Academic literature on the topic 'Tactile cartographic media'

Within the existing body of geographical work on touch, the haptic and the surficial, as well as within the emerging field of haptic media studies, cartography has not yet been specifically considered. Moving beyond a technical examination of special tactile map products, this article explores the tactile, haptic and surficial qualities of everyday cartographic experiences in digital, non-digital and mixed formats. These qualities are researched through a phenomenological-aesthetic lens, a sensuous disposition and a creative sensibility, thus enacting what could be described as ‘non-representational cartography’. Drawing from multisensory visual ethnography, this paper explores the perspective of ‘tactile empathy’ through photographic/video recordings based on the matching of seen and experienced touch described by neuroscientists. Some personal ‘map stories’ generate a possible agenda for the study of haptic cartographies, which includes: representations of cartographic tactility; 3D sensations; cartographic surfaces; the spatialities of maps; gestures, or maps as a touch space. This article is complemented by a photo essay available in the Society and Space open website at the URL http://societyandspace.org/2018/06/13/haptic-cartographies-a-photo-essay/

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The near future of our planet under climate change is predicted to be characterized by increasingly frequent and severe natural hazards of all kinds. Understanding the potential spatial extent and impacts of these hazards is a critical component of creating effective emergency management plans, not just on the part of emergency managers and relief organizations, but also for those who may reside in areas vulnerable to disaster. Often, information about disaster risk is communicated using maps, such as in the case of storm surge maps, evacuation zone maps or wildfire extent maps. While generally helpful, these maps are of limited use to those with low vision or blindness, and the information is rarely, if ever, distributed in accessible formats. Furthermore, in contrast to wayfinding maps, this type of information does not lend itself to being translated into a set of instructions to be read aloud by a test-to-speech device. Instead, risk maps are useful because they allow users to identify and assess spatial relationships between many features on the maps- a key process that would be muddled if the maps were to be verbally described, and thus a process that is currently inaccessible to those who cannot see the maps. As people with visual impairments are especially vulnerable in disaster scenarios, working towards the universal accessibility of spatial information is imperative for inclusive disaster preparedness and hazard mitigation.</p><p>Many challenges exist in creating maps for people with visual impairments. The most obvious is the fact that a visual medium cannot be used by someone who is unable to see. It is important to note that “visual impairment” covers a broad spectrum of conditions from pronounced myopia to complete blindness. Here, I will be limiting my topical scope to people with total or near-total blindness. Tactile maps are the tool of choice for this population. However, it is generally harder to distinguish between similar patterns using touch than using sight, so features on a tactile map need to be unique and unambiguous. This makes it more challenging to communicate information typically represented using color gradients or transparency. Additionally, distributing spatial information in tactile form poses another layer of complications. There are several options for creating tactile maps, from embossed paper to 3D printing, and each come with their own advantages and drawbacks. Cost, speed and detail all vary among these media, and thus each potentially impact the user’s perception of risk.</p><p> In my talk, I will be examining these challenges as they intersect with research on cartographic risk visualization, emergency management, and tactile maps in general. First, I will briefly discuss the state of risk visualization in the context of emergency management, focusing on preparedness. Then, I will give a general overview of the extant research on tactile maps with particular attention paid to their influence on spatial cognition. Next, I will examine how the considerations particular to risk map creation are affected by the potentials and limitations of tactile maps. Finally, I will outline a research agenda for creating and distributing accessible maps for emergency management. Using visual impairment and tactile maps as starting points, I will identify further aspects of emergency management that urgently require greater attention to accessibility, and how cartographic research and technology can help bridge those gaps.</p><p> Planning for natural hazards is an essential step in mitigating their impacts on communities, and that process includes individual citizens making their own plans for evacuation, finding shelter or securing food, water or medicine. This is especially important for people with disabilities, as resources deployed after a disaster may fail to accommodate their particular needs, and processes such as evacuating a building or house can take substantially longer than average. Planning for these scenarios is made all the more difficult for people with visual impairments, as conventional maps are unhelpful, and environmental awareness is limited. Thus, empowering people with visual impairments to make emergency plans for themselves and contribute to planning for their community as a whole can help build autonomy and self-confidence and ultimately ensure that disaster plans truly account for everyone.</p>

Spatial media for people who are blind or visually impaired (B/VI) have evolved considerably in the years following Chris Perkins’ review of tactile map research, especially due to the proliferation of Internet access, mobile computing, and GPS technology. Reviewing intervening research, I identify prevailing themes in cartographic data management, media production, map design, and map use. I then propose a research agenda that identifies four high-priority topics for investigation: research conducted by people who are B/VI, maps created by people who are B/VI, low-tech tactile mapping, and social dynamics of tactile map use and production.