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Today, we live in a map saturated world, surrounded by both conventional geographic maps and many other maplike spatial images and models (e.g. animated satellite images, three-dimensional city models, magnetic resonance imaging scans of the brain). Maps and visualizations have long been used as mode of analysis, providing a uniquely powerful way of making the world more comprehensible. Mapping provides a means by which to classify, represent and communicate information about areas that are too large and too complex to be seen directly. Well designed maps are relatively easy-to-interpret, and constitute concentrated databases of information about the location, shape and size of key features of a landscape and the connections between them. Moreover, the process of spatialisation, where a spatial, map-like structure is applied to data where no inherent or obvious one exists, can provide an interpretable structure to large databases of abstract information.[1] In essence, maps and spatialisations exploit the mind›s ability to more readily see complex relationships in images, providing a clear understanding of a phenomena, reducing search time, and revealingrelationships that may otherwise not been noticed. Here I illustrate the power of a mapping strategy by focusing on its utility in comprehending Internet infrastructure, although mapping and spatialisation can be used to develop an understanding of many different aspects of cyberspace including the structure of the Web and online social interactions.[2]
Internet addresses, connectivity, and bandwidth. The mapping of these elements provide important insights into who owns and controls infrastructure, who has access to the Internet, how the system can be surveyed, and how and from where the Internet is being used. At a basic level, the maps provide a visual inventory and census of where Internet nodes and routes of connection are located, and in specific cases the traffic that flows through networks and their user profiles. Depending on scale, these maps can be used by engineers to install and maintain the physical hardware of the networks, by system operators to manage networks more effectively, and by marketing and business development departments to demonstrate the size and penetration of networked services. In addition, the maps have academic utility by showing significant trends and spatial patterns in the growth of network architecture, service provision, user profiles and traffic flow across spatial scales, so for example, allowing comparison of neighborhoods, cities and countries. As such they reveal the growth of the ‹Network Society› and information economy, but also its uneven and unequal geographic nature by revealingthe distribution of infrastructure and those areas that have poor access to the Internet or are presently excluded altogether. Moreover, they allow an analysis of the changes occurring in these patterns. As recent research highlights, although the Internet has expanded, diversified and diffused greatly, basic infrastructure access and equity issues are still significant; the so called ‹digital divide› issue, which is played out in different ways at different spatial scales, and is fractured along lines of wealth, class, race, gender and so on.[3] The cartographic designs employed are various. Many examples use conventional approaches of shaded or symbol maps on a familiar geographic framework. These are often produced using standard geographic information systems (GIS) packages. However, other significant examples stretch the notion of a ‹map› using more diagrammatic approaches, for example showing the topology of network connections laid out in a non-geographic, abstract coordinate space. Some of the maps are interactive interfaces using the medium of the map to allow users to access and query the data in novel ways. Some of the most potentially powerful and interesting
‹new breed› of infrastructure maps are dynamic in nature, constructed with live data gathered from the Internet every time the map is requested by a user.
either as a logical schematic diagram or on a geographic base with a familiar template of cities and administrative boundaries. These maps can often be highly generalised, with for example the network architecture shown as straight lines, although they are topologically correct (as with conventional subway maps). One useful method, available to average Internet users, for monitoring network performance is traceroute, which allow the active ‹probing› of real-time data routing and speed. Traceroutes are simple utility programs which report the route data packets travel through the Internet to reach a given destination, and the length of time taken to travel between all the nodes along the route. Designed primarily for network engineers to ‹debug› routing problems, they are also useful tools for researchers to scan the inside of the Internet cloud. They reveal the hidden complexity of data flows, showing how many nodes are involved (often more than twenty), the seamless crossing of oceans and national borders and the multiple transfers through networks owned and operated by competing companies. They can also detail how geographically illogical some data routing is,following the cheapest paths rather than the shortest.[6] —see a typical text-based output of the basic traceroute utility. Each line in the output of traceroute represents a single ‹hop› the data takes through the Internet. In this case the data route took 30 hops to reach its destination. Each hop is generally a separate physical node comprising of dedicated switch or router hardware. The approximate locations of this routing hardware can also be plotted on a map to give a geographic traceoute (see the VisualRoute utility).
