‘horse’) and its plural chevaux (‘horses’). It is commonly said that these are two forms of the same word. But, taking each as a whole, it is clear that we are dealing with two quite distinct items, as regards both meaning and sound. (Saussure, 1916/1983, pp. 103-104) The understanding of the word can be sharpened by consideration of this passage. As sounds, and more clearly evidenced, as sequences of letters, there is both resemblance (the letters, cheva) and differentiation (l, ux), but not the identity of a concrete unit between the two words. For meaning, or at a semantic level, there is contrast between singleness and plurality but a commonality of the constituents of reference (the horse as one horse and as one of more than one horse). Saussure continues to acknowledge the absence of “immediately perceptible entities” in language, but concludes by regarding the word as “a unit which compels recognition by the mind’ and which ‘has a central role in the linguistic mechanism” (1916/1983, p. 105, 109). The word would be an element of language, and the combination of words in discourse would normally belong to speech. The word could be regarded as
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a historically developed division of the written syntagm, and as a possible origin for the perception of the paradigm, particularly as the network of associations created by the occurrence of identical or related word forms in different syntagms, with a variety of senses. Syntagms more extensive than the word, such as the phrase or the sentence, can be considered. The notion of the syntagm was understood by Saussure to apply “not only to words, but to groups of words, and to complex units of every size and kind (compound words, derivative forms, phrases, sentences)” and to flexional forms, “il a été, ‘he has been’’ (1916/1983, p. 122, 104). Some of these complex units, particularly compound words and derivatives, would, like the word, belong to language: “to the language, and not to speech, must be attributed all types of syntagmas constructed on regular patterns” (1916/1983, p.123). More extensive syntagms, such as the phrase and the sentence, would be part of speech, although there would be no clear boundary separating language, or communal usage, from speech, marked by the freedom of the individual. For Saussure, the “characteristic of speech is freedom of combination,” in a curious anticipation of the terminology used to describe the selection of messages from the source in information theory. Similarly, with “sentences … it is diversity which is predominant” (1916/1983, p. 122-123, 105).
S u rf ace and Pa radig m Paradigm The paradigm has been classically understood in a triple sense: first, as the vertical axis, counterposed to the horizontal syntagm, with, again, a metaphor of spatial rather than immediately temporal extension underlying the contrast; secondly, as the collection of units or members of an associative group that can be substituted for one another in the syntagm, while remaining syntactically or
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semantically acceptable or cognate; and, thirdly, and possibly most influentially, as the network of associations a word can acquires when considered apart from the syntagm, in accord with Saussure’s primary understanding: Outside the context of discourse, words having something in common are associated together in the memory. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 121). The idea of memory as a network of associations entered modern cognitive science through the idea of the semantic network, without any discernible indebtedness to Saussure, but possibly prompted by similar influences directly from language itself. The originally complex semantic networks have tended to be reduced to simpler, and more computationally tractable, tree structures incorporating genus-species relations (Johnson-Laird, 1988, pp. 328-330). The paradigm is characteristically placed in a binary contrast with the syntagm (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 123). Syntagmatic relations hold in praesentia, while the associative relations of the paradigm, by contrast, obtain in absentia. The syntagm brings in, immediately, the idea of a fixed sequence, with a specific number of elements. A paradigm or associative group does not have a fixed order and may have an indefinite number of elements. Some associative groups, such as the flexional paradigm of the cases of a noun or verb, may have a limited, although not necessarily precisely agreed, number of elements (1916/1983, p. 122-124). The paradigm has been regarded as formed by carving out units from the syntagm (Barthes, 1984, p. 121). The metaphorical force of carving out should be observed, as it may help understand the strength and extent of the release of words into multivalency, or many meanings, when cut from the syntagm. Formation of the paradigm from the division of the syntagm also has a historical analogue in the introduction of word divisions
Materializing Communication Concepts
into the previously undivided line of writing. A further common metaphor for the relation of the syntagm and paradigm is that of weaving, with the oral or written text as the woven product formed from the line of oral speech over time, or of writing across space. Written words, particularly, can be regarded as torn from their line of writing, embedded in the fabric of the text, when removed from their syntagm.
S urface From a rigorous materialist perspective, the paradigm can be regarded as generated from the syntagm, corresponding to the probable historical order of perception and the known historical order of the development of written language. The syntagm, as the line of writing, can be repeatedly cut along its vertical axis, isolating words or elements of the paradigm, with the possibility of cutting partly depending on word boundaries marked by spaces. Oral speech, by contrast, does not necessarily have intervals of silence between words analogous to spaces in writing or constituting a product that can be segmented, with the cut segments retaining material existence. There is no direct equivalent to the surface on which to distribute words cut from oral speech. Cutting the line of writing implies a disruption of linearity, and the cut pieces can be gathered on a surface, with the surface itself preexisting, rather than generating from the line. Identical cut words from different syntagms, possibly contrasting in meaning in their original syntagms, can be regarded as the origin for the concept of the paradigm, particularly in the sense of a network of associations. The paradigm can, then, be regarded as being produced by, and abstracted, from the experience of the syntagm. The cut pieces can be distributed, on a surface, in ways that reflect, first, a lack of deliberately imposed organization, then pattern-based groups, and, finally, organization by meaning or other semantic considerations. Scattering pieces as
they are cut on a surface, corresponding to the material experience of cutting paper with scissors from above a desk surface, gives a lack of imposed organization. Grouping cut words by similarity in patterns, for instance, by opening sequences of letters of words, represents patternbased organization, in which distinguished groups might constitute collections of what are regarded as grammatical variants (for instance, cheval, chevaux). Grouping works by their networks of associations in memory, such as by similarities or oppositions in meaning, would be a form of semantic organization. The different forms of organization, from scattering through pattern-based to semantic cohesion, broadly correspond to each of the three senses of paradigm distinguished, cutting by vertical axis, an associative group, where associations rest on common patterns, and the network of associations a word acquires outside of its context in discourse. Only a lack of imposed organization and organization by pattern, not by meaning, are computationally possible, in the first instance. Representation of the paradigm on surface, as a diagram, rather than simply as line, has often been found essential for exposition, with representations imposing both pattern-based and semantic cohesion (Saussure, 1916/1983, p.125). Both the possibility of distributing cut pieces on a surface, and the established form of representation of the paradigm as a diagram on a plane, imply that linearity alone is not sufficient to represent the paradigm, with the possibility of immediate intelligibility. A paradigm for a sequence, such as stood for, could be deliberately constructed. Mental representations and associations in individual memory, recognizing that these representations are historically and socially constructed, dictionaries, and collections of syntagms that could be derived from documents covered by Internet search engines, could all be used to construct the paradigm. For instance, an incomplete flexional paradigm, stood for – stand for – standing for, can be constructed from mental representations
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guided by historically accumulated grammatical understandings. The infinitive form, [to] stand for, which becomes the entry or head term for dictionaries, has no necessary special priority in the paradigm. As Saussure noted with regard to nouns: As far as language-users are concerned, the nominative is not in any sense the ‘first’ case in the declension: the forms may be thought of in any variety of orders, depending on circumstances. (Saussure, 1916/1983, pp.124-125) The need to draw on external sources to construct the paradigm, particularly as a network of associations, implies that an incomplete mental representation of it may have been held, on the semantic rather than grammatical level, possibly due to thinking of language as a nomenclature, with a single, or highly restricted, number of senses belonging to a word (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 65). Constructing the paradigm from syntagmatic occurrences confirms the existence of the syntagm in praesentia and the paradigm in absentia (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 122). A historical perspective on the possibility of constructing the paradigm from external sources would reveal continuities and contrasts, continuities in forms of signification and contrasts in the quantity of direct human labour. Specifically, current information technologies, including Internet search engines, offer greatly enhanced possibilities for recovering syntagmatic occurrences, with reduced direct human labour.
