Content area
Full Text
Atlas of Cyberspace. By MARTIN DODGE and ROB KITCHIN London: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001, 268 pp. £30.00. ISBN 0 201 74575 5
Map-making is central to the way geographers explore the world, but during the last 50 years, the subject has experienced many twists and turns in its main focus. The latest represents our concern for the geography of cyberspace and the way computers and communications are changing our sense of space and place. This new frontier has begun to be charted and this book is the first of many which will act as an 'Atlas' to this new world.
More specifically, Atlas of Cyberspace presents a graphic discussion of projects that seek to map and visualize the information spaces of the Internetand World Wide Web. It combines the subjectivity of individual explorations with the technical rigour of modern cartographic techniques using computers. As such, the book reveals mapping to be a practice subject to both bottom-up 'trial and error' techniques as well as logical theories of how such spaces are formed. The book explores the ambiguity between the physical geography of information spaces and the interconnected presence of virtual worlds. It is divided into four sections, each providing a theme for discussion. In the first section, the mapping and quantification of telecommunications infrastructure, user populations, and data traffic are discussed. Topological representations of this infrastructure, such as submarine fiber-optic cables and satellite constellations, provide the reader with context...