how a particular network could expedite their travel needs. As a consequence, there is a long (dis)honourable tradition of promotional maps being used to highlight the advantages of the latest transportation network such as canals, oceanic shipping lines, railroads, highways and of course airlines.[8] Given that the provision of Internet network services is a highly competitive business, dominated by large corporations many of whom operate globally, effective marketing is a vitally important activity. Here, maps are employed to provide a selective and positive view of a network, emphasizing its extent (e.g. demonstrating the geographic reach of the network, emphasizing all the distant places that are linked together) and capabilities (e.g. illustrating the tremendous capacity of the ‹pipes› of the network to cope with huge users demands) in order to attract and compete for custom. In many respects Internet network provision is such an intangible commodity that the map is powerful in making it seem more ‹real.› The maps generally show a generalized and simplified view of the network, usually in a bright, colorful and visuallyeffecting manner. Most often the maps are drawn on a template of real world geography and have many design commonalties with the airline route maps in the back of in-flight magazines. While these maps do provide a selective picture, a reflection of what the company wants to emphasize, they also allow academic researchers and market researchers to chart the range and make-up of each companies network, to document different kinds of provision at a range of scales, and importantly to note how this has changed over time. This can be illustrated in reference to an analysis of UUNet's infrastructure (formerly part of Worldcom). Infamously, it was claimed in the late 1990s that the UUNET network was growing at rate of 1000 per cent per year. A longitudinal study of their marketing maps at a variety of scales allowed researchers to see the company’s strategy for delivering infrastructure services and to project the likely consequences this strategy on issues such as the digital divide, urban-regional restructuring, local and regional economic development, and so on). In fact, the 1000 % growth figure was apocryphal[9] and was an element in
the «dotcom» hype of the late 1990s that led to significant over investment in fibreoptic infrastructure.
As widely documented, cities are increasingly becoming competitive enterprises, vying to attract investment of the high-tech sector. Maps are a potentially important tool for illustrating highcapacity internet infrastructure to potential inward investors and encouraging economic development. Examples include the «Bandwith Bay Fiber Network Mapping» by the City of San Diego and the «Georgia High-Speed Telecommunications Atlas» as well as document the so called ‹knowledge economy.›[11] (See the variations in the home Internet access across London) Similar quantitative assessment and mapping of the geographical patterns of competitive in the knowledge economy has also be undertaken at a national scale. Mark Krymalowski analysed data at the country level, plotting the geographical distribution of .DE domain registrations in Germany. In other words, the information economy is likely to grow most quickly around existing IT hubs, rather than invest in new, potentially cheaper, locations. These kind of maps when put together in a timeline, form a powerful means for tracking development and for predictingfuture change. One project that illustrates this is that by Larry Landweber, and several organisations have taken his lead to produce longitudinal maps at different scales (e.g. TeleGeography). During the first half of the 1990s the Internet spread across the globe so that by the end of the decade virtually all nations were connected (although the number and capacity of connections still varies greatly). This global diffusion of the Internet was tracked by Landweber and charted in a series of maps providing a useful baseline census for policy of the spread of international network connectivity.[12]
impacts on social, economic and political life, engendering widespread changes e.g. in relation to urban-regional restructuring as illustrated above.[13] The process of mapping has been used to comprehend two other sorts of projects aimed at furthering our understanding of these changes in relation to infrastructure: the digital divide; measuring the Net. As noted above, maps reveal visually the nature and extent of the ‹digital divide› in society. [14] Matthew Zook has analysed the spatiality of the Internet content production industries in the US through the detailed mapping of the geographic location of domain name registrations at different scales. Just as postal addresses in the geographic space identify a unique location, domain names perform the same function for the Internet, allowing users to visit the site. Importantly, the geographic location of the owner of these domains can be determined from registration databases, which have a billing postal address, containing zipcodes that can easily be mapped to street-level locations using offthe- shelf GIS software and map data. This mapping led Zook to conclude that the ‹Internet industry exhibits a remarkable degree ofclustering despite its reported spacelessness.›16 This approach provides a valuable quantitative measurement for policy analysis on Internet economic activity and revealing where is connected and just as importantly where is not. Despite the virtualised rhetoric, this assemblage remains embedded in real places and maps can help to reveal the intersections between cyberspace and geographic space. In academic Internet research, an understanding of that geography is important, as knowledge of the physical location of virtual phenomena can tell you interesting things (such as which territorial jurisdiction it is in) and can also enable the linkage to a large array of existing secondary data (for example socio-economic characteristics from censuses). The ‹where› and ‹how› of the physical embeddedness of data networks and information flows is also important because of their uneven global distribution and the consequent socio-spatial implications in terms of access and inequalities, as starkly revealed in. This is a global scale mapping of network infrastructure that contrasts the density of core Internet routers with the distribution of population. The maps are density
surfaces, where the land is colourcoded so that higher densities are darker. In design terms they are really quite conventional cartographic maps, using a geographic framework of continental outlines to show univariate data. This type of world map is familiar to most people and can be easily produced using GIS software, and succinctly summarises a large volume of data in an intuitive manner. The final way that maps have been used by academics and commercial research teams is a means by which to display measurements that quantify the extent and use of Internet infrastructure so as to gain a better understanding of its distribution, diffusion and utilisation. [15] In an ‹arc map› of Internet traffic flows between fifty nations, from February 1993, the colour, thickness and height of the arcs are used to encode the traffic statistics for particular inter-country routes.[16] In the SeeNet3D application in which the image was generated, the user had considerable interactive control able, for example, to vary the arc height, scaling and translucency. The map could also be rotated and scaled, so that the user can view it from any angle. The map shows that there was significant traffic, in the early 1990s, betweenthree areas of the world, North America to Europe, Europe and Australiasia, and Australiasia and North America, with most traffic crossing the Atlantic. The map does not show all traffic, however, because it is limited to just fifty countries. As such, it portrays a selected image, one that is dominated by developed countries that were the principle nations connected to the Internet in 1993. The final example is the Internet Mapping Project being undertaken by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick at Lumeta Corporation.[17] Their project maps the topology of thousands of interconnected Internet networks to provide perhaps the best currently available large-scale overview of the core of the Internet in a single snapshot. They map the Internet in an abstract space (i.e. using a process of spatialisation), thus disregarding the actual location of nodes in physical space. Data is gathered by using the Internet to measure itself on a daily basis, surveying the routes to a large number of end-points (usually Web servers) from their base in New Jersey, USA. The resulting spatialisation maps how hundreds of networks connect together to form the core of the Internet. In the example shown, links have been colour-coded
according to the ISP, seeking to highlight who ‹owns› the largest sections of Internet topology. This project is ongoing and the data is archived and available to other researchers to utilise. Over time, it is hoped that the data will be useful for monitoring growth and changes in the structure of the Internet. The experience gained in mapping the Internet is also being applied commercially, using network scanning and visualization techniques to chart the structure of corporate intranets to identify security weaknesses and unauthorized nodes.
views with multiple maps.»[18] Further, some of these new mappings of the inside of the Internet cloud can also been seen as a new kind of surveillance, revealing connection and interactions that were previously hidden in unused log files and incomprehensible databases. The act of mapping itself may constitute an invasion of privacy. If the appeal of the Internet is its aspatial anonymity, then users may object to it being placed under wider scrutiny, even if individuals are unidentifiable. Here, public analysis may well represent an infringement of personal rights. In some senses, these maps may work to shift the spaces they map from what their users consider semi-private spaces to public spaces, and thus the maps may actually change the nature of Internet itself. Therefore, it is important to consider the ways, and the extent to which, maps of the Internet cloud are ‹responsible artefacts,› that do not destroy what they seek to represent or enhance. Lastly, it should be recognised that mapping is also cultural process of creating, rather merely revealing knowledge. All the sophisticated, interactive maps of network infrastructures have politics just the same as any other form of cartographic text, and we must bealert to their ideological messages.[19] Maps of the Internet cloud can prove to be very valuable, but at the same time they can never be value-free. There is no one single map or technique that can capture all the complexities of the Internet cloud. Instead, there are a multiplicity of different Internet maps that focus on different components of the infrastructure. Perhaps, even, our knowledge is diminishing as the scale and complexity of infrastructure grows and information about it becomes less open to scrutiny. So as the Internet cloud grows evermore expansive and dense, it is becoming even harder to see the details within.