S yntagm and Paradigm For Saussure, syntagmatic and associative relations constituted linguistic structure, and determined how the language functions (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 126). In contrast to the “interpenetration of morphology, syntax and lexicology”:
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Only the distinction earlier drawn between syntagmatic relations and associative relations suggests a classification which is indispensable, and which fulfils the requirements for any grammatical systematization. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 135) In a development from the indispensability of the distinction, Saussure insisted: Everything in a given linguistic state should be explicable by reference to a theory of syntagmas and a theory of associations. (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 135). From a modern perspective, influenced by computational technologies, transformations on language should be equally explicable by the reference to the syntagm and paradigm.
message
and L inea rity
Message The message in information theory is part of a coherent and comprehensive model of communication, with communication primarily understood as the transmission of signals across telecommunication channels. In contrast to Saussurean linguistics, the model emerged from a mathematical culture that valued the precision and the possibility of mathematical development, obtainable from the abstraction of fundamental concepts and entities from everyday reality (See Figure 1). The surface is essential to the diagrammatic representation of the model. A solely written account of the model, combining verbal and notational elements, might be difficult to grasp. The diagram, in contrast, can aid intelligibility by locating the constituent elements of the model in relation to the model as a whole. The fundamental components of the model were identified in the late 1930s, with the model
Materializing Communication Concepts
developed and substantiated through experience of cryptography in the 1941-1945 war. The theory, including both the model of communication and its mathematical development, was finally made fully public in 1948 as “A mathematical theory of communication” (Shannon, 1948/1993). At a biographical level, Shannon had been interested in coding systems, including Morse code, as an adolescent (Liversidge, 1993: xxii). On a cultural level, coding systems for transforming written language, including Morse code and other telegraphic codes, had proliferated in the late 19th century, in part in connection with the need for the transmission of messages over the geopolitical space created by the western expansion of the United States and its increased links with Europe. Both practical understanding of coding and the full material realization of the components of the communication model were, then, in advance of theory. The theory embodied in “A mathematical theory of communication” is valued for its scope, applicable, under certain specified conditions, to a variety of systems previously considered as separate entities. Since 1948, and particularly from the late 1970s, the model has become relevant to the design, as well as the understanding, of telecommunications and data storage systems. It is regarded as still valid, and as setting fundamental limits for information or signal transmis-
sion (Verdú & McLaughlin, 2000). The model has antecedents, traceable to Aristotle (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, pp. 5-6), and does resemble Saussure’s less deliberately abstracted speech circuit (Saussure, 1916/1983, pp. 11-13), but, in its original intention, was primarily restricted to communication as signals, and not concerned with the understanding of messages. The level of concern with signals will be preserved and helps to clarify connections and contrasts between information theory and linguistics. Linguistics was concerned, in semiotic terms, with signifier, sign, and signified, both as complexes and at the levels of signifier and signified. Some attention to complexes of signifier, sign, and signified was made when considering speech, as marked by freedom of combination, in a partial anticipation of the combinatorial concerns of information theory. Saussurean linguistics was explicitly concerned with spoken language, although the influence of written language on it was recognised, and its concepts were brought to bear on the understanding of written sequences. Information theory, by contrast, is concerned exclusively with communication as signals, or with the signifier, not the relation of signals to meaning (Shannon, 1916/1983, p. 5). It is also limited, in its original formulation, to discrete rather than continuous signals, although it is recognised that continuous signals, such as oral
Figure 1. Model of communication in information theory Information Source
Transmitter
Messages for selection
Receiver
Signal
Destination
Received Signal
Message
Message
Noise Source
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speech, can be transformed into discrete form (Shannon, 1916/1983, pp. 7-8, 50, 75). The message is one of a number of fundamental and interrelated components differentiated in the model of communication developed for information theory (see Figure 1). In this model, an information source chooses from messages for selection to combine them into a message. Information, in its technical and deliberately intratheoretic sense, would be a measure of the freedom of choice in selecting messages from the source. Measures of information can be derived directly from the message, if stationarity, or the stability of the statistical characteristics of messages across samples analyzed, is present or assumed. The message is then passed to a transmitter that operates on the message to produce a signal for transmission. The signal is then sent across a communication channel, with noise in the communication channel assumed. The communication channel is linked to a receiver,that operates on the signal to transform it into a message for passing to the destination. The information source, transmitter, receiver, and destination can be a combination of human and technology. For instance, the information source could be a printer selecting messages from a font of type, or a person composing a telegram and implicitly choosing from the lexicon of the language, in accord with the combinative constraints of syntactically acceptable telegraphic messages. The transmitter could be a combination of telegraph operator and equipment, transforming the message into a signal for transmission, with an inverse process undertaken by the receiver, who then passes the message received to the destination (Shannon, 1948/1993) See Figure 1. The examples of printing and of telegraphic communication confirm the possibility of the message corresponding to an object central to the understanding of the syntagm, the linear sequence of written language. Other aspects of information theory and linguistics reveal similarities between the concepts of the message and of the syntagm, and
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help to differentiate them. Shannon’s references to the message as a sequence are reminiscent of Saussure’s insistence on sequentiality as constitutive of the syntagm (Shannon, 1916/1983, p. 6). The terminological similarity is suggestive of conceptual congruence. In contrast to the concern of linguistics with levels of signifier, sign, and signified, information theory is exclusively concerned with the signifier or expression. Even when linguistics anticipated the combinatorial perspective of information theory; in its view of speech as marked by freedom of combination, it was concerned primarily with complexes of signifier, sign, and signified, not the signifier alone. Both the message and the syntagm can, then, refer to a common object, the sequence of written language, but to different aspects of that object, the message to expression alone and the syntagm incorporating expression and content and the relation between them.
L inearity An assumption, rather than a principle, of linearity is implicit in the model of communication in information theory, with communication proceeding in time, from messages for selection to the destination. Feedback loops, allowing for a modification of linearity, were incorporated into later modifications of the model. Linearity is also implicitly observed in telecommunication practices for oral messages, presumably independently of Saussure’s understanding of oral speech as extended over time, but influenced by similar considerations. An oral message must be received by the human destination in the sequence of the message for transmission, if it is to remain ordinarily intelligible. In contrast, graphic messages, including written language, can be received in parts over time by the destination, as long as an adequate correspondence to the message for transmission is finally reconstructed (consider the display over time of a digital photograph or other image).
Materializing Communication Concepts
The message emerges in two forms in information theory, as the message for sending, passed from the information source to the transmitter, and as the message reconstructed by the receiver, from the received signal, for passing to the destination. Classically, information theory was concerned with ensuring a close correspondence between the message sent and the message received, accepting that signal would be perturbed by noise in the communication channel. For certain uses of writing, such as handwritten, typed, or printed forms used for communication over distance, the message is identical with the signal, and neither the transmitter nor receiver operate significantly on the message or signal. Selection errors and noise, for instance as orthographic mistakes and failures in printing, are still possible, and it has been suggested that redundancy in written language was deliberately introduced, to enable reconstruction of the message intended to be sent (Warner, 2003). For other, historically, subsequent uses of writing, such as telegraphy and e-mail, the transmitter and receiver operate on the message and received signal, with technology displacing direct human labour and intervention, over time. The message of written English can be understood at interconnected levels of granularity, once the messages for selection are taken to be the individual characters of the Roman alphabet. Character or letter, word, and multiple or multiword sequence can be distinguished. Shannon’s own brief, but highly illuminating, explorations of the structure of written language, effectively as message as signal, yield a definition of the word, consistent with the Saussurean understanding of a unit that compels recognition by the mind, but more historically and medium specific, and less tautological, as “a cohesive group of letters [of printed English] with strong internal statistical influences” (Shannon, 1951/1993, pp. 197-198). The definition is specific to the written, and printed, not the oral medium, although it may have some application to handwritten utterances, if these
are regarded as composed of discrete characters rather than as a continuous or broken line. Prediction possibilities offered by the message of written language, as revealed by testing human subjects (Shannon, 1951/1993), both connect the word to, and differentiate it from, the multiword sequence. From prediction testing, Shannon concluded that, for ordinary literary English, statistical effects extending up to 100 letters, and therefore, beyond the separate word, reduced entropy, or the amount of information conveyed, to the order of one bit per letter. Redundancy, understood as the negative of entropy, was roughly 75%. Shannon’s experiments included pattern-based and semantic predictions by human subjects, introducing, at least in part, issues of meaning, foreign to the primary concern of information theory with expression. A distinction of patternbased from semantic prediction can be made, and attention focused on the pattern-based level, embodied in text compression programs. The possibilities of prediction are greatest, with high redundancy and low entropy for subsequent characters, when sequences immediately below the word are considered: for instance, in written English, the sequence strengt can normally only be followed by h. These predictive possibilities would be consistent with Shannon’s understanding of the word, as “a cohesive group of letters with strong internal statistical influences.” Prediction based on purely pattern-based features may cover shorter sequences. Accordingly, it has yielded a lower value for redundancy and a higher for entropy, for written English, than prediction from a combination of syntactic and semantic considerations (Moradi, Grsymala-Busse, & Roberts, 1998). Shannon’s experiments revealed the space as almost entirely redundant, for human interpreters, when sequences of one or more words were involved (Shannon, 1951/1993, p.198). Real-world coding systems have displayed a practical under-