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. —Marshall McLuhan. What is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action upon them. —Henri Bergson. Introduction: Subjective Maps as ‘Contact Zones’ Maps feature heavily in a variety of media; they appear in textbooks, on television, in print, and on the screens of our handheld devices. The production of cartographic texts is a process that is imbued with power relations and bound up with the production and reproduction of social life (Pinder 405). Mapping involves choices as to what information is and is not included. In their organisation, categorisation, modeling, and representation maps show and they hide. Thus “the idea that a small number of maps or even a single (and singular) map might be sufficient can only apply in a spatialised area of study whose own self-affirmation depends on isolation from its context” (Lefebvre 85–86). These isolations determine the way we interpret the physical, biological, and social worlds. The map can be thought of as a schematic for political systems within a confined set of spatial relations, or as a container for political discourse. Mapping contributes equally to the construction of experiential realities as to the representation of physical space, which also contains the potential to incorporate representations of temporality and rhythm to spatial schemata. Thus maps construct realities as much as they represent them and coproduce space as much as the political identities of people who inhabit them. Maps are active texts and have the ability to promote social change (Pickles 146). It is no wonder, then, that artists, theorists and activists alike readily engage in the conflicted praxis of mapping. This critical engagement “becomes a method to track the past, embody memories, explain the unexplainable” and manifest the latent (Ibarra 66). In this paper I present a short case study of Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies a new media art project that aims to model a citizen driven effort to participate in a critical form of cartography, which challenges dominant representations of the city-space. I present a critical textual analysis of the maps produced in the workshops, the artist statements relating to these works used in the exhibition setting, and statements made by the participants on the project’s blog. This “praxis-logical” approach allows for a focus on the project as a space of aggregation and the communicative processes set in motion within them. In analysing such projects we could (and should) be asking questions about the functions served by the experimental concepts under study—who has put it forward? Who is utilising it and under what circumstances? Where and how has it come into being? How does discourse circulate within it? How do these spaces as sites of emergent forms of resistance within global capitalism challenge traditional social movements? How do they create self-reflexive systems?—as opposed to focusing on ontological and technical aspects of digital mapping (Renzi 73). In de-emphasising the technology of digital cartography and honing in on social relations embedded within the text(s), this study attempts to complement other studies on digital mapping (see Strom) by presenting a case from the field of politically oriented tactical media. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has been selected for analysis, in this exploration of media as “zone.” It goes some way to incorporating subjective narratives into spatial texts. This is a three-step process where participants tapped into spatial subjectivities by data collection or environmental sensing led by personal reflection or ethnographic enquiry, documenting and geo-tagging their findings in the map. Finally they engaged an imaginative or ludic process of synthesising their data in ways not inherent within the traditional conventions of cartography, such as the use of sound and distortion to explicate the intensity of invisible phenomena at various coordinates in the city-space. In what follows I address the “zone” theme by suggesting that if we apply McLuhan’s notion of media as environment together with Henri Bergson’s assertion that visibility and tangibility constitutes the potential for action to digital maps, projects such as Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies constitute a “contact zone.” A type of zone where groups come together at the local level and flows of discourse about art, information communication, media, technology, and environment intersect with local histories and cultures within the cartographic text. A “contact zone,” then, is a site where latent subjectivities are manifested and made potentially politically potent. “Contact zones,” however, need not be spaces for the aggrieved or excluded (Renzi 82), as they may well foster the ongoing cumulative politics of the mundane capable of developing into liminal spaces where dominant orders may be perforated. A “contact zone” is also not limitless and it must be made clear that the breaking of cartographic convention, as is the case with the project under study here, need not be viewed as resistances per se. It could equally represent thresholds for public versus private life, the city-as-text and the city-as-social space, or the zone where representations of space and representational spaces interface (Lefebvre 233), and culture flows between the mediated and ideated (Appadurai 33–36). I argue that a project like Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies demonstrates that maps as urban text form said “contact zones,” where not only are media forms such as image, text, sound, and video are juxtaposed in a singular spatial schematic, but narratives of individual and collective subjectivities (which challenge dominant orders of space and time, and city-rhythm) are contested. Such a “contact zone” in turn may not only act as a resource for citizens in the struggle of urban design reform and a democratisation of the facilities it produces, but may also serve as a heuristic device for researchers of new media spatiotemporalities and their social implications. Critical Cartography and Media Tactility Before presenting this brief illustrative study something needs to be said of the context from which Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has arisen. Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space (see historypin for example), few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology (Crampton and Krygier 14). According to Foucault, power was not applied from the top down but manifested laterally in a highly diffused manner (Foucault 117; Crampton and Krygier 14). Foucault’s privileging of the spatial and epistemological aspects of power and resistance complements the Frankfurt School’s resistance to oppression in the local. Together the two perspectives orient power relative to spatial and temporal subjectivities, and thus fit congruently into cartographic conventions. In order to make sense of these practices the post-oppositional character of tactical media maps should be located within an economy of power relations where resistance is never outside of the field of forces but rather is its indispensable element (Renzi 72). Such exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International, whose maps of Paris were inherently political. The Situationist International incorporated appropriated texts into, and manipulated, existing maps to explicate city-rhythms and intensities to construct imaginative and alternate representations of the city. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies adopts a similar approach. The artists’ statement reads: We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; […] to explore the visible and invisible […] city; […] we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory, defined as the study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the emotional behaviour of individuals. The project proposals put forth by workshop participants also draw heavily from the Situationists’s A New Theatre of Operations for Culture. A number of Situationist theories and practices feature in the rationale for the maps created in the Bangalore Subjective Cartographies workshop. For example, the Situationists took as their base a general notion of experimental behaviour and permanent play where rationality was approached on the basis of whether or not something interesting could be created out of it (Wark 12). The dérive is the rapid passage through various ambiences with a playful-constructive awareness of the psychographic contours of a specific section of space-time (Debord). The dérive can be thought of as an exploration of an environment without preconceptions about the contours of its geography, but rather a focus on the reality of inhabiting a place. Détournement involves the re-use of elements from recognised media to create a new work with meaning often opposed to the original. Psycho-geography is taken to be the subjective ambiences of particular spaces and times. The principles of détournement and psycho-geography imply a unitary urbanism, which hints at the potential of achieving in environments what may be achieved in media with détournement. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies carries Situationist praxis forward by attempting to exploit certain properties of information digitalisation to formulate textual representations of unitary urbanism. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies is demonstrative of a certain media tactility that exists more generally across digital-networked media ecologies and channels this to political ends. This tactility of media is best understood through textual properties awarded by the process and logic of digitalisation described in Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media. These properties are: numerical representation in the form of binary code, which allows for the reification of spatial data in a uniform format that can be stored and retrieved in-silico as opposed to in-situ; manipulation of this code by the use of algorithms, which renders the scales and lines of maps open to alteration; modularity that enables incorporation of other textual objects into the map whilst maintaining each incorporated item’s individual identity; the removal to some degree of human interaction in terms of the translation of environmental data into cartographic form (whilst other properties listed here enable human interaction with the cartographic text), and the nature of digital code allows for changes to accumulate incrementally creating infinite potential for refinements (Manovich 49–63). The Subjective Mapping of Bangalore Bangalore is an interesting site for such a project given the recent and rapid evolution of its media infrastructure. As a “media city,” the first television sets appeared in Bangalore at some point in the early 1980s. The first Internet Service Provider (ISP), which served corporate clients only, commenced operating a decade later and then offered dial-up services to domestic clients in the mid-1990s. At present, however, Bangalore has the largest number of broadband Internet connections in India. With the increasing convergence of computing and telecommunications with traditional forms of media such as film and photography, Bangalore demonstrates well what Scott McQuire terms a media-architecture complex, the core infrastructure for “contact zones” (vii). Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies was a workshop initiated by French artists Benjamin Cadon and Ewen Cardonnet. It was conducted with a number of students at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in November and December 2009. Using Metamap.fr (an online cartographic tool that makes it possible to add multimedia content such as texts, video, photos, sounds, links, location points, and paths to digital maps) students were asked to, in groups of two or three, collect and consult data on ‘felt’ life in Bangalore using an ethnographic, transverse geographic, thematic, or temporal approach. The objective of the project was to model a citizen driven effort to subvert dominant cartographic representations of the city. In doing so, the project and this paper posits that there is potential for such methods to be adopted to form new literacies of cartographic media and to render the cartographic imaginary politically potent. The participants’ brief outlined two themes. The first was the visible and symbolic city where participants were asked to investigate the influence of the urban environment on the behaviours and sensations of its inhabitants, and to research and collect signifiers of traditional and modern worlds. The invisible city brief asked participants to consider the latent environment and link it to human behaviour—in this case electromagnetic radiation linked to the cities telecommunications and media infrastructure was to be specifically investigated. The Visible and Symbolic City During British rule many Indian cities functioned as dual entities where flow of people and commodities circulated between localised enclaves and the centralised British-built areas. Mirroring this was the dual mode of administration where power was shared between elected Indian legislators and appointed British officials (Hoselitz 432–33). Reflecting on this diarchy leads naturally to questions about the politics of civic services such as the water supply, modes of public communication and instruction, and the nature of the city’s administration, distribution, and manufacturing functions. Workshop participants approached these issues in a variety of ways. In the subjective maps entitled Microbial Streets and Water Use and Reuse, food and water sources of street vendors are traced with the aim to map water supply sources relative to the movements of street vendors operating in the city. Images of the microorganisms are captured using hacked webcams as makeshift microscopes. The data was then converted to audio using Pure Data—a real-time graphical programming environment for the processing audio, video and graphical data. The intention of Microbial Streets is to demonstrate how mapping technologies could be used to investigate the flows of food and water from source to consumer, and uncover some of the latencies involved in things consumed unhesitatingly everyday. Typographical Lens surveys Russell Market, an older part of the city through an exploration of the aesthetic and informational transformation of the city’s shop and street signage. In Ethni City, Avenue Road is mapped from the perspective of local goldsmiths who inhabit the area. Both these maps attempt to study the convergence of the