Geography 880 - Graduate Seminar In GIS

Mapping Cyberspace

Instructor: Dr. Mei-Po Kwan

Department of Geography, The Ohio State University
Spring 2001


1.  Course Objective and Description

"Cyberspace" refers to the information "world" created by the Internet, World Wide Web, virtual reality and other information technologies. It has a profound impact on our everyday lives and society. Geographers have examined various aspects of cyberspace through socio-cultural, network-analytical, cognitive-behavioral and other perspectives. Drawing upon a wide variety of recent materials (many of which are available on the Web), this seminar explores whether geographical concepts and analytical methods can be used to study and enhance our understanding of cyberspatial phenomena and behavior (e.g. the suitability of conventional cartographical or GIS methods for representing cyberspatial phenomena). Other important topics include the geography of the digital divide, the interaction between physical and virtual worlds, and the potential impact of these interactions on society, economy and people's everyday lives. Students will explore these issues through reading and discussions as well as class projects. 

2.  Course Requirements

Students are required to read ALL the required readings before they come to class and to fully participate in class discussion. Students are encouraged to actively bring additional articles that are relevant for the discussion in class. All students are required to make a major presentation in this class. Students may enroll for 3 or 5 credits. To receive 5 credits, students will complete one of the following in addition to the above requirements: (1) a research paper, (2) an individual or a group project, or (3) an elaborated research proposal.

For further information, please contact Mei-Po Kwan at 292-9465 or email me at kwan.8@osu.edu

3.  Course Readings

(a)  Required reading

MC: Martin Dodge and Robert Kitchin (2001) Mapping Cyberspace. Routledge.  More information about the book is available at the web site: 
http://www.mappingcyberspace.com/)

(b)  Supplemental readings

Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (1996) Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. New York: Routledge.

Donald Janelle and David Hodge, eds. (2000) Information, Place and Cyberspace:Issues in Accessibility. Springer-Verlag: Berlin. 

Thomas R. Leinbach and Stanley D. Brunn, eds. (2001) Worlds of E-Commerce: Economic, Geographical, and Social Dimensions. New York: John Wiley.

James O. Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama and Barney Ward, eds. (2000) Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies. New York: Routledge.

(c) Web resources 

Useful information on the cybergeography web site: http://www.cybergeography.com/atlas/atlas.html

4.  Schedule

Week 1  -  Introducing cyberspace (MC: Ch.1)
  • Paul Adams (1997) Cyberspace and virtual places. Geographical Review 87(2): 157-171.
  • Helen Couclelis. (1996) Editorial: the death of distance. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 23: 387-389.
  • Stephen Graham (1998) The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology. Progress in Human Geography 22(2): 165-185.
Week 2  -  Geographies of the information society (MC: Ch.2)
  • Barney Warf (2001) Segueways into cyberspace: multiple geographies of the digital divide. Environment and Planning B 28(1): 3-19.
  • Anthony Townsend (2001) The Internet and the rise of the new network cities, 1969 - 1999. Environment and Planning B 28(1): 39-58.
  • Mark Wilson (2001) Location, location, location: the geography of the dot com problem. Environment and Planning B 28(1): 59-71.
Week 3  -  Geographies of cyberspace (MC: Ch.3)
  • Paul Adams (1998) Network topologies and virtual place. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88(1): 88-106.
  • Susan Tanney (1997) Evidence of place in electronic space. December 1997, Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab, University of Washington.
  • Abrams D, Baecker R and Chignell M (1998) Information archiving with bookmarks: personal web space construction and organization. In CHI '98 Proceedings. http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/chi/274644/p41-abrams/
Week 4  -  The cartographies of cyberspace 1
  • Michael Batty and Harvey Miller (2000) Representing and visualizing physical, virtual and hybrid information spaces. In Donald Janelle and David Hodge, eds. Information,Place, and Cyberspace. Ch.8. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
  • Luc Girardin (1995) Mapping the virtual geography of the World Wide Web. Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, Paris, May 6-10. (Web)
  • Mei-Po Kwan (2000) Human extensibility and individual hybrid- accessibility in space-time: a mutli-scale representation using GIS. In Donald Janelle and David Hodge, eds., Information, Place, and Cyberspace. Ch.14. Berlin: Springer- Verlag.
  • Paul Adams (2000) Application of a CAD-based accessibility model. In Donald Janelle and David Hodge, eds. Information, Place, and Cyberspace. Ch.13. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
  • B Jiang and F. J. Ormeling (1997) Cybermap: the map for cyberspace. The Cartographic Journal 34(2): 111-116.
Week 5  -  The cartographies of cyberspace 2 (MC: Ch.4)
  • G. C. Staple (1996) Notes on mapping the net: from tribal space to corporate space. TeleGeography 1995: Global Telecommunications Traffic Statistics and Commentary, TeleGeography, Inc., October 1995.
  • Martin Dodge and Robert Kitchin. 2000. Exposing the 'second text' of maps of the Net. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communcation 5(4).
  • Terry Harpold (1999) Dark vontinents: a critique of Internet metageographies. Postmodern Culture 9(2).
Week 6   -  Spatial cognition of cyberspace (MC: Ch.5, 9)
  • Mei-Po Kwan (2001) Cyberspatial cognition and individual access to information: the behavioral foundation of cybergeography. Environment and Planning B 28(1): 21-37.
  • John Eklund (1995) Cognitive models for structuring hypermedia and implications for learning from the World Wide Web. The First Australian World Wide Web Conference.
  • Rudolph P. Darken and John L. Sibert. (1996) Wayfinding strategies and behavior in large virtual world. In CHI'96 Electronic Proceedings.
  • Lara D. Catledge and James E. Pitkow. (1995) Characterizing browsing strategies in the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of the Third International World-Wide Web Conference, http://www.igd.fhg.de/www/www95/papers/
Week 7  -  Cyber-spatial analysis and modeling of interaction in cyberspace (MC: Chs.7, 8)
  • David Wheeler and Morton O'Kelly (1999) Network topology and city accessibility of the commercial Internet. Professional Geographer 51(3): 327-339.
  • Shane Murnion and R.G. Healey (1998) Modeling distance decay effects in Web server information flows. Geographical Analysis 30(4): 285-303.
  • Shane Murnion (2000) Cyberspatial analysis: appropriate methods and metrics for a new geography. In Stan Openshaw and R. Abrahart, eds. GeoComputation. The Netherlands: Balkema Publishers.
  • Bernardo Huberman, Peter Pirolli, James Pitkow and Rajan Lukose (1998) Strong regularities in World Wide Web surfing. Science 280(3): 95-97.
Week 8  -  Spatializing cyberspace (MC: Ch.6)
  • Sara I. Fabrikant (2000) Spatialized Browsing in large data archives. Transactions in GIS 4(1): 65-78.
  • Andre Skupin (2000). From metaphor to method: cartographic perspectives on information Visualization, Proceedings, IEEE Symposium on Information Vizualization (InfoVis) 2000, Oct. 9-10, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Week 9  -  Presentations

Week 10  -  Presentations




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