Leicester

I got off at Leicester to try and find the Spanish guitar store.  Surfacing on Colbourn, I found casinos, theatres and a sea of tourists.  It felt pretty different than Covent Gardens, only one stop up the Picadilly line.  Trying to find the address, and inadvertently walking past the guitar shop at least three times without seeing it,   I finally gave up, having spotted a bookstore that I told myself didn't look promising.

Making sure not to get too far away from the underground entrance (I left without a map yesterday) I went to the bookstore and it turned out to be quite an interesting one.  It was an old/used/rare/secondhand type shop and there were some pretty old looking books on evolution by Darwin and a couple of editions of Lyell's geology book.  Many of the books looked like academic remainders or cheap paperbacks though and I wonder if the better books were not being sold online.

I asked a man running the book store about the guitar shop and he knew right away what I was talking about and steered me in the right direction.  I found the tiny shop entrance and worked my through the tourists to get to it, then up the winding old narrow stairs past a painted lion to the shop entrance.  It's a tiny place with ukeleles, banjos, stratocasters and dobros, as well as classical guitars (which is what I am in the market for). I did not end up buying a guitar yesterday but I want to soon.

As I told the instructor at the shop, I've been messing around pretty seriously with classical guitar for about 20 years now, and I can play a couple of pieces at the 5 or 6 level of the Royal Conservatory series (Canada).  But I've never had more than a couple of lessons, though I've been very dedicated and disciplined about it.  One problem I have is that I can't play without sheet music in front of me.  It's almost embarassing when someone hands me a guitar.  The result is usually silence.

I'd like for this to change.  As gratifying as playing the guitar strictly for my own pleasure has been, I think it's time to let the cat out of the bag.

Picadilly Line

Mostly I'm sticking to the Picadilly Line, but my mental map is expanding as I work my way outwards from what I consider my personal downtown ground zero.  The tentative kickoff point was Russell Square, of course, and from there I was off to the British Library and Museum, as well as the University of London buildings.  I met a friend there last weekend and he showed me around a little bit.  It was great to catch up with him and talk about 'the old days' back in Montreal when we were both grad students.  I told him it felt easier being here in some ways because I mostly understand everything people around me are saying.

Today, my mental map will expand a bit as I hit the Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Holborn areas.  There are a few shops down there that I need to visit.  After that I'll try my hand at taking a book out of the Senate House library, or any one that will let me.  Books are my thing, as many of you know, and I can't help acquiring them through purchase, lending, begging, borrowing or stealing.  I don't plan on begging or stealing, and I will only borrow with permission.

Adventures in Bloomsbury

I haven't been there, but I'm going tomorrow. After riding the Picadilly line tomorrow morning, I will meet my friend on the steps of the British Library and, most likely, recount stories from my first week in London and environs.

 This first week has been mostly about words. It is culturally insensitive to use the wrong word in certain social situations, especially when others realize that the mistake is being made more out of laziness than ineptitude.

So, while two of us queued to get our tickets for Leonard Cohen last Sunday, the night before my first day of work, the third person went to 'fetch' 'chips,' a task that involved 'queuing up' by the chip truck (chip 'lorry'?).

 We actually made it in with plenty of time to spare before Cohen came on and he went on to play for 3.5 hours (with a 15 minute intermission). It was an unforgettable show and it was a great way to start my new job, feeling just a little bit tired the next day.

Often I'm anxious at a new job, but here I'm not. It could be that I have more confidence now, or it could be that I seem to take to the sense of humor I'm finding here. I seem to be able to bring up the issue of words without it becoming too weird.

 'Bespoke' is another one, and then there's 'surgery.' Surgery is apparently like clinic, insofar as a North American might use the word clinic as a sort of metaphor for diagnosing something other than a human body. The British use 'surgery' this way.

So I made up the phrase 'bespoke surgery' which may or may not be funny, but we found it so (the three of us, my roommate and his wife who so generously showed me around London my first couple of days here).

And what, after all this, do I know of Bloomsbury? Next to nothing, other than that it is the literary heart of London, and that is saying something. I'm hoping to find bookshops and cafes, but I can't even picture the place in my mind. When I think Bloomsbury I somehow always think Leopold Bloom from Joyce's Ulysses.

Which is entirely inaccurate, but not entirely inappropriate, at least not for me.  It has an appropriately literary quality and it is, I hope, a peripatetic reference because I seem to remember characters in Ulysses walking around a lot.  But it has been a while since I read it.