city’s dual function and how the relationship between merchants and their customers has changed during the transition from localised enclaves, catering to the sale of particular types of goods, to the development of shopping precincts, where a variety of goods and services can be sought. Two of the project’s maps take a spatiotemporal-archivist approach to the city. Bangalore 8mm 1940s uses archival Super 8 footage and places digitised copies on the map at the corresponding locations of where they were originally filmed. The film sequences, when combined with satellite or street-view images, allow for the juxtaposition of present day visions of the city with those of the 1940s pre-partition era. Chronicles of Collection focuses on the relationship between people and their possessions from the point of view of the object and its pathways through the city in space and time. Collectors were chosen for this map as the value they placed on the object goes beyond the functional and the monetary, which allowed the resultant maps to access and express spatially the layers of meaning a particular object may take on in differing contexts of place and time in the city-space. The Invisible City In the expression of power through city-spaces, and by extension city-texts, certain circuits and flows are ossified and others rendered latent. Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters writes: however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project. (252) The artists’ statement puts forward this possible response, an exploration of the latent aesthetics of the city-space: In this sense then, each device that enriches our perception for possible action on the real is worthy of attention. Even if it means the use of subjective methods, that may not be considered ‘evidence’. However, we must admit that any subjective investigation, when used systematically and in parallel with the results of technical measures, could lead to new possibilities of knowledge. Electromagnetic City maps the city’s sources of electromagnetic radiation, primarily from mobile phone towers, but also as a by-product of our everyday use of technologies, televisions, mobile phones, Internet Wi-Fi computer screens, and handheld devices. This map explores issues around how the city’s inhabitants hear, see, feel, and represent things that are a part of our environment but invisible, and asks: are there ways that the intangible can be oriented spatially? The intensity of electromagnetic radiation being emitted from these sources, which are thought to negatively influence the meditation of ancient sadhus (sages) also features in this map. This data was collected by taking electromagnetic flow meters into the suburb of Yelhanka (which is also of interest because it houses the largest milk dairy in the state of Karnataka) in a Situationist-like derive and then incorporated back into Metamap. Signal to Noise looks at the struggle between residents concerned with the placement of mobile phone towers around the city. It does so from the perspectives of people who seek information about their placement concerned about mobile phone signal quality, and others concerned about the proximity of this infrastructure to their homes due to to potential negative health effects. Interview footage was taken (using a mobile phone) and manipulated using Pure Data to distort the visual and audio quality of the footage in proportion to the fidelity of the mobile phone signal in the geographic area where the footage was taken. Conclusion The “contact zone” operating in Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies, and the underlying modes of social enquiry that make it valuable, creates potential for the contestation of new forms of polity that may in turn influence urban administration and result in more representative facilities of, and for, city-spaces and their citizenry. Robert Hassan argues that: This project would mean using tactical media to produce new spaces and temporalities that are explicitly concerned with working against the unsustainable “acceleration of just about everything” that our present neoliberal configuration of the network society has generated, showing that alternatives are possible and workable—in ones job, home life, family life, showing that digital [spaces and] temporality need not mean the unerring or unbending meter of real-time [and real city-space] but that an infinite number of temporalities [and subjectivities of space-time] can exist within the network society to correspond with a diversity of local and contextual cultures, societies and polities. (174) As maps and locative motifs begin to feature more prominently in media, analyses such as the one discussed in this paper may allow for researchers to develop theoretical approaches to studying newer forms of media. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. “Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://bengaluru.labomedia.org/page/2/›. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. Crampton, Jeremy W., and John Krygier. “An Introduction to Critical Cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geography 4 (2006): 11–13. Chardonnet, Ewen, and Benjamin Cadon. “Semaphore.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://semaphore.blogs.com/semaphore/spectral_investigations_collective/›. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm›. Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx. New York: Semitotext[e], 1991.Hassan, Robert. The Chronoscopic Society: Globalization, Time and Knowledge in the Networked Economy. New York: Lang, 2003. “Historypin.” 4 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.historypin.com/›. Hoselitz, Bert F. “A Survey of the Literature on Urbanization in India.” India’s Urban Future Ed. Roy Turner. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. 425-43. Ibarra, Anna. “Cosmologies of the Self.” Elephant 7 (2011): 66–96. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fibre. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. “Metamap.fr.” 3 Mar. 2011 ‹http://metamap.fr/›. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. London: Penguin, 1967. McQuire, Scott. The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage, 2008. Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004. Pinder, David. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405–27. “Pure Data.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://puredata.info/›. Renzi, Alessandra. “The Space of Tactical Media” Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Ed. Megan Boler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 71–100. Situationist International. “A New Theatre of Operations for Culture.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/urbanism/reading-the-situationist-city/›. Strom, Timothy Erik. “Space, Cyberspace and the Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps.” M/C Journal 4.3 (2011). 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/370›. Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left, 1979.

IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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IntroductionSupermarkets are functionally challenging environments for people with vision impairments. A supermarket is likely to house an average of 45,000 products in a median floor-space of 4,529 square meters and many visually impaired people are unable to shop without assistance, which greatly impedes personal independence (Nicholson et al.). The task of selecting goods in a supermarket is an “activity that is expressive of agency, identity and creativity” (Sutherland) from which many vision-impaired persons are excluded. In response to this, a number of proof of concept (demonstrating feasibility) and prototype assistive technologies are being developed which aim to use smart phones as potential sensorial aides for vision impaired persons. In this paper, I discuss two such prototypic technologies, Shop Talk and BlindShopping. I engage with this issue’s list theme by suggesting that, on the one hand, list making is a uniquely human activity that demonstrates our need for order, reliance on memory, reveals our idiosyncrasies, and provides insights into our private lives (Keaggy 12). On the other hand, lists feature in the creation of spatial inventories that represent physical environments (Perec 3-4, 9-10). The use of lists in the architecture of assistive technologies for shopping illuminates the interaction between these two modalities of list use where items contained in a list are not only textual but also cartographic elements that link the material and immaterial in space and time (Haber 63). I argue that despite the emancipatory potential of assistive shopping technologies, their efficacy in practical situations is highly dependent on the extent to which they can integrate a number of lists to produce representations of space that are meaningful for vision impaired users. I suggest that the extent to which these prototypes may translate to becoming commercially viable, widely adopted technologies is heavily reliant upon commercial and institutional infrastructures, data sources, and regulation. Thus, their design, manufacture and adoption-potential are shaped by the extent to which certain data inventories are accessible and made interoperable. To overcome such constraints, it is important to better understand the “spatial syntax” associated with the shopping task for a vision impaired person; that is, the connected ordering of real and virtual spatial elements that result in a supermarket as a knowable space within which an assisted “spatial practice” of shopping can occur (Kellerman 148, Lefebvre 16).In what follows, I use the concept of lists to discuss the production of supermarket-space in relation to the enabling and disabling potentials of assistive technologies. First, I discuss mobile digital technologies relative to disability and impairment and describe how the shopping task produces a disabling spatial practice. Second, I present a case study showing how assistive technologies function in aiding vision impaired users in completing the task of supermarket shopping. Third, I discuss various factors that may inhibit the liberating potential of technology assisted shopping by vision-impaired people. Addressing Shopping as a Disabling Spatial Practice Consider how a shopping list might inform one’s experience of supermarket space. The way shopping lists are written demonstrate the variability in the logic that governs list writing. As Bill Keaggy demonstrates in his found shopping list Web project and subsequent book, Milk, Eggs, Vodka, a shopping list may be written on a variety of materials, be arranged in a number of orientations, and the writer may use differing textual attributes, such as size or underlining to show emphasis. The writer may use longhand, abbreviate, write neatly, scribble, and use an array of alternate spelling and naming conventions. For example, items may be listed based on knowledge of the location of products, they may be arranged on a list as a result of an inventory of a pantry or fridge, or they may be copied in the order they appear in a recipe. Whilst shopping, some may follow strictly the order of their list, crossing back and forth between aisles. Some may work through their list item-by-item, perhaps forward scanning to achieve greater economies of time and space. As a person shops, their memory may be stimulated by visual cues reminding them of products they need that may not be included on their list. For the vision impaired, this task is near impossible to complete without the assistance of a relative, friend, agency volunteer, or store employee. Such forms of assistance are often unsatisfactory, as delays may be caused due to the unavailability of an assistant, or the assistant having limited literacy, knowledge, or patience to adequately meet the shopper’s needs. Home delivery services, though readily available, impede personal independence (Nicholson et al.). Katie Ellis and Mike Kent argue that “an impairment becomes a disability due to the impact of prevailing ableist social structures” (3). It can be said, then, that supermarkets function as a disability producing space for the vision impaired shopper. For the vision impaired, a supermarket is a “hegemonic modern visual infrastructure” where, for example, merchandisers may reposition items regularly to induce customers to explore areas of the shop that they wouldn’t usually, a move which adds to the difficulty faced by those customers with impaired vision who work on the assumption that items remain as they usually are (Schillmeier 161).In addressing this issue, much emphasis has been placed on the potential of mobile communications technologies in affording vision impaired users greater mobility and flexibility (Jolley 27). However, as Gerard Goggin argues, the adoption of mobile communication technologies has not necessarily “gone hand in hand with new personal and collective possibilities” given the limited access to standard features, even if the device is text-to-speech enabled (98). Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) limit the way a device accesses and reproduces information, and confusion over whether audio rights are needed to convert text-to-speech, impede the accessibility of mobile communications technologies for vision impaired users (Ellis and Kent 136). Accessibility and functionality issues like these arise out of the needs, desires, and expectations of the visually impaired as a user group being considered as an afterthought as opposed to a significant factor in the early phases of design and prototyping (Goggin 89). Thus, the development of assistive technologies for the vision impaired has been left to third parties who must adopt their solutions to fit within certain technical parameters. It is valuable to consider what is involved in the task of shopping in order to appreciate the considerations that must be made in the design of shopping intended assistive technologies. Shopping generally consists of five sub-tasks: travelling to the store; finding items in-store; paying for and bagging items at the register; exiting the store and getting home; and, the often overlooked task of putting items away once at home. In this process supermarkets exhibit a “trichotomous spatial ontology” consisting of locomotor space that a shopper moves around the store, haptic space in the immediate vicinity of the shopper, and search space where individual products are located (Nicholson et al.). In completing these tasks, a shopper will constantly be moving through and switching between all three of these spaces. In the next section I examine how assistive technologies function in producing supermarkets as both enabling and disabling spaces for the vision impaired. Assistive Technologies for Vision Impaired ShoppersJason Farman (43) and Adriana de Douza e Silva both argue that in many ways spaces have always acted as information interfaces where data of all types can reside. Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Quick Response (QR) codes all allow for practically every spatial encounter to be an encounter with information. Site-specific and location-aware technologies address the desire for meaningful representations of space for use in everyday situations by the vision impaired. Further, the possibility of an “always-on” connection to spatial information via a mobile phone with WiFi or 3G connections transforms spatial experience by “enfolding remote [and latent] contexts inside the present context” (de Souza e Silva). A range of GPS navigation systems adapted for vision-impaired users are currently on the market. Typically, these systems convert GPS information into text-to-speech instructions and are either standalone devices, such as the Trekker Breeze, or they use the compass, accelerometer, and 3G or WiFi functions found on most smart phones, such as Loadstone. Whilst both these products are adequate in guiding a vision-impaired user from their home to a supermarket, there are significant differences in their interfaces and data architectures. Trekker Breeze is a standalone hardware device that produces talking menus, maps, and GPS information. While its navigation functionality relies on a worldwide radio-navigation system that uses a constellation of 24 satellites to triangulate one’s position (May and LaPierre 263-64), its map and text-to-speech functionality relies on data on a DVD provided with the unit. Loadstone is an open source software system for Nokia devices that has been developed within the vision-impaired community. Loadstone is built on GNU General Public License (GPL) software and is developed from private and user based funding; this overcomes the issue of Trekker Breeze’s reliance on trading policies and pricing models of the few global vendors of satellite navigation data. Both products have significant shortcomings if viewed in the broader context of the five sub-tasks involved in shopping described above. Trekker Breeze and Loadstone require that additional devices be connected to it. In the case of Trekker Breeze it is a tactile keypad, and with Loadstone it is an aftermarket screen reader. To function optimally, Trekker Breeze requires that routes be pre-recorded and, according to a review conducted by the American Foundation for the Blind, it requires a 30-minute warm up time to properly orient itself. Both Trekker Breeze and Loadstone allow users to create and share Points of Interest (POI) databases showing the location of various places along a given route. Non-standard or duplicated user generated content in POI databases may, however, have a negative effect on usability (Ellis and Kent 2). Furthermore, GPS-based navigation systems are accurate to approximately ten metres, which means that users must rely on their own mobility skills when they are required to change direction or stop for traffic. This issue with GPS accuracy is more pronounced when a vision-impaired user is approaching a supermarket where they are likely to encounter environmental hazards with greater frequency and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in greater density. Here the relations between space defined and spaces poorly defined or undefined by the GPS device interact to produce the supermarket surrounds as a disabling space (Galloway). Prototype Systems for Supermarket Navigation and Product SelectionIn the discussion to follow, I look at two prototype systems using QR codes and RFID that are designed to be used in-store by vision-impaired shoppers. Shop Talk is a proof of concept system developed by researchers at Utah State University that uses synthetic verbal route directions to assist vision impaired shoppers with supermarket navigation, product search, and selection (Nicholson et al.). Its hardware consists of a portable computational unit, a numeric keypad, a wireless barcode scanner and base station, headphones for the user to receive the synthetic speech instructions, a USB hub to connect all the components, and a backpack to carry them (with the exception of the barcode scanner) which has been slightly modified with a plastic stabiliser to assist in correct positioning. Shop Talk represents the supermarket environment using two data structures. The first is comprised of two elements: a topological map of locomotor space that allows for directional labels of “left,” “right,” and “forward,” to be added to the supermarket floor plan; and, for navigation of haptic space, the supermarket inventory management system, which is used to create verbal descriptions of product information. The second data structure is a Barcode Connectivity Matrix (BCM), which associates each shelf barcode with several pieces of information such as