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standing of the relative, although not complete, redundancy of the space. Early forms of alphabetic written language do not mark word boundaries, while, in contrast, the absence of the space symbol from Morse code required the introduction of further codes in telegraphic transmission, to prevent confusion over letter boundaries and word endings in the message received (Warner, 1993: 310-312). The space has been a recent introduction to spell-checkers for word processing systems. Word boundaries, clearly marked by spaces, may still remain significant for rapid human pattern recognition. Coding systems have reduced the redundancy of the original message of written English to produce shorter sequences. Shorthand, diffusing in the late 19th century, and which can be considered as a mapping from full to reduced written sequences, even if primarily intended for the transcribing oral speech, reduced redundancy in the full sequence, and was reversible. The reduction in redundancy might introduce errors in reversing, particularly if, instead of being used for private recollection over time, informed by knowledge of the circumstances of production of the original utterance, the shorthand message was transmitted to a destination different from the information source. Text messaging can be understood as the reduction of redundancy in order to economise on labour in composition and display space at the destination. For instance, the sequence, Thnx 4 infrmtn thry, is shorter than the full sequence, “Thanks for information theory.” Reduction has been obtained by omitting redundant vowels and by an implicit appeal to common equivalents in oral speech to different characters (x for “ks” and 4 for “for,” with an implicit reference to common sounds). The potentially significant vowel opening a word has been retained. The reduced sequence would be transformed to the normal, lexicographically acceptable and semantically coherent expression by the human description, necessarily employing semantic as well as pattern-based considerations;
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differentiating Thnx as “Thanks” from Thnx as “Thinks” requires semantic understanding to determine the appropriate vowel for substitution. The transformation from full to reduced and reduced to full form, for text- essaging, does not, then, rest on a formal code that would generalize across extensive samples of the language on the basis of patterns alone. Predictive text messaging, embodied in the system rather than in direct human intelligence, would involve a pattern-based coding with human semantic choice between alternative lexicographically acceptable sequences, with the generation of alternatives derived from the opening of words. Shannon’s definition of the word as “a cohesive group of letters [of printed English] with strong internal statistical influences” (Shannon, 1951/1993, pp. 197-198), has been largely subsequently neglected since its publication in 1951, although there are beginning signs of its adoption in connection with the computational parsing of language3, but it is potentially highly significant. Most fundamentally, it is congruent with an emphasis on the material basis for communication, in its concentration on humanly, and potentially, automatically, detectable patterns. Each element of the definition can also be understood in a specific material sense, strongly related to linearity. Group could understood as spatially grouped, particularly within the line of writing, and separated from contiguous words within the line by the space, with the space itself recognised as a character rather than just as the absence of a character. Cohesive could be understood in both a related and further developed sense: related, as the cohesion or mutual stickiness implied by the letters grouping together between spaces; further developed, as cohesion between units of the word, or letters, that exhibit transitions between units, acceptable within that written language. Strong internal statistical influences would imply the cooccurrence of particular letters with one another, including transition probabilities between two individual letters, but extending
Materializing Communication Concepts
beyond immediately contiguous transitions to longer sequences. The definition of the word then meets a rigorous test for knowledge as “an ideal reproduction of the external world serviceable for cooperative action thereon” (Childe, 1956, pp. 4-5, 54-55, 82). Specific cooperative actions could include isolation of words from written discourse, for instance for full-text indexing, conducted either by human clerical labour or machine process. Clerical labour effectively instantiated an understanding of the word strongly analogous to Shannon’s definition, for instance, for producing biblical concordances or 19th century indexes to newspapers (Palmer, 1885), before its formal definition. Such clerical and automatic computational processes have used a similar implicit understanding of the word, including a recognition of the significance of the space, but, particularly in their clerical form, would seem to have been developed largely independently of the relevant theory. Practical understanding has then been partly in advance of theoretical formulation and diffusion, but practice could be informed by the encompassing theory. The multiword sequence of written language can then be understood, from the perspective of information theory, as a linear concatenation of weakly correlated units, with the units or words themselves internally cohesive. The space, on this understanding, was then historically introduced, and persists where transition possibilities would otherwise be extensive and the potential for prediction low, particularly for purely pattern-based prediction. The initial character of a word, after a space, is, conversely, likely to be difficult to predict and to have low redundancy. The relative infrequency of recurrence of identical phrases, or extended multiword sequences, even in large corpora, can be understood as consistent with the weak correlations between the concatenated units. The understanding of the multiword sequence also corresponds to the Saussurean view of speech as marked by freedom of combination, although
information theory would be limited to the level of expression. The concepts of the syntagm and of the message have, then, been linked to and differentiated from each other. Both the syntagm and the message can refer to a common object, including the line of written language, but are concerned with different aspects of that object. Saussurean linguistics is concerned with signifier and signified, and the sign as the relation between them, and also, with the levels of signifier and signified, partly considered separately. Information theory is restricted, in its original formulation, to the signifier or expression, and has a concern with the combinatorial possibilities of the individual characters of the message. An understanding of the word and multiword sequence, consistent with Saussurean linguistics, but more fully developed, was derived from that combinatorial perspective.
Rese rvoi r and Messages fo r S election Messages for S election In information theory, the messages for selection are the messages existing in the source from which the information source selects to compose a message. Classically, the messages for selection are conceived at the level of granularity of the individual character or letter of the alphabet of characters for selection (Shannon, 1948/1993). There is an analogy with the paradigm, particularly in the sense of the collection of units or members of an associative group, from which selection can be made to form a syntagm, but also some contrasts. The constituents of the paradigm, understood as a collection of associated units, are primarily words, limited in number compared to the full vocabulary of the language. Selection into the paradigm, based on semantic connection, is implied, in contradistinction to the inclusiveness of the messages for selection. Again, the paradigm
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has a semantic connotation, while the messages for selection are conceived at the level of expression. The messages for selection are explicitly regarded as preexisting their combination in the message for transmission, in a further objectification of communication. In contrast, particularly on the interpretation here, the paradigm was derived from the syntagm, and existed partly in absentia and as an analytic construct. Information theory, then, receives the products of human semiotic labour as objective existents.
Reservoir The messages for selection can be conceived as held in a store as a reservoir, or as scattered across a surface, in contrast to the surface often found essential for a representation of the paradigm. The lack of organization implied in a reservoir, or scattering across a surface, is analogous to the formalised concept of entropy, within information theory. Real historical analogues to a store, or reservoir of messages for selection, can be considered at increasing levels of organization. Clarity in exposition can be obtained by a restriction to a single alphabet, the lower case Roman alphabet, although the concept of an alphabet can be extended to other sets of characters. For instance, a relatively unorganized store could be conceived as a container containing equal numbers of individual letters. Combinations blindly chosen, or randomly generated from the store, might be difficult to form into cohesive units of words of a given language, even on a purely pattern-based and computationally realisable basis, and, after formation of units, a residue of unusable letters might remain (for instance, qqq, xxx, zzz). At a further level of organization, the distribution of letters in the store could correspond to the relative distribution of letters in messages of the intended language: blind selections would then be more amenable to concatenation into lexically cohesive units or words, and there need only be a limited,
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possibly nil, residue of unusable characters (players of Scrabble should recognise the close correspondence with their modes of blind selection, of combination into units, and ending with a limited residue). A still closed, but partially organized store, could be constructed by organization of characters into categories, such as consonant and vowel, with blind selection from different categories possible: Countdown letter games could be understood as selection from categorised but effectively unlimited stores (Countdown, 2007). The collection of moveable type in a printer’s shop could be regarded as an organized store of letters open to deliberate selection of individual letters, with the number of letters in each box of the overall store anticipating their relative numerical distribution in message sequences (ligatures are excluded for the sake of analytical clarity, but could be understood as frequently recurring sequences of individual letters). A surface with some pattern-based organization imposed would be the sending mechanism for the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, from which messages were selected by pointing needles at particular characters within an array. Each character, from a restricted alphabet of 20 letters, could be selected by pointing two out of the five needles, with the characters arranged primarily by reference to the order of the alphabet (Ohlman, 1996, pp. 713-714; Science Museum, 2007). A keyboard could also be regarded as surface for selection; the historical transition from alphabetic arrangement to the qwerty configuration was intended to ensure that type bars, linked to keys in a manual typewriter, did not conflict in their movements and jam (Ohlman, 1996, p. 632). Proposals for reform towards a more efficient keyboard could be understood as reorganization deliberately governed by frequency of occurrence in anticipated messages. The parallel with the increasing organization of the components of the paradigm (earlier in this chapter) is only partial: the organization imposed on the messages for selection is primarily conceived at the level of the character
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(although it could be extended to the word); and the organization is restricted to pattern-based or syntactic characteristics, and stops short of semantic associations. Semantic coherence could be imposed by direct human intervention in selection of specific letters from the source for combination into semantically as well as lexically cohesive sequences of messages.
Message and Messages for S election The message and the messages for selection are as fundamental to information theory as the syntagm and paradigm are to Saussurean linguistics. A more sophisticated formal understanding of the word, corresponding to its practical implementation, has been derived from information theory.
