Building an Atlas of Cyberspace

these issues and work towards appropriate solutions. Fortunately, the pace of internet growth will ensure that this occurs sooner than latter. What is Cyberspace and can cartographers map it? Cyberspace is the multifaceted digital space in and of computer networks. At the very heart of Cyberspace, and its golden children, the Internet and the Web, are a rich and deep foundation of spatial metaphors, both literary and visual (Adams 1997, Graham 1998). Given how deeply ingrained spatial metaphors are throughout the emerging Cyberspace, it would seem that cartographers have much to contribute in mapping out this new geography and advancing our understanding of it. Scholars in a number of disciplines have done valuable work critically examining Cyberspace through the lens of geographic space at varying scales; for example, urban planning (Graham The field of information visualisation has emerged in the 1990s from computer science and computer graphics, and has contributed significantly to mapping Cyberspace (Card et al. 1999). Also, we should also not overlook the expertise in the graphic design community in charting Cyberspace (Jacobson 1999). There is no one single map of Cyberspace that can show everything , just as there is no one map of the geography of a country like Brit-ain. Instead, we compile atlases to show the complex and many fold geographies of a country. A comprehensive atlas of Britain covers all aspects-the landscape, the soil, the buildings, the roads, the people, disease, crime, wealth and poverty, rivers and rainfall. In just the same manner, an atlas of Cyberspace will contain many different kinds of maps, mapping the myriad distinct virtual spaces of Cyberspace (e.g. telephone & fax, email, web, chat rooms, multiuser games, intranets, and electronic financial flows). There are also different dimensions of the spaces to be mapped and understood (infrastructure, protocols, content and traffic). As yet, you can not buy an atlas of Cyberspace in the shops, but over the past couple of years I have attempted to construct one by combining the best maps of Cyberspace from many diverse sources. Appropriately enough the current version is available on the Web at <http:// www.cybergeography.org/atlas/>. In the rest of this article I present five exemplars from the Atlas showing how different aspects of Cyberspace are being mapped and the diversity of cartographic forms being employed. It is important to realise the Cyberspace is not new, it builds on decades of technological evolution in computing …