Sunday, January 16, 2011

Knowledge Cartographer!

From the website Knowledge Cartography:

The aim of the research [on knowledge cartography] is to extend the cartographic metaphor beyond visual analogy, and to expose it as a narrative model and tool to intervene in complex, heterogeneous, dynamic realities, just like those of human geography. The map, in this context, is not only a passive representation of reality but a tool for the production of meaning. The map is thus a communication device: a mature representation artefact, aware of its own language and its own rhetoric, equipped with it its own tools, languages, techniques and supports. 


The part of this that fascinates me is that in my own attempts to understand the workings of systems that require the use of multi-level models to describe the relationships of the parts of the system to each other, I find myself creating my own internal maps to create an understandable relationship between those parts. Proximity is a measure of similarities between the parts of the system and the map is a narrative that gives the map contextual meaning. Not the narrative, of course, since another context or perspective could rearrange the parts in the map bases on another way of measuring similarities between the parts of the system. Then there are questions about how many dimensions can be represented - or rather how many dimensions have to be ignored or collapsed in order to place the visual map into a 2-D or 3-D representation. 


So if I have thought of myself as a novice knowledge engineer/explorer, now I can think of myself also as a knowledge cartographer. And I can see how this is connected to the work of Katy Börner, who has worked on the ways of visually representing scientific knowledge and who taught a half-day workshop I was privileged to attend a year or so ago.