C onclusion Semiotic and physical space, a lack of deliberately imposed organization, pattern-based, and semantic organization of isolated units within the semiotic space of the line, and particularly of the surface, have been differentiated. The analogy between the extension of the line of writing across space, and of oral speech over time, was recognised, with differences in the continuity of the line, and the separation of units, particularly words, within the line, indicated. The representational possibilities of the surface, for making complex concepts intelligible, exceeded those of the line. A rematerialization of communication has been implied by the development of the argument here, in contrast to the dematerialization associated with widely diffused concepts such as cyberspace. Material products of human communication may, in turn interact, with the consciousness of those who produced them, and some aspects of that interaction have been explored here. The respective domains of linguistics and information theory have been sustained. There
was some convergence, emerging from the dynamics of each discourse, in the linguistic view of speech, as marked by freedom of combination, and in the elements of semantic selection by the source and interpretation by the destination in information theory, with Shannon’s own experiments on language not separating out semantic from syntactic processes (Shannon, 1948/1993). Information theory yielded an understanding of the word and of the relative frequency of recurrence of particular multiword sequences. Insights have been produced which would not have been obtainable from either discourse in isolation. The Janus-like character of information, familiarly regarded as facing both the technical world of bytes and data compression and the social world of language and meaning, and, equally significantly, although less fully recognised, requiring understanding from the human and discursive as well as the mathematical and computational sciences, has also been addressed.
Refe rences Audiblox. (2007). Dyseidetic dyslexia. Retrieved August 7, 2007, from http://www.audiblox2000. com/learning_disabilities/dyseidetic.htm Barthes, R. (1984). Elements of semiology. In R. Barthes, Writing degree zero & elements of semiology (pp. 75-172). Translated by A. Lavers and C. Smith, London: Jonathan Cape. Childe, V. G. (1956). Society and knowledge. London: George Allen & Unwin. Countdown. (2007). The Countdown page. Retrieved July 23, 2007, from http://www.thecountdownpage.com/index.htm Dijkstra, E. W. (1968). Letters to the editor: Go To statement considered harmful (Letters to the editor). Communications of the ACM. 11, 147–148.
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Google. (2007a). Google. Retrieved May 23, 2007, from http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_ search?hl=en Google. (2007b). Google Scholar. Retrieved May 23, 2007, from http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search Google. (2007c). Google Book Search. Retrieved May 23, 2007, from http://books.google.co.uk/advanced_book_search Harris, R. (1987). Reading Saussure: A critical commentary on the Cours de linguistique générale. London: Duckworth. Johnson‑Laird, P. N. (1988). The computer and the mind: an introduction to cognitive science. London: Fontana. Liversidge, A. (1993). Profile of Claude Shannon. In N. J. A. Sloane & A. D. Wyner (Eds.), C.E. Shannon. Collected papers (pp.xix-xxxiii). Edited by Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. MacKenzie, D. (2001). Mechanizing proof: Computing, risk, and trust. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press. Moradi, H., Grsymala-Busse, J. W., & Roberts, J. A.. (1998). Entropy of English text: Experiments with humans and a machine learning system based on rough sets. Information Sciences. 104, 31-47. Ohlman, H. (1996). Information: Timekeeping, computing, telecommunications, and audiovisual technologies. In I. McNeil (Ed.), An encyclopaedia of the history of technology (pp.686-758). London; New York: Routledge. Palmer, S. (1885). Palmer’s Index to The Times: Spring quarter. Richmond House, Shepperton on Thames: Samuel Palmer. Saussure, F. de. (1916/1983). Course in general linguistics. First published 1916. Edited by C. Bally & A. Sechehaye with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger. Translated and annotated by R. Harris. London, Duckworth.
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Science Museum. (2007). Cooke and Wheatstone five-needle telegraph, 1837. Image number: 10307582. Retrieved July 23, 2007, from http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/ I039/10307582.aspx?keywords=wheatstone Shannon, C. E. (1948/1993). A mathematical theory of communication. In N. J. A. Sloane & A. D. Wyner (Eds.), C.E. Shannon. Collected papers (pp.5-83). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. Shannon, C. E. (1949/1993). Communication theory of secrecy systems. In N. J. A. Sloane & A. D. Wyner (Eds.), C.E. Shannon. Collected papers (pp.84-143). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. Shannon, C. E. (1951/1993). Prediction and entropy of printed English. In N. J. A. Sloane & A. D. Wyner (Eds.), C.E. Shannon. Collected papers (pp.194-208). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Starobinski, J. (1979). Words upon words: The anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure. Translated by O. Emmet. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Verdú, S., & McLaughlin, S. W. (2000). Information theory: 50 years of discovery. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. Vološinov, V. N. (1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik. New York; London: Seminar Press Warner, J. (1993). Writing and literary work in copyright: A binational and historical analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 44, 307-321. Warner, J. (2003). Information and redundancy in the legend of Theseus. Journal of Documentation, 59, 540-557.
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Warner, J. (2005) Escape from surface and linearity. In P. Turner & E. Davenport (Eds.), Spaces, spatiality and technology. The Kluwer International Series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 5, 129-138. Berlin: Springer.
E ndnotes
1
2
3
A search for the string, ‘cohesive group of letters with strong’, in May 2007 retrieved 5 documents captured by Google, 7 by Google Scholar, and 4 by Google Book Search, with some duplication between Google and Google Scholar (a version of Shannon’s own article was recalled by Google) (Google, 2007a, b, c).
I draw upon my personal memory and experience for these examples. I am indebted to Luigina Ciolfi of the University of Limerick and Howard Rosenbaum of Indiana University for independent communication of these analogies as pedagogic techniques, for semiotics and full-text indexing respectively, at the workshop.
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Chapter XVI
On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry Sándor Darányi University of Gothenburg, Sweden & University College Borås, Sweden Péter Wittek National University of Singapore, Singapore
A bst ract Current methods of automatic indexing, automatic classification, and information retrieval treat index and query terms, that is, vocabulary units in any language, as locations in a geometry. With spatial sense relations among such units identified, and syntax added, the making of a geometric equivalent of language for advanced communication is an opportunity to be explored.
Int roduction In what follows, we offer a few general considerations, with theoretical overtones, working toward the definition and generation of a geometric language for practical purposes, prominently for information retrieval (IR). This chapter is a nonmathematical introduction to the mathematical modelling of meaning of both words and sentences, outlining already existing components of such an endeavour, and hinting at directions
of synthesis. Technical aspects of realization will be discussed in forthcoming articles. A mathematical treatise of the dependence of information visualization on structures being visualized, first and foremost, the interdependencies between language and space, has been long overdue. Elements of such a systematic treatise are emerging in the interacting fields of information retrieval and language technology, whenever the structure of concept space is discussed by addressing subject classifications inhabiting such
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On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry
spaces and influencing the efficiency of information retrieval. Fine recent examples on the topic include van Rijsbergen (2004) and Widdows (2004). In a general sense, questions about the nature of information and meaning, in the form of word and sentence semantics, are pertinent to the outcome of the modelling effort: the better the mathematical description of linguistic information (and the behaviour of linguistic and nonlinguistic information per se), the higher hopes one may have for constructing more efficient IR models and systems. On the other hand, the number of observations pointing in the same direction, the feasibility of such a general model, is on the increase, a fact hopefully justifying our attempt at listing some of them. To start with an immediate difficulty, meaning is both perceived and processed; therefore, it can be assigned both to percept and concept spaces. This distinction goes back to Karl Pearsson (1911, pp. 191-208, reprinted in Kockelmans, 1999, pp. 191-205), for whom perceptual spaces are, strictly speaking subjective, whereas concept spaces as a means of scientific description are objective. Further, “[S]pace is not a thing but an order of things. To say that a thing exists in space is to assert that our perceptive faculty has distinguished this thing as a group of sense perceptions from other groups of sense perceptions which actually (or possibly) coexist. In other words, space is not a real thing in the sense on an immediately given phenomenon, but merely our mode of perceiving phenomena, in short a mode of our perceptive faculty” (Kockelmans, 1999, p. 190). On the other hand, if the space of perception is like this, the question arises: “What is conceptual space – the space with which we deal in the science of geometry? We have seen that our perceptive faculty presents sense-impressions to us as separated into groups, and further that though this separation is most serviceable for practical purposes, it is not very exactly and clearly defined “at the limits.” How do we represent in thought, in conception, this separation into groups that results from our
mode of perception? The answer is, „we conceive sense-impressions to be bound by surfaces, to be limited by straight or curved lines. Thus our consideration of conceptual space leads us at once to a discussion of surfaces and lines – to a study, in fact, of Geometry” (Pearson, 1911, p. 191). Likewise, for Wittgenstein, geometry is the grammar of space (Baker, 2003, p. 521)1 and of spatial relations (Hacker, 1996, p. 50), that is Pearson’s distinction prevails. This raises the question whether such phrases as “perceptual space” and “concept space” have a geometric reality; that is, if kinds of geometry can model percept and concept agglomerations to a reasonable extent; and in particular, whether meaning in language, regardless of being considered a percept or a concept, can be adequately reproduced by means of geometry. This chapter offers four arguments in favour of representing meaning by means of metric space, the first three of them relating to word meaning, the last one to sentence semantics. The point of departure will be Bateson’s definition of information, and how this inherently brings geometry into the picture. Then, we connect the concept of distance in geometry with the concept of difference as offered by Bateson. Next, we argue that a component of word meaning, namely lexical or sense relations, are inherent in established IR practice in the vector space information retrieval model, and their applicability can be further extended by enriching the information representation convention. Finally, we suggest ways for the generation of sentences which use geometric locations, that is, coordinates, as their words.
