Visual Sociology

July 22-24, 2009. International Visual Sociology Association Conference, University of Cumbria, UK. Theme: "Appreciating the views: how we're looking at the social and visual landscape."

For additional information, go to www.visualsociology.org

>> La culture visuelle est encore bien trop méprisée comme outil et objet de recherche chez les sociologues. Les outils statistiques permettent soit de visualiser des données et d'entreprendre des analyses et des interprétations. Mais rares sont encore les recherches sociologiques qui prennent pour objet les images, la perception ou l'histoire visuelle.

Housing & transportation

“The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index is an innovative mapping tool that measures the true affordability of housing by estimating not just the cost of the housing itself, but also the costs of transportation. Using this index you can compare neighborhoods you may be considering based on both housing and transportation costs.”

>> http://htaindex.cnt.org/

Representing social networks

The Technology Review published by the MIT (since 1899) on the issue of march/april 2008 is addressing the questions of representation of social networks. As Erica Naone states in her article “ The idea of a social graph – a representation of a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances – gaines currency last year as the popularity of online social networks grew: Facebook, for example, claims to have more than 64 million active users, with more 250,000 signing up each day”. Some of the examples illustrated in this article are: the blogosphere from Matthew Hurst’s visualizations of relations between blogs and referrals in blogs; comment flow realized by Dietmar Offenhuber by the MIT Media Lab representing relations between individuals in MySpace; or the so called Twitter social network which is the result of “shared messages, and brief updates on microblogging” where received and sent information can illustrate what is shared and who is sharing it.

>> Those representations of networks are not placed based but as urban thinkers and urban sociologists we see a lot of potential in analyzing how social interactions take place or not in specific spaces. And if the networks are placed-based see what are the relationships between the physical place and the type of relations someone can have with someone else. With this type of information we could eventually better understand the social and spatial context of cities, and propose new links or networks that bring together social actors and physical places.

>> Check our previous posts on social networks.

mapping Chicago

This well documented web site made by UrbanLab, an independent research laboratory of urbanism, is an amazing resource for those who need illustrations of geographical and social mapping of the city. The main sponsors of this online exhibition are the Chicago Metropolis 2020, The Openlands organization, and the Center for Neighborhood Tecnology (CNT).

>> see http://www.mapsinthepublicsquare.org/

>> see the article of CNT

>> see our post on HYPERCARTE

World Democratic Tour

Not really a map but a cartography of everything and nothing. This could be a headline for the work of Pascal Colrat, a young artist, who is exhibiting at the Cité Internationale de Paris. The idea is simple: to transform our representation of the Parisian subway map. The map as an object is also reinforced by its presentation as an element of the public space as it is described by the web site of the Cité Internationale about:

« L’œuvre réalisée par Pascal Colrat est donc d’abord un objet : une carte, un plan que les résidents et visiteurs de la Cité pourront avoir entre les mains. Elle donnera également lieu à une installation dans le parc de la Cité : pour renforcer l’idée originale du plan, mais également celle du détournement d’un objet quotidien, l’artiste utilise comme support d’installation un mobilier urbain traditionnel de signalétique que peut trouver tout usager, dans et autour du métro. C’est ainsi que porte-plans et “ sucettes “ d’affichage seront installés dans la cour d’honneur de la cité internationale et dans la Maison Internationale, créant ainsi un faux univers RATP, montrant à voir de faux plans de métro.Autant de trompe-l’œil suscitant la curiosité des utilisateurs du parc, qui pourront se procurer les plans, tirés en dix mille exemplaires et mis à leur disposition dans des présentoirs. » source: web site CIUP.

Two main objectives are achieved in this work:
- To work on the signaletic and the presentation of the map.
- To realize a public document for everyone.

Whereas this illogic representation pastes the world map to the Parisian map, it aims to be mainly considered as a playful object. With the bold title of ‘World Democratic Map’ this representation relates to its own location: the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris as a place of diversity of cultures.

Inhabiting the city as a democratic citizen is also to be aware of representation such as maps and multiple cartographies. The transformation of its use is revealing even more its primary purpose: to extract from the physical geography a specific use or network.

>> See the web site of Etapes
>> See the web site of VisualImage

ps: Images are coming from the two web sites cited above.

Hypercarte: social mapping

Recently, a research center Géographie-Cités [CNRS UMR 8504] in the Université Paris I based in Paris is organizing a research program and analytic tool. Called Hypercarte, this project seeks to be an interactive tool, to represent and question graphically social phenomenons. This mapping project follows the social and political demand that could be adressed by cartography. Neither the main classical atlases nor the new GIS systems seem to respond to this new need by the social sciences and the society at large.

The main hypothesis of the Hypercarte rely on the idea that any type of 'spatialisation' of any social phenomenon can follow any type of representation depending on the designer, the purposes of the actual etc.. In that sense, the theoritical approach is close to the one given by Simmel meaning that any representations like the Hypercarte are imperfect attempts to reconstruct the social reality and are at the same time also necessary for our understanding of the production of social processes.

The web site of Hypercarte is a rich ressource for those interested in mapping social facts, phenomenons, processes...some examples of maps can give you an idea of the software. A history of the project gives you insightful information on the origins and perspectives of the Hypercarte.