Mapping the World-Wide Web

Introduction Maps of the WorldWide Web will be the focus of this paper. These are maps that usually dispense with many of the conventional notions of real-world cartography, doing away with the framework of latitude and longitude location and the familiar background of countries and cities in favour of arbitrary grids and new visual metaphors. These are maps of the information spaces of Cyberspace that employ graphical techniques and visual metaphors ranging from 2D flat static maps to immersive 3D fly through ones. They are created by academic researchers and companies from a wide variety of disciplines, including computer graphics, information design, user interfaces and human-computer interaction, virtual reality, information retrieval and scientific visualisation to name just a few (see the following particular, a distinct research field, under the title of information visualisation, has coalesced in the past five years or so, with much of the work focusing on developing new interfaces and interactions for the Internet and the Web (Gershon & Eick 1995, Card et al. 1999, Chen 1999). More recently information visualisation research has been turned into products via commercial ventures such as Visual Insights, Perspecta, Inxight Software and Cartia 1. By way of a definition, three of the leading practitioners in the field state that: " …information visualization focuses on information, which is often abstract. In many cases information is not automatically mapped to the physical world (e.g. geographical space). This fundamental difference means that many interesting classes of information have no natural and obvious physical representation. A Key research problem is to discover new visual metaphors for representing information and to understand what analytical tasks they support. " (Gershon et al. 1998:10). Many of the maps I shall examine, particularly the three-dimensional ones, do not even look like maps in any conventional cartographic sense, although most still serve the fundamental purpose of visual explanation to aid navigation and understanding of a space. But perhaps some can not even make this claim, they are just pictures of the structure of the Web, pictures of Cyberspace, striking and 3 powerful images that give people a unique sense of the space, in similar manner to the Apollo images gave people a new understanding of the Earth (Cosgrove 1994). Many of the examples I consider are experimental, work in progress, only providing a fragmentary, imperfect view of the Web, just like the Mappae Mundi's gave of the ancient world. However, …