E xa mples fo r S pace as a Met apho rical V ehicle of L anguage and Info rmation For some time now, spatiality as a metaphor has been frequently applied to the study of information and language: studies of cyberspace
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(Kitchin, 1998, Ryan, 1999), information space (Colomb, 2002), semantic space (Ando, 2000; He, Ma, King, Li, & Zhang, 2002; Hori et al. 1986; Uchinami & Tezuka 1980 ), cognitive space (Newby, 2001), and concept space (Bärtschi, 1984; Luhn, 1957; Rocchio, 1965; Schäuble, 1987) have been prevalent. As for the liaison of geometry with meaning, this seems to have begun in 1952, when Charles Osgood started publishing his ideas about the metric nature of word semantics (Osgood, 1952; Osgood & Sebeok, 1954). These papers finally had led to the publication of “The Measurement of Meaning” (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), a seminal endeavour in its originality to apply multivariate methods to the extraction of background variables from linguistic material (or one related to linguistics). Although in his review of the book, Weinreich (1958) was quick to dismiss the results, pointing out that they pertained to the metric arrangement of emotions connected to symbols, that is, emotive or affective meaning, rather than to their signification, the affair of multivariate space and word semantics was nonetheless about to begin, and has been continuing uninterrupted ever since. If one revisits this idea, one will still find that there is more to Osgood’s idea than meets the eye. Was this insight about metric space and meaning a coincidence or a stroke of genius? We think that the spatial (geometric) metaphor is generally useful for the representation of language for two apparent reasons: •
•
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A spatial dictionary of terms is inherent in the vector space model of automatic indexing, automatic classification, and information retrieval (Deerwester, Dumais, Furnas, Landauer, & Harshman, 1990; Salton, 1968); and In a broader context, information visualization automatically follows from such a representation, providing the user with visual access to language and reasoning (Fleuriot, 2001).
In this respect, two related concerns need to be addressed: •
•
Can geometry be a carrier mechanism for meaning, just like vocal (phonemic) and graphic (graphemic) signal sequences are? How can one conceive a geometric language, in conformity with the major theories of word meaning?
For an affirmative answer, we have to inspect a set of postulates and their underlying argumentation.
Postula tes and B ackg round C onside rations Our postulates will be as follows: 1.
2.
Information and meaning are different. Information is the inverse of probability, based on the cardinality of some event set and the occurrence probabilities of its elements (Nöth, 1990, p. 135); it is meaningless (Shannon & Weaver, 1949, p. 3). Meaning of a word or a sentence is not a concept, an entity, or a state of affairs (Lyons, 1968, p. 411), but a composite, rather, consisting of at least three major constituents, namely meaning as use, meaning as change, and meaning as equivalence. These components will be explained. Meaningful information, consequently, is a mixture of two, not necessarily related, phenomena. Apart from the necessity of a more precise philosophical account about form and substance going back to Aristotle vs. content and expression proposed by Augustine in this context, roughly, let for the time being form be represented by information, and content by meaning. Information can be reduced to difference (Bateson, 1987, p. 17), or dissimilarity (van Rijsbergen, 1979).
On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry
3.
4.
In support of this, only structures coding differences seem to have information value (Gärdenfors, 2000, pp. 43-44, 124, 132, esp. 225-243). Content, on the other hand, can be modeled by the superimposing of a second difference structure upon the first one, for instance, one eigenstructure charging the other, such as in the case of ontologies defining the meanings of index terms. We will assume that content and form preexist the binding process separately, for example, during language acquisition or in the process of cognition, the naming of unarticulated substance; that learning implies the binding of form and content, and that the binding process results in a vehicle-loading conglomerate. With regard to vehicle-loading conglomerates as means of communication, geometry and language are similar: in both, empty coordinates dominate over the used ones. If its coordinates become laden with meaning, then geometry can act as the carrier mechanism, thereby becoming on par with other vehicles of communication. The prerequisite to this end is that semantic similarity be expressed by geometric similarity, that is, nearness or distance.
No doubt some additional explanation of this is in place here. In our eyes, the way the term “information” is used turns it into a homonym, mixing up two, equally justifiable interpretations of the concept. The first is the novelty value of any element in an event algebra; the other goes back to the trivial fact that form is not content. For the first, as soon as one knows the cardinality of an event set, that is, the number of its individual events (such as letters of an alphabet), and their respective probabilities, information as the inverse of probability for these elements can be computed. In this sense, information is totally meaningless, yet perfectly expresses the novelty value of any event.
This is the place where confusion enters. Because meaningful elements of a set also have probabilities, they too can be expressed by information, as soon as we know their cardinalities. Further, because such events likewise can be surprising, this is underlying the concept of the news, and products such as newspapers based thereon: unexpected, improbable, meaningful occurrences of an event algebra that prove sensational if they do happen against all odds. With this in mind, the strategy that information is sometimes interpreted as meaning with a news value finds a simple explanation. A prominent example of information charged with meaning is a binary term-document matrix, used as the raw material for automatic indexing, automatic classification, and information retrieval. On one hand, the zeroes and ones in this matrix are completely meaningless; it is us who associate their semantics with them. The same distribution of numerical values could describe a meteorological situation or a meteor shower. On the other hand, they constitute a vector space. Upon envisaging term and document coordinates in this space, we associate their respective meanings with these geometric locations. Some major theories of word meaning, going back to Carnap, Wittgenstein, Frege, Peirce, Trier, Harnad, Bloomfield, Uexküll, and Lyons, can be demonstrated to hold on vector space (Darányi, 2000). Because none of them are able to account for word semantics alone, one has to regard meaning a composite. Prominently, the best-known theories fall in three major groups: •
“Meaning is use” (Wittgenstein): Habitual usage provides indirect contextual interpretation of any term (cf. Harris’ distributional hypothesis; connecting this paradigm to structuralism); frequency of use expresses aspects of a conceptual hierarchy (in accord with findings of Carnap, Zipf, and Luhn); their interplay, expressed in metric space, turns sense relations into a measurable form. 217
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•
•
“Meaning is change”: The stimulus-response theory (Bloomfield, Morris) and the biological theory of meaning (Uexküll) both stress that the meaning of any action is its consequences. “Meaning is equivalence”: Referential (Frege, Peirce) or ostensional (Harnad) theories of meaning suggest that ‘X = Y for/as long as Z’.
Ar gu ment ation Information and D ifference As said, our point of departure will be Bateson’s definition of information, and how this inherently brings geometry into the picture. For him, “information is difference that makes the difference” (Bateson, 1987, p. 17). We translate this maxim as “information is meaningful difference”; in other words, difference laden with semantics. Put another way, this sounds as if Bateson equated information with transcended identity. However, identity distortion resulting in difference propagation yields structures based on dissimilarity, the way van Rijsbergen had concluded. Whether or not such difference structures become charged with some loading, manifesting content, is another question; what matters, however, is that identity distortion inevitably leads to difference-based distributions, and thereby, to geometry.
D ifference and D istance Now we want to connect the geometric concept of distance with Bateson’s concept of difference. The reason for this is that, provided information is binary, as is the case with regard to Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication, then information expressed as the presence and absence of features yields a vector structure, in fact, a vector space in which distance exists.
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Thereby, information as difference is expressible in terms of distance. Suppose document vectors consist of the presence and absence of index terms, so that the heads of identical vectors mark the same location in vector space. Then the minimal difference between two document vectors, the presence vs. absence of the same term, maps them onto nearly identical locations in vector space. Ideally, minimal difference in terms of vector representation becomes the minimal distance between the two respective document vector coordinates, that is, spatial difference manifests content difference expressed by information. The final step toward formalization of this is: let x and y be any two vectors that differ in exactly one vector coordinate. If the vectors describe more and more features, and there are nonzero values among the features, a distance weighted by the length of the vectors (e.g., cosine dissimilarity) tends to a constant, expressing that the angle between the vectors tends to zero.
D istance and D irection Working toward the expression of meaning in metric space the way Osgood did, we have to consider the following question: what component of a composite meaning is at home in vector space? And, by what means can we express this component? In this chapter, we argue that by means of distance and direction, that is, the length and direction of vectors, one can express lexical or sense relations between word pairs; in fact, one can show that many more of them pertain to vector space, not just synonymy and incompatibility, as experienced in information retrieval on a day-byday basis. According to this argumentation, the conceptual similarity of two words, modelled by the distance between the coordinates of two locations in vector space and measured by the cosine of their angle, can include all of the important sense relations, provided:
On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry
1. 2. 3.
Beside vector space, we use concept space as well, that is, latent semantic methods; We go beyond real vector space and default on complex numbers instead; and We utilize negative numbers for information representation too, that is, extend the range of coordinates allowed for displaying relations between word pairs.
Because (1) is trivial, we concentrate on (23) instead. In order to do so, first we define the most important sense relations based on Lyons (1968), who pioneered their discussion, with additional observations by Lehrer (1974) and Cruse (2000). The most studied, best known and most widely applied sense relations are synonymy, antonymy (contrast, converseness, opposition), homonymy (polysemy), meronymy, hyponymy (troponymy), hypernymy, co-hyponymy, and incompatibility. Sometimes they are called classical lexical semantic relations vs. nonclassical ones (Morris, Beghtol, & Hirst, 2003, p. 2), their artificial isolation being the subject of ongoing research (Heyer, Läuter, Quasthoff, Wittig, & Wolff, 2001; Mendes & Chaves 2001). While taking note that lexical semantics regroups the same subject matter on a more global level in a richer and different fashion, starting with congruence relations, hierarchical relations and nonhierarchical relations (Cruse 1986), our attempt will be limited this time to sense relations only.
S ynony my Cruse makes a distinction between absolute, propositional, and near (quasi-) synonymy. Propositional synonymy, dealing with sentences, will be out of scope here. “Absolute syononyms can be defined as items which are equinormal in all contexts: … for two lexical items X and Y, … in any context in which X is fully normal, Y is, too; in any context in which X is slightly odd, Y
is also slightly odd, and in any context in which X is totally anomalous, the same is true of Y” (Cruse, 2000, p. 157). Absolute synonymy can be defined as bilateral [mutual] implication: A and B are such synonyms if A is implied in B and vice versa. Therefore, Lyons also defines synonymy as symmetrical hyponymy (1968). This criterion of classifying two items synonymous means complete interchangeability, leading to, strictly speaking, very few or no true synonyms at all; however, there will be a number of items that are very similar in meaning and partially substitutable. The term is often used with these reduced restrictions in mind (Lehrer, 1974, p. 23), resulting in de facto near synonymy.
A nt ony my Antonyms, also called contrast, belong to the class of opposites, with complementaries, reversives, converses, polarity, and more (Cruse, 2000, pp. 165-175). They, too, fall into several relatively well-defined groups, such as polar antonyms (long – short, heavy – light), equipollent antonyms (typically denoting sensations, and thereby, impartiality, e.g., hot – cold, painful – pleasurable), and overlapping antonyms (in which one member yields an impartial comparative, and the other a committed comparative, e.g., good – bad). Antonyms and opposites cover a very large variety of phenomena. A definition could be that lexical units A and B are antonyms or opposites if they have most semantic characteristics in common but if they also differ in a significant way on at least one essential semantic dimension. As with synonyms, antonyms and opposites are highly contextual, – for example, both long and tall are antonyms of short, and thus introduce a kind of ternary relation. They do not necessarily partition the concept space into two mutually exclusive compartments that cover the whole conceptual domain. Some overlap or space in between is possible, as in good and bad, since it
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is indeed possible to say that something is neither good nor bad, or, possibly, is both. A special class of antonyms are complements that divide concept space in two nonoverlapping compartments. Polar antonyms refer to gradable properties and opposites to nongradable ones. Gradable antonyms are pairs that express relationships in a continuum, such as up and down, whereas complementary antonyms are word pairs that express an either/or relationship, such as in dead and alive.
H o mony my (pol yse my) Homonyms are lexical units that have the same orthographic and/or phonetic form but unrelated meaning. The animal called bear, and bear, the activity of carrying something, have no shared senses. Similarly, a river bank, a savings bank, and a bank of switches share only their spelling. Polysemy refers to the multiplicity of meaning, with a detectable connection between two meanings of the same form; the lexical ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used in different contexts to express two or more different meanings. Although closely related in meaning to homonym, lexicographers distinguish between polysemes, different uses of the same word, as walk the dog, take a walk, going walking, which they define in a single dictionary entry, and homonyms like fluke, which have multiple meanings and different etymologies, and are therefore separate definitions. There is clearly a gray area between the two ideas, but homonyms are much better known to average speakers, while polysemes are a matter for specialists.
Me rony my Meronymy and holonymy fall into that broad class of paradigmatic sense relations that express identity and inclusion between word meanings (Cruse,
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2000, p. 150). In such cases as for example, finger – hand, finger is said to be the meronym and hand the holonym. It is the name of the part-whole relation (A is part of B, A has a B), often constituting several layers of hierarchy, for example, tyre and rim are parts of the wheel, itself part of a car. A meronym is the name of a constituent part of, or the substance of, or a member of something. The relation is a composite one, with subtypes like component vs. integral object (handle/cup), member vs. collection (tree/forest), portion vs. mass (grain/salt), stuff vs. object (steel/bike), feature vs. activity (dating/adolescence), and place vs. area (oasis/desert) (Winston et al. 1987). This relation too has logical properties, particularly manifest in connection with locative predicates: for example, if X is a meronym of Y, then for an entity A, A is in Y entails, but is not entailed in A is in Y (John is in the cockpit entails John is in the aeroplane, Cruse, 2000, p. 153). Lyons points out a semantic clue identifying meronymy: “Part-whole relations between lexemes are bound up with a particular sub-class of possessive constructions, exemplified by such semantically...related phrases and sentences as ‘John’s right arm’ and ‘John has a right arm’” (1977, p. 312). Thereby, as a shorthand, sometimes it is called the “has-a” relation.
H ypony my Hyponymy (troponymy, subordination) is a relation of inclusion, where A is a kind, sort, or type of B. Here, A is the hyponym, a word whose meaning is conceptually included in the definition of another one, such as scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red. Although closely related to synonymy, they constitute two different semantic categories. Its opposite sense relation is hypernymy. Sometimes it is referred to as the “instance-of” (‘B [is] instance-of A’) relation.
On Information, Meaning, Space and Geometry
In the words of Lyons (1968, p. 453), “...the meaning of tulip [or rose or geranium] is said to be ‘included’ in the meaning of flower.” Therefore, the term tulip is a hyponym with respect to flower, while tulip, rose, and geranium are co-hyponyms, that is, hyponyms of the same superordinate term. Looking at this from the opposite angle, flower is the superordinate with respect to tulip, rose, and geranium. Looking at inclusion from a different angle, “what includes what depends on whether we look at the meanings extensionally or intensionally. From the extensional point of view, the class denoted by the superordinate term includes the class denoted by the hyponym as a subclass; thus the class of fruit includes the class of apples as one of its subclasses. (…) Looking at the meanings intensionally, we may say that the meaning (sense) of apple is richer than that of fruit and includes, or contains within it, the meaning of fruit” (Cruse, 2000, pp. 150-151).
H ype rny my Hypernymy or hyperonymy, also called superordination or class inclusion (Lyons, 1968) “is one of the most important and basic notions in structural semantics” (Lehrer, 1974, p. 23). A hypernym is a linguistic term for a lexical unit whose meaning includes the meanings of other units, as the meaning of transportation includes the meaning of train, chariot, dogsled, airplane, and automobile. Class inclusion is unilateral implication: B implies A, where B is higher in the taxonomy than A, but it is not the case that A also implies B. In this case, concept B is superordinate of concept A. The highest word in such a taxonomy is sometimes called a head word, a cover word, a superordinate word or an archlexeme. Sometimes it is called the “is-a” (“A is-a B”) relation. As previously stated, hypernymy is the opposite of hyponymy. Thus, plant is hypernymic to flower, while tulip is hyponymic to flower.
C o-hypony my The subordinates of incompatible words also manifest a different sense relation, co-hyponymy. As Cruse suggests, in “An X is a kind of Y, and a Z is another kind of Y” and “...and so is a Z,” the expressions another kind of and so is both imply that X is not the only member of the class Y but that Z, too, belongs in the same class. He also proposes a frame for verbs, which, as he says, “seem to show hierarchical structuring to a more limited extent than nouns” (1986, p. 139). For example, he mentions “X-ing is a way of Y-ing,” as in “walking is a kind of moving.” Further, he notes that co-hyponyms should be incompatible among themselves, a rule debated by Mendes and Chaves (2001, p. 5). The hypernymy-hyponymy pair of relations is also called generic-specific or taxonomy. Lyons (1977, p. 291) defines hyponymy as “the relation which holds between a more specific, or subordinate, lexeme and a more general, or superordinate, lexeme.” If the subordinate term has related terms, they are co-hyponyms.
Inco mpatibility “Just as hyponymy can be thought of as a relation of inclusion, incompatibility is a relation of exclusion… Incompatibles are terms which denote classes which share no members. Hence, if something is a mouse, then it is not a dog, horse or elephant: nothing in the world can belong simultaneously to the class of mice and the class of dogs” (Cruse, 2000, p. 165). From the intensional point, for example, composite terms clearly show that whereas a stallion is [a n im a l +eq u in e +m a le ], a mare is [a n im a l +eq u in e +f e m a le ]. Words that contrast in a taxonomy are incompatible. This is the case when neither B nor A do imply the other. Such mutual exclusion is the case when, for example, sheep, horse, and shark are all animals but otherwise cannot replace each other.