aisle, aisle side, section, shelf, position, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, product description, and price. Nicholson et al. suggest that one of their “most immediate objectives for future work is to migrate the system to a more conventional mobile platform” such as a smart phone (see Mobile Shopping). The Personalisable Interactions with Resources on AMI-Enabled Mobile Dynamic Environments (PRIAmIDE) research group at the University of Deusto is also approaching Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) by exploring the smart phone’s sensing, communication, computing, and storage potential. As part of their work, the prototype system, BlindShopping, was developed to address the issue of assisted shopping using entirely off-the-shelf technology with minimal environmental adjustments to navigate the store and search, browse and select products (López-de-Ipiña et al. 34). Blind Shopping’s architecture is based on three components. Firstly, a navigation system provides the user with synthetic verbal instructions to users via headphones connected to the smart phone device being used in order to guide them around the store. This requires a RFID reader to be attached to the tip of the user’s white cane and road-marking-like RFID tag lines to be distributed throughout the aisles. A smartphone application processes the RFID data that is received by the smart phone via Bluetooth generating the verbal navigation commands as a result. Products are recognised by pointing a QR code reader enabled smart phone at an embossed code located on a shelf. The system is managed by a Rich Internet Application (RIA) interface, which operates by Web browser, and is used to register the RFID tags situated in the aisles and the QR codes located on shelves (López-de-Ipiña and 37-38). A typical use-scenario for Blind Shopping involves a user activating the system by tracing an “L” on the screen or issuing the “Location” voice command, which activates the supermarket navigation system which then asks the user to either touch an RFID floor marking with their cane or scan a QR code on a nearby shelf to orient the system. The application then asks the user to dictate the product or category of product that they wish to locate. The smart phone maintains a continuous Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader to keep track of user location at all times. By drawing a “P” or issuing the “Product” voice command, a user can switch the device into product recognition mode where the smart phone camera is pointed at an embossed QR code on a shelf to retrieve information about a product such as manufacturer, name, weight, and price, via synthetic speech (López-de-Ipiña et al. 38-39). Despite both systems aiming to operate with as little environmental adjustment as possible, as well as minimise the extent to which a supermarket would need to allocate infrastructural, administrative, and human resources to implementing assistive technologies for vision impaired shoppers, there will undoubtedly be significant establishment and maintenance costs associated with the adoption of production versions of systems resembling either prototype described in this paper. As both systems rely on data obtained from a server by invoking Web services, supermarkets would need to provide in-store WiFi. Further, both systems’ dependence on store inventory data would mean that commercial versions of either of these systems are likely to be supermarket specific or exclusive given that there will be policies in place that forbid access to inventory systems, which contain pricing information to third parties. Secondly, an assumption in the design of both prototypes is that the shopping task ends with the user arriving at home; this overlooks the important task of being able to recognise products in order to put them away or to use at a later time.The BCM and QR product recognition components of both respective prototypic systems associates information to products in order to assist users in the product search and selection sub-tasks. However, information such as use-by dates, discount offers, country of manufacture, country of manufacturer’s origin, nutritional information, and the labelling of products as Halal, Kosher, containing alcohol, nuts, gluten, lactose, phenylalanine, and so on, create further challenges in how different data sources are managed within the devices’ software architecture. The reliance of both systems on existing smartphone technology is also problematic. Changes in the production and uptake of mobile communication devices, and the software that they operate on, occurs rapidly. Once the fit-out of a retail space with the necessary instrumentation in order to accommodate a particular system has occurred, this system is unlikely to be able to cater to the requirement for frequent upgrades, as built environments are less flexible in the upgrading of their technological infrastructure (Kellerman 148). This sets up a scenario where the supermarket may persist as a disabling space due to a gap between the functional capacities of applications designed for mobile communication devices and the environments in which they are to be used. Lists and Disabling Spatial PracticeThe development and provision of access to assistive technologies and the data they rely upon is a commercial issue (Ellis and Kent 7). The use of assistive technologies in supermarket-spaces that rely on the inter-functional coordination of multiple inventories may have the unintended effect of excluding people with disabilities from access to legitimate content (Ellis and Kent 7). With de Certeau, we can ask of supermarket-space “What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?" (96).In designing assistive technologies, such as those discussed in this paper, developers must strive to achieve integration across multiple data inventories. Software architectures must be optimised to overcome issues relating to intellectual property, cross platform access, standardisation, fidelity, potential duplication, and mass-storage. This need for “cross sectioning,” however, “merely adds to the muddle” (Lefebvre 8). This is a predicament that only intensifies as space and objects in space become increasingly “representable” (Galloway), and as the impetus for the project of spatial politics for the vision impaired moves beyond representation