London

Image: Harvard University Press web site

I have never been to London, nor have I ever been to England, Britain, the UK or Europe as of today.  By Thursday morning all of this will change when I touch down at Heathrow Airport on British Airways flight 94.

If London consists of a set of circulating discourses, representations and spatial recipes for cooking up 'London-ness,' just what precisely, if anything, comprises the 'essential' London?

As I mentally flip through what has registered in my brain 'about London' or 'about England/Britain/UK' over the years what can I say I truly 'know' about this place (or set of places)?

There's John Snow's cholera map, an early example of a mashup or even a GIS, in which new point data (cholera outbreak locations) was overlain upon an existing base map to solve a spatial problem.

The result has been an outbreak of the idea of a 'vector' of transmission (for Snow it was water in the local wells), and the birth of epidemiology.

The following 'memes' are just a sampling of some of the things that go into the makeup of the place we call 'London'.

They are 'place memes' in a giant place-meme-plex, the epidemic of London-ness, with vectors like the internet and TV pumping out ever-evolving exa-bytes of images, maps, stories, sounds and other information about this place.

Can I truly say I've caught the bug?  Have the set of practices, cultures and paradigms that make up London ever taken hold in me?

For me, there are a few books, some literature (though I've not read Dickens) with scattered references to the city.  There's The Map That Changed the World (Winchester), London (Ackroyd), and the new London: A History in Verse (see video below).


There's the London on the maps, that giant pulsing cell, that octopus, that big messy sprawl with the Thames winding through it like a strand of DNA.

There are all those songs from the 'new wave' of music I used to listen to in the early eighties, most of which were British, rediscovered this past weekend in a rented Fiat with satellite radio installed.

There is, of course, the London Olympics, still fresh in my mind, all those competitions, victories and scorching defeats I saw on TV while shuttling between Montreal and Vancouver to visit my ailing father.

The recent special report on London in the Economist is another point of interest in my mental file, the stories of which attempted to assay the fate of this vibrant and essential city.

There was the book by Self, illustrated by Steadman, in which he 'walks' from Heathrow to JFK airports in an attempt to 'critique' and contrast ideas of movement, constriction and control associated with notions of travel and wayfaring we find in modern (British and American) life.

And all of this gathered without ever having set foot in the place.  How will my view of things change once I actually get there and begin to gather firsthand knowledge?

Will I be better informed, with the secondhand knowledge beginning to take second seat, rounding out the firsthand knowledge gained not merely by description, but by experience?

More importantly, what will the process of navigating a boundary every day entail, of moving from the outside in, of moving towards 'being' the insider, and an ever receding and impossible goal of assimilation?

This will involve much reflection, beginning tomorrow when I step on board that plane.  Then, a new journey begins, and I intend to record, in writing and maps, the things I see and experience along the way.

The boundary crossing I will experience involves leaving a place where I am already a minority anglophone in  a French speaking nation (Quebec) that is itself a minority within the English speaking former British colony of Canada, and entering the domain of that former colonizer and fallen imperial power, where I will again be in the majority, linguistically speaking.

That linguistic compatibility could serve to mask some cultural incompatibilities and to provide a false sense of security in what will surely be at times a tense negotiation, but which will be smoothed by making friends and making an attempt to understand, to fit in.

As I make London my new home, my home away from home, my home-within-a-home of the cozy transatlantic world served by British Airways and the like, I will send off missives and inscriptions to try and give you, my reader, some sense of what I'm going through, the sense of adventure, frustration and discovery that always goes with the territory of being between two places, in transition moving back and forth between the two.

Deconstructing Enbridge

Source: http://sumofus.org/campaigns/enbridge/?sub=fb

The Douglas Channel and Kitimat are making some headlines this week after Enbridge produced a 'flyover video' including a classic propaganda map.  Below is a reaction, found on youtube and disseminated through participatory mapping and geoweb listservs (which is how I received it).  I am immediately drawn to the controversy because the Douglas Channel is a half hour drive from Terrace, my home town.


I finally located the original video on the Enbridge site. There is a disclaimer right at the start that states "The animation is for illustrative purposes only.  It is meant to be broadly representational, not to scale."  This, however, is an obfuscation if not an outright lie.  The disclaimer is repeated three times, once at the beginning, once at the appearance of Douglas Channel, and once at the end.

It is interesting to see how various interests are squaring off around a proposed pipeline and how obviously ideologies are coming to the forefront.

The geopolitics of the Enbridge pipeline are complex.   Environmentalists stress how the Great Bear Rainforest will be affected by the proposed pipeline, but those same environmentalists rarely include images of Tsimshian or Haisla livelihoods (including logging) in their propaganda.  Further complicating any easy positioning, indigenous peoples in the area are taking sides.  The Gitksan seem to have flip-flopped in their support of Enbridge due to internal dissent.  The Wet'suwet'en (allies of the Gitksan in the historic Delgamuukw case) seem to be in solidarity against Enbridge.

The premiers of British Columbia and Alberta are squaring off as well.  The Vancouver Sun has reported that some BC First Nations are outraged at Christy Clark's putting a price tag on traditional Dene and other lands.  Clark has made it known that she believes British Columbia to be taking all the risk and Alberta to be getting all the gain.  The Calgary Herald has retorted that Clark might be doing Albertans a favor by polarizing the debate and driving moderates into supporting positions (as against the opposition which is now, according to the Herald, made up of extremists).

What is important for this blog are the maps upon which all of this is based.  So, getting back to 'that map' the one shown in the Enbridge video.  There is another very interesting video that appears to the right of the video tour.  This link shows Enbridge's justification for 'looking west' to the northern gateway of Douglas Channel.  The video is so packed with propaganda it makes the head spin, and most of it has cartographic and geographic content and overtones. But take note, at 4:33 in this tanker safety video, Enbridge includes a proper map of Douglas channel with all islands included and a detailed plan for addressing safety issues.

This blog post is more a compendium of links to information about the pipeline and its controversies.  It is also a prelude and invitation for beginning to sort out, by writing about it, thoughts about this debate, and what various parties' maps say that is unspoken in their actual verbiage.  Maps, like actions, speak louder than words.  A map is worth a hundred thousand words (or more), and more than that is likely to be spilled before we see the end results.  Should this spillage of words be seen as foreshadowing of things to come?  Who will then be to blame?  Can we blame it on the maps, or should we blame it on those who so adeptly twist their original purposes?  How can one twist a map's purpose when all maps are propaganda to some extent?  These and many other questions remain to be sorted out.  They are not new.  We are back to ground zero in terms of critical cartography.  Break out the Harley and let's have a heyday.

Navigating the Geoweb by Periplum

I first learned of the word 'periplum' from a book about Ezra Pound written by Hugh Kenner.  From what I can gather, Pound used periplum as a method for composing his Cantos, and in his usage the term means something like a bird's eye view, or the view from the crow's nest of a ship.  The last part I gleaned from Wikipedia, but there are echoes of Homer's Odyssey, on which the Cantos were based, and which definitely has a seafaring trope running through it.

My idea is to take the method and apply it to theorizing about the geoweb (a definition of which appears in my last blog post 'Geowebs').  When navigating from a metaphorical crow's nest while on, for instance, Google Earth, this hypothetical navigator might take a variety of veiwpoints from vertical, high elevation to oblique, low elevation.  The alternation between these two viewpoints as a method for navigating Google Earth is what I would call navigating (part of) the geoweb by periplum.

This is in fact how I tend to use Google Earth, but I'm not sure if others who use the program use it in the same way I do.  Today I read a Harper's book review of Jennings' Maphead in which the reviewer noted that Jennings failed to mention the Rumsey map collection, citing a major oversight and silence (and I tend to agree).  The reviewer described how you can view the Rumsey collection of maps, georeferenced and/or 'rubber sheeted' to conform to the Google projection and/or datum (or lack thereof).  I found myself quickly zooming in and out, giddy at the possibilities of mixing old maps on a new geoweb platform.  I was navigating the geoweb by periplum and doing so in a particular way.  I was zooming back and forth in time, gauging the distance each time by the dates included on layers added each time the center point of an old map was clicked.

I would like to extend the metaphor of periplum and to make it political at the same time.  When navigating by periplum, one is always measuring the distance between two things and in the classical formulation this means, as much as anything, the distance between prominent points on a coastline.  Imagine fog and rain rolling in, and the seafarer up there at the top of the mast communicating what he sees to those on deck below.  In terms of high geographical theory, there is something to be made of the high/low aspect of periplum.  I noticed that (admittedly non-geographical) theorists like Zizek and Nietzsche tend to alternate between a 'view from above' and a 'view down below' full of particularisms, parables and apocrypha.  A bit like Google Earth.