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Subordinates (i.e., hyponyms) of incompatible words are mutually incompatible, too (e.g., lamb, ewe, ram vs. colt, mare, stallion, and gelding).
T he G eo met ry of S ense Rela tions Because sense relations exist between any two words in natural language, once words are mapped onto coordinates in vector space, relations among such coordinates evidently manifest sense relations as well, the bottleneck being the goodness of these mappings, that is, how closely classification algorithms reproduce natural language word semantics. Strictly speaking, simple Euclidean vector space is enough if we do not care for the conceptual hierarchy of index terms like experienced in thesauri, but one has to apply latent semantic analysis (LSA, Deerwester et al., 1990) or hierarchically growing self-organizing maps (GHSOM, Merkl & Rauber, 2000) in order to show them. Further, as long as we tolerate term
ambiguity, we can get by using real vector spaces and applying LSA or word-sense disambiguation methods (WSD, e.g., Sanderson, 1994), but to eliminate polysemy, the only natural way to go is to use complex numbers for information representation. And finally, should one be interested in using antonyms for document retrieval as well, one has to use negative term weights instead of only positive ones (Raghavan & Wong, 1986), as is the practice today. As for the concrete steps of realization, it is sufficient here to point out that in real vector space, meronymy and holonymy can be represented by component vectors and their resultants. Synonymy, near synonymy, incompatibility, near antonymy, and antonymy are inherent in the concept of the cosine (angular separation) of term vectors (Figure 1). Hypo- and hypernymy correspond to the cosine of one or more term vectors and their latent vector, considered to be their broader term. Co-hyponymy and co-hypernymy can be modeled by the cosines of at least two pairs of terms plus their respective two latent vectors.
Figure 1. Established and experimental sense relations corresponding to angular separation
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Homonymy can be displayed on complex vector space, where coordinates have this form: z = x + yi, x and y standing for numerical values and i being a unit, the imaginary number i = −1 , because term ambiguity naturally disappears as soon as using complex numbers for information representation. From this, currently only near synonymy and incompatibility are used in IR, expressed as nearunity vs. near-zero cosine values between document and query vectors. Also, term ambiguity is a recognized problem, reducing the efficiency of information retrieval, and LSI having been offered for its resolution (see e.g., Landauer, Laham, & Derr, 2004). In other words, with some effort and utilizing a range of lexical relations, meaning-based information retrieval can significantly evolve, falling back on the spatial representation of word semantics.
strategies for sentence generation, so that grammatically and semantically correct sentences will be subgraphs of K|V|. In other words, distance and direction specifies geometric words, and so does their sequencing all those possible permutations that happen to include the subsets of grammatical and meaningful vs. grammatical but meaningless sentences.
D irection
A ckno wledg ment
and S equence
Finally, we suggest a method for the generation of sentences that use geometric locations, that is, coordinates as their words. To this end, our line of thought is as follows: recalling that Chomsky had applied graphs for the representation of syntactic structures (1957), and using the same structural approach, their representation has evolved into the that of semantic structures (Jackendoff, 1990), regardless whether the content carrier mechanism is words or coordinates, graphs can be applied to the same purpose, that is, phrase and sentence generation. Graphs are not geometric and have no connection with space whatsoever, though. However, let G = (V, E) be a set of V nodes and E vertices (arcs) in a graph so that elements of V are labelled vectors from an n-dimensional linear space. Then |V| will be the number of nodes in the complete graph K|V|, and the maximal number of vertices is |E| = |V|(|V|-1)/2, where |V| stands for the cardinality of V, |E| for the cardinality of E, and |E| is the total number of available routing
C onclusion We have theoretically shown that linear space is a geometric carrier apparatus for the information-based communication of word and sentence meaning by virtue of difference, distance, direction, and sequence. The application opportunities include, but are not limited to, meaning-based information retrieval.
The authors are grateful for the suggestions and encouragement of three unknown referees.
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“If by ’space’ I understand visual space, then geometry is the grammar of the words which I use to describe phenomena.”
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About the Contributors
Phil Turner is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing at Napier University. He has a first degree and a PhD in psychology and an MSc in computing science. Phil has some 20-years experience in the domain of human computer interaction in industry and academia, and has published extensively. His current work concerns the application of philosophical concepts to develop explanatory frameworks for human computer interaction. Susan Turner is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing at Napier University. Susan has experience in the teaching and research of the human aspects of computing across a variety of domains, and a number of related publications. She has a PhD in design and computing, an MSc in information technology, and a first degree in psychology. Currently, she is working on discourse analytic methods for studying the experience of technology. Elisabeth Davenport is professor of Information Management at Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland, where she has led and been engaged in numerous research projects in this domain. Her research focus is the interaction of texts, tasks, and technologies in academic and professional domains, and in social contexts outside the workplace such as the home, or the political process, and she has an extensive publications history in these areas. She is also Visiting Scholar in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Indiana. *** John Willy Bakke works as a research scientist at Telenor Research and Innovation, where his primary areas of research are flexible work arrangements, and user interpretations and user acceptance of technologies. Recent projects include studies of teleworking, the role of ICTs and workplace design for work task execution and collaboration, and trust and social capital in distributed groups. He has published a number of articles and papers in these areas, and is also the editor and coeditor of books on telework, distributed work, and workplace design. David Benyon has been professor of Human-Computer Systems at Napier University, Edinburgh since 1996. His background is in computing, cognition, and the application of artificial intelligence techniques to human-computer interaction. He has published widely on human-computer interaction, interaction design, and on applying new theories of cognition to design. The book Designing with Blends: Conceptual Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering by Manuel Imaz
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About the Contributors
and David Benyon, was published by MIT press in 2006. David Benyon is also one of the authors of one of the major textbooks in HCI, Designing Interactive Systems (Benyon, D., Turner, P., & Turner, S. Addison-Wesley, 2005). Stephen Boyd Davis has worked and taught in digital media since 1984. At Middlesex University, with his colleagues, he founded one of the first Masters programmes in the world dealing with interactive media, whose graduates have had influence worldwide. As Reader in Interactive Media, he runs the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, a University Research Centre. He shares the Centre’s commitment to continuous innovation, but also sets new media practices in wider historical contexts. His wide-ranging interests include novel forms of interaction and the spatiality of media. Originally a textile designer, Stephen retains an interest in design for pleasure rather than just for utility. Cheryl Campanella Bracken (PhD, 2000, Temple University) is an associate professor in School of Communication at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, OH, USA. Her research interests include psychological processing of media. She is intrigued with the strong impact that television, video games, and other forms of media have on people’s perceptions. Her specific research interests include (tele)Presence, and the impact of media form variables (i.e., image quality and screen size) on audiences’ perceptions of media content. Dr. Bracken has published in Media Psychology; Journal of Communication; Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Human Communication Research. She has coedited two issues of the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments in 2003, and has another special issue expected in 2008. Fiona Carroll graduated with a BA in ceramic design (1996) and a Graduate Diploma in art and design teaching (1998) from Limerick Institute of Technology. She then went on to gain a MSc in interactive media, at Limerick University, in 2002. She is currently completing a part-time PhD with the School of Computing at Napier University, Edinburgh, whilst also working as an e-learning/graphic designer at Swansea University. Her main research interest is in experience design, particularly the design of technology that enhances educational experiences. Her current focus is on the visual aesthetic, and how new media can be aesthetically designed to enhance the user’s experience. Richard Coyne has authored several books with MIT Press and Routledge on the implications of digital technologies for cultural understandings of space and spatiality. Recent projects include examinations of non-place, branded meeting places and the role of the human voice in digitally mediated environments. He researches and teaches in design, theory, digital media, and sound design. His work is richly multidisciplinary and collaborators include musicians, sociologists of technology, and urbanists. He is an architect and head of the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. Laura Daley is a PhD student in the Lincoln Social Computing (LiSC) Research Centre at the University of Lincoln. She has a background in psychology, and her current research interests lie in developing an understanding of how technology mediates the use of spatial and directional language, especially in the case of special populations such as people with Aspergers. Sándor Darányi is associate professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS). He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, with a PhD in library and information
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About the Contributors