to centre on access and meaning-making.ConclusionSupermarkets act as sites of hegemony, resistance, difference, and transformation, where the vision impaired and their allies resist the “repressive socialization of impaired bodies” through their own social movements relating to environmental accessibility and the technology assisted spatial practice of shopping (Gleeson 129). It is undeniable that the prototype technologies described in this paper, and those like it, indeed do have a great deal of emancipatory potential. However, it should be understood that these devices produce representations of supermarket-space as a simulation within a framework that attempts to mimic the real, and these representations are pre-determined by the industrial, technological, and regulatory forces that govern their production (Lefebvre 8). Thus, the potential of assistive technologies is dependent upon a range of constraints relating to data accessibility, and the interaction of various kinds of lists across the geographic area that surrounds the supermarket, locomotor, haptic, and search spaces of the supermarket, the home-space, and the internal spaces of a shopper’s imaginary. These interactions are important in contributing to the reproduction of disability in supermarkets through the use of assistive shopping technologies. The ways by which people make and read shopping lists complicate the relations between supermarket-space as location data and product inventories versus that which is intuited and experienced by a shopper (Sutherland). Not only should we be creating inventories of supermarket locomotor, haptic, and search spaces, the attention of developers working in this area of assistive technologies should look beyond the challenges of spatial representation and move towards a focus on issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data within and beyond supermarket-space.ReferencesDe Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.De Souza e Silva, A. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies As Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9.3 (2006): 261-78.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012.Galloway, Alexander. “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Theory, Culture and Society 28 (2011): 85-102.Gleeson, Brendan. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge, 1999.Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006.Haber, Alex. “Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces.” Tattered Fragments of the Map. Ed. Adam Katz and Brian Rosa. S.l.: Thelimitsoffun.org, 2009.Jolley, William M. When the Tide Comes in: Towards Accessible Telecommunications for People with Disabilities in Australia. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2003.Keaggy, Bill. Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Cincinnati, Ohio: HOW Books, 2007.Kellerman, Aharon. Personal Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2006.Kleege, Georgia. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd edition. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 391-98.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991.López-de-Ipiña, Diego, Tania Lorido, and Unai López. “Indoor Navigation and Product Recognition for Blind People Assisted Shopping.” Ambient Assisted Living. Ed. J. Bravo, R. Hervás, and V. Villarreal. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011. 25-32. May, Michael, and Charles LaPierre. “Accessible Global Position System (GPS) and Related Orientation Technologies.” Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired and Blind People. Ed. Marion A. Hersh, and Michael A. Johnson. London: Springer-Verlag, 2008. 261-88. Nicholson, John, Vladimir Kulyukin, and Daniel Coster. “Shoptalk: Independent Blind Shopping Through Verbal Route Directions and Barcode Scans.” The Open Rehabilitation Journal 2.1 (2009): 11-23.Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. and Ed. John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1997.Schillmeier, Michael W. J. Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things. New York: Routledge, 2010.Sutherland, I. “Mobile Media and the Socio-Technical Protocols of the Supermarket.” Australian Journal of Communication. 36.1 (2009): 73-84.

As I round the corner from Church Street onto Vesey, I am abruptly met with the façade of St. Paul’s Chapel and by the sudden memory of two things, both of which have not yet happened. I think about how, in a couple of decades, the area surrounding me will be burnt to the ground. I also recall how, just after the turn of the twenty-first century, the area will again crumble onto itself. It is 1759, and I—via my avatar—am wandering through downtown New York City in the videogame space of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (AC:R). These spatial and temporal memories stem from the fact that I have previously (that is, earlier in my life) played an AC game set in New York City during the War for Independence (later in history), wherein the city’s lower west side burns at the hands of the British. Years before that (in my biographical timeline, though much later in history) I watched from twenty-something blocks north of here as flames erupted from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Complicating the situation further, Michel de Certeau strolls with me in spirit, pondering observations he will make from almost this exact location (though roughly 1,100 feet higher up) 220 years from now, around the time I am being born. Perhaps the oddest aspect of this convoluted and temporally layered experience is the fact that I am not actually at the corner of Church and Vesey in 1759 at all, but rather on a couch, in Virginia, now. This particular type of sudden arrival at a space is only possible when it is not planned. Prior to the moment described above, I had finished a “mission” in the game that involved my coming to the city, so I decided I would just walk around a bit in the newly discovered digital New York of 1759. I wanted to take it in. I wanted to wander. Truly Being-in-a-place means attending to the interconnected Being-ness and Being-with-ness of all of the things that make up that place (Heidegger; Haraway). Conversely, to travel to or through a place entails a type of focused directionality toward a place that you are not currently Being in. Wandering, however, demands eschