Cyberspace is a nebulous concept to most of us, a soup of information out of which we fish facts, using search engines as hooks.
So, an atlas containing hundreds of maps, diagrammes and pictorial representations of cyberspace is a surprise, an aid to understanding and, most of all, a sheer pleasure to browse.
The Atlas of Cyberspace, by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, is a beautiful, big coffee-table book. It is possible to flick through admiring the sometimes bizarre and often complicated representations of a landscape inhabited by some 400 million users. But, this is also a book that repays careful reading. Indeed, some of the maps and diagrammes are impenetrable without the accompanying text.
The antecedent of cyberspace, the telegraph, is the subject of the first map, which prosaically shows the location of telegraph stations in the "United States, the Canadas and Nova Scotia". Published in 1853, it includes a list of the tariffs from Pittsburgh to some 670 telegraph stations. For instance, it cost 90 cents for the first 10 words of a message to Boston, and seven cents for each additional word.
Turning the page from the ornate Cable and Wireless "Great Circle" map, of 1945, with its richly-decorated borders, the next diagramme looks like a lecturer's whiteboard scrawl. The hand-drawn sketch displays the first node of the network connected to a mainframe computer at UCLA. It marks the foundation of the internet.
The infrastructure of the internet is not just a mass of wires, it also consists of great cables, spanning the seas, and satellites orbiting the earth. Undersea cable communications, linking continents, have been laid since the 1860s. In the 1990s, their capacity was greatly increased by advances in fibre-optic technologies. The largest cable across the north Atlantic, laid in 2000, can carry the equivalent of 9.7 million simultaneous telephone conversations.
Optical fibre submarine systems are the subject of a large paper map, which is reproduced above a frame from an animation of satellite constellations. This latter map illustrates the point made by Rob Kitchin, that the best way to appreciate many of the maps is to look at them on the internet, where you can interact. Many of the maps can be rotated, viewed from different vantage points and some change with time.
However, maps measuring the international connectivity to the internet are no longer relevant, we are told as only states suffering from extreme poverty, war and civil conflicts (such as Afghanistan and Somalia) or from geopolitical isolation (like North Korea, and Iran) are the exceptions to global connectivity. However, mapping the internet by service providers shows, as might be expected, a concentration in certain wealthier regions.
For the non-technical reader, the next series of maps are somewhat obscure with a "3-D hyperbolic visualization of internet topologies". Don't be put off by the words. Each of the book's six chapters deals with a distinct topic and the section referred to is the only one that require some specialist knowledge.
Fans of AA Roadwatch or the daily weather bulletin will be fascinated to hear that the performance of the global internet is measured every four hours, every day of the week, by Matrix.Net to produce a continuous "Internet Weather Report".
Analysis of the "weather maps" shows peaks in congestion coinciding with the overlapping of key times in geographic space, such as the coinciding of the early morning on the east coast of the US with the mid-afternoon with Europe.
Moving away from physical infrastructure, chapter three concentrates on mapping the informational content of cyberspace - the original conceptual design of what became known as the World Wide Web.
Navigating the web is not just about finding sites. There is also the problem of navigating within websites. One innovative solution is provided by artist Shelley Jackson, who has superimposed hypertext links on a line drawing of her body, which serves as a table of contents.
Mapping conversation and community on the internet also requires an imaginative approach. In PeopleGarden, MIT student Rebecca Xiong uses a flower garden to represent a discussion forum. Each flower represents a user and each petal in a flower represents a single message. The form and colour of the flowers encode data on the number of messages posted, their sequence, whether they are initial conversations or replies. As more messages are posted, more petals sprout. The height of each flower represents the time a user has been involved. So a blooming flower garden represents a vigorous discussion forum.
Cyberspace is not just about communication and data flow, it's also about play. As of November 2000, some 67.7 million objects have been placed in the flat plane that is AlphaWorld. Users "own" land, design and build homesteads (from modest suburban to mock-Tudor houses to grand castles and follies), from pieces provided. The density of urban distribution, in what is probably the most popular virtual landscape, has been plotted and mapped as if it were real. There are even "satellite images" of urban development.
Conventional cartography gives way to images created by artists, film makers and storytellers in chapter five, Imagining Cyberspace. Their representations range from star charts to mosaics of multi-coloured pixels to an interactive electronic collage of jumbled text and spaces.
A health warning issued by the authors notes that this atlas, which draws together a wide selection of maps produced over the past 30 years or so, must be approached with caution. Readers should ask themselves why a particular map or spatialisation was created? Does the map change the way we think about, and interact, with cyberspace? To what extent does it accurately reflect the data? Is the map interpretable? How valid and reliable are the data used to construct the map? And, is the map or spatialisation ethical? While the book is written by academics - Rob Kitchin is a lecturer in human geography in NUI Maynooth and Martin Dodge works as a computer technician and researcher in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, at University College London - it should be enjoyed by most internet users.
A final thought from the authors: "remember: there is no one true map of cyberspace."