This blog post is part of a line of inquiry extending back to a response I wrote to a Kingsbury and Jones Geoforum article that appeared in 2009, in which I criticized (or critiqued, I'm not sure which) the 'double binary' the authors had set up for themselves in trying to combine left/right sensibilities (Benjamin and Nietzsche in their case) in a 'playful' and 'Dionysian' deconstruction of Google Earth.  My response will, in a full length article, attempt an alternative reading that will avoid the double bind they set up.  The periplum is playful but it is also serious, and it is political in a robust way by which I mean, it seeks to see deeply into things through the smoke and mirrors.

I found that Google Earthing things (just like Googling, but on Google Earth) associated with left/right divides resulted in some interesting results.  I Google Earthed 'gulag,' 'concentration camp,' and 'art,' as an initial query designed to mirror communist, fascist and artistic political sensibilities.  The results are forthcoming as I write up the article.

Geowebs

"geocoding of Web content to specific parts of the earth surface
driven by a combination of automatic and user
generated efforts and resulting in a growing body
of content with specific spatial references (Graham et al 2012, 3 citing Turner
2006)"

The quote above is a definition of "a geospatial Web ( or 'geoweb')" given by Graham et al (2012, 3).  In the past I have made an argument for a plurality of geowebs.  While the paper in which the quote above appears admits the possibility of multiple geowebs, I have yet to see anyone venture the possibility that multiple geowebs currently do exist in different forms and with varying degrees of power over geocoded lives.

The main problem in the above definition for alternate, or even counter-geowebs, lies in the word 'automatic,' and not for the reasons that might be easily inferred.  A counter-geoweb might include automatic elements that counter-map an existing geoweb by overlaying opaquely coded spatial references lacking precise coordinates or obfuscating their origins.

An almost 'artistic' geoweb might then emerge, driven by generalized angst, decentralized protest and hope for a future free from the control of (geo)code.

The word 'automatic' is problematic instead for an alternate geoweb of my own theoretical construction, but not of my own making.  The alternate geoweb (or counter-geoweb) I posit to exist is that of indigenous peoples that has existed from time immemorial, or at least for several thousand years, and many many generations.  The toponymic surfaces of being and place, the depth of place-based knowledge in landscape that, for instance, the Cree have accumulated over centuries are in a sense coded references to specific places that are driven by bottom up processes of knowledge accumulation.

In my PhD dissertation I posited a two part geoweb, one ancient ('traditional') and one postmodern ('local'). Constant references in my reading to 'webs of knowledge' amongst the Cree of eastern James Bay led me to believe that there is no real fundamental difference between older and much newer 'webs of knowledge' (Carlson 2008).  Subsequently I received some reviews challenging my theoretical construction.

Thus, the present blog post.  An ongoing thread of research will involve picking apart differences between indigenous and postmodern ways of knowing, and ways in which the former adopt the latter and vice-versa. A mutually constructed and hybrid 'web of knowledge' is growing as indigenous cultures around the world adopt geosocial media and geospatial technologies in increasingly sophisticated ways.

In the end I do not really have a problem with indigenous knowledge being considered automatic as long as it is not constructed in behavioralist (Skinnerian or Pavlovian) terms.  The 'memetic' aspect of places means that, to a certain extent, geospatial knowledge might indeed be 'automatic' in the sense that, for instance, in wayfaring across the land, the hunter knows how to get from a to b by following an explicit or implicit set of directions or even 'spatial recipes.'  These recipes, explicitly formulated or implicitly copied through performance, facilitate and ease the intergenerational transmission of place based knowledge systems essential for the survival of younger and future generations.

The idea that the Cree, for instance, should use cell phones and GPS to augment such processes should neither shock nor surprise.  Cree, Inuit, and many other northern and indigenous cultures have survived through the generations in less than ideal conditions and in changing environments 'from time immemorial' precisely because they have an ability to seize upon and adapt new technologies to those conditions and environments.

References:
Carlson H  2008  Home is the Hunter  UBC Press, Vancouver

Graham M, Zook M and Boulton A  2012  Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code  Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers  Online first in advance of publication.

Turner A  2006  Introduction to Neogeography  O'Reilly, Sebastopol, CA