science in 1989, and earned his candidate of Science degree in 1994, both in the field of computational ethnography. He has been on Programme Committees of relevant scholarly conferences (ACM SIGIR MF/ IR 2004-2005, ICTIR 2007). His research interests include machine learning for document classification, the representation of language change and analogical knowledge representation. Alan Dix is professor in the Department of Computing, Lancaster University, UK. He was a mathematician by training, and mathematics is still his first love, but he has worked in human-computer interaction since 1984, has published over 250 articles, and is author of one of the key textbooks in the area. He has worked in several universities, agricultural engineering research, local government, and hi-tech start-ups. His interests are eclectic: formalisation and design, physicality and digitality, the economics of information, structure, and creativity, and the modelling of dreams. Recently, he and a colleague have developed technology for autonomous pixels that can configure, in turn, any surface or space into a two- or three-dimensional display. Lynne Hall is a principal lecturer leading Interaction Design & Media in the School of Computing and Technology at the University of Sunderland. Her field of experience is in designing and evaluating innovative virtual environments, with over 40 publications in journals and conferences in this area. She was the project director of the Digital Media Network and is currently the Deputy Coordinator for the FP6 eCIRCUS project. She has responsibility for promoting, managing, and disseminating business and community engagement in the School of Computing and Technology. Elin K. Jacob earned her doctorate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is currently associate professor and director of the Doctoral Program in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where she teaches courses in representation and organization, indexing, metadata, and ontologies. Her research interests include theories of classification and categorization; the design, implementation, and evaluation of ontologies and metadata schemes; the influence of context and organization on perceptions of information; and, most recently, the potential application of usergenerated folksonomies in the development of controlled vocabularies. Tom Erik Julsrud works as a research scientist at Telenor Research and Innovation, and is also associated to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research areas of interests include social networks; distributed work; workplace changes; trust in organizations; and organizational social capital. He has coauthored books on telework and distributed work, and has published several articles and papers on collaboration in distributed and virtual teams. His latest work focuses, in particular, on the development of trust in virtual environments and distributed groups. Jon Kerridge is professor of Computing at Napier University, Edinburgh and a fellow of the British Computer Society. His research is focussed on pedestrian modelling and wireless communication, where he has led a number of productive funded projects and published widely. Anne Sofie Laegran completed her PhD thesis, entitled Connecting Places Internet Cafes as Technosocial Spaces, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2003. She has published in New Media and Society, Journal of Rural Studies, Geoforum, Norwegian Journal of Geography and provided chapters to several edited collections. Working interdisciplinarily within cultural geography
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and technology studies, she has continued doing research on information technology and everyday life at NTNU and the University of Edinburgh, where she is now based. Shaun Lawson is a senior lecturer in the Dept. of Computing and Informatics at the University of Lincoln. His research interests lie mainly in the design and evaluation of human-interactive systems, including robotic systems and virtual companions. He has also published in areas such as technology and ageing, and in how computers mediate the use of directional language. He has a strong interest in animal behaviour, particularly in how dogs interact with humans and how this could be exploited when building artificial systems. He is codirector of the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre (LiSC). Matthew Leach recently completed his PhD, focusing on human interaction with Specknets. He graduated with a first class honours degree in virtual reality design from the University of Wolverhampton in 2003, and has worked on a number of commercial urban-redevelopment VR visualization projects. Iain McGregor is a lecturer in sound design within the School of Computing at Napier University. He is currently finishing his PhD in soundscape mapping, and has had work presented at a number of acoustic ecology and auditory interface design conferences. Iain has worked for a number of years as a sound engineer and sound designer prior to becoming a lecturer. His main areas of interest are sound design for the film and games industries, as well as playing the cello and classical piano. Shaleph O’Neill is currently the programme director and lecturer for the Interactive Media Design course at the University of Dundee. He has written numerous papers on issues of interactive media, largely from a semiotic perspective. He is also author of the book Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction, published by Springer UK. His research interests include interactive media design, semiotics, phenomenology, and presence research. Martin Parker makes music, designs sound, and creates interactive systems involving computers and live musicians. He studied composition at the University of Manchester, and completed a PhD in Composition at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. He is academic director of the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in sound design, and artistic director of Edinburgh’s Dialogues Festival; http://www.dialogues-festival. org. He performs widely as a soloist with laptop, and is a member of concert remixing duo SNAIL. Some of his music is available on Ein Klang records, http://www.einklangrecords.com. Julian Warner is a faculty member in information science at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he teaches courses in the human aspects of modern information and communication technologies and in information policy. He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of California at Berkeley, Illinois, and Edinburgh. He has research interests in information retrieval, the history of copyright, in the connections between writing and computing, and in understandings of information technology. He has published a number of journal articles in information science and three books, the first of which was translated into Japanese and selected as a recommended reading by Microsoft Japan. Delia Whitbread is an artist/stained glass designer with a background in secondary and University level teaching. She originally graduated in English and Sociology from the University of York in 1973 but, after teaching for some years in South East Asia and London, retrained in Architectural Glass at Chelsea
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School of Art from 1985-87. In 1989, she was awarded an MA in Islamic and Traditional Art from the Royal College of Art for an MA by Project examining images of the feminine in religious iconography. From 1990, she was a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Glass at the University of Roehampton, also lecturing in Gender Studies and Art History. She completed her practise-based PhD in the School of ADM&C (Art, Design, Media and Culture) at the University of Sunderland in 2007. Péter Wittek is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. He graduated from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary, with an MSc in information management and an MSc in mathematics in 2005 and 2007, respectively, both dealing with the abstract representation of knowledge. His research interests lie in mathematical linguistics and machine learning in natural language processing and text classification. Emile van der Zee is the editor of the interdisciplinary book series Explorations in Language and Space for OUP, focusing on the interface between language and spatial representation, and drawing from linguistics, computer science, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. He is the founder and director of the Research Centre for Comparative Cognition (RECOGNITION), consisting of 18 full-time members of staff, at the University of Lincoln, which focuses on our attempts to understand the evolutional aspects of human cognition such as perception, categorisation, attention, and communication. He is currently principal lecturer in the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Lincoln.
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Index
.walk 161
directional language using mobile technology 173 disembodied voice 107 distributed cognition (DC) 29
A
E
aberrant behaviour in a space 23 acousmêtre in spatial design 102–112 antonymy 219 augmented reality (AR) 29 autobiographical memory 186
early renaissance 145 everyday memory 185
Symbols
B baroque 147 being-in concept 187 being-with concept 188 boundedness 94
C change process motivations 47 CityNova 160 co-hyponymy 221 collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) 174 communication concepts 196–213 community of interest (CoI) 91 computer-mediated communication (CMC) 175 computer mediated communication, spatial language 168–182 configurational mode 130 configurational mode, merits 132 configurational television 135 conversation analysis (CA) 173
D diegetic space 133 digital dérive 159 digital détournement 161 digital situationist 155–167, 158
F fiasco 160 first person shooter (FPS) game 174
G geometry of sense relations 222 gnosis 1–16 grafted voice 109
H homonymy (polysemy) 220 human-SpeckNet interaction (HSI) 28 hybridity 134 hypernym 221 hypernymy 221
I incompatibility 221 information places 96 information retrieval (IR) 214 information spaces 96 interactive spectacle 155–167 Internet cafés 57 Internet cafés, case studies 59 Internet cafés, production 63
L landscapes of the mind 10 language in shared games 174
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Index
late medieval 144 linearity 199, 204, 206 linguistics, linearity 196 linguistics, surface 196 listening 115 listening, three level classification 119 listening modes 116
M macroscopic measurement scale 19 measured space 17–25 measurement attempts, previous 18 memories and minds 4 memory prosthetics 183–195 meronymy 220 message 204 messages for selection 209 messoscopic scale 19 microscopic movements, measuring 19 mind of a mathematician 7 modern day 151 modes of listening 116
N native English speakers, experiment 176 navigating information space 29 nineteenth century 149
O O.U.T. 163 object-event listening 122 online directions, giving 175 organizational identities 45
P paradigm 202 patterns of geonosy 1–16 phenomenological perspectives, Relph and Tuan 189 physicality of space 91 pictorial film 135 pictorial imperative 137 pictorial progress 131 picture space 142 picture spaces that tell stories 143 place, what is it? 189 place, work, and organizational identities, case study 45 places 189
polysemy 220 prehistoric paintings to computers 143 prelistening 122
Q quake friends 164
R reconfiguring the rose 70–89 reconfiguring the rose, virtual workspace 74 representing space 128–140 reservoir, messages for selection 210 rose, workspace features 74–79
S semiotic dynamics, physical ecology 12 sense-making listening 122 sociality of place 91 society of the spectacle 156 sound, sense of presence, and sense of place, empirical study 119 space and organizational processes 42 space as a metaphorical vehicle 215 spatial analogies 97 spatial language, perspective taking 170 speckled computing consortium 28 spectacular space of virtual reality 158 structure 95 surface 203 synonymy 219 syntagm 199
T technology meets memory 187 technosocial space 54–69 technosocial space, material and social 56 transformation process 49
U untitled game 162
V velvet strike 163 visual culture 131 voice and space 102–112 voice over IP (VoIP) technology 169, 174
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W wayfinding 34 wireless sensor networks, interacting 26–40 wombrose 71 wombrose artists 80 wombrose community 80 wombrose project, audience response 84 wombrose workspace 79 workplaces 45 world space to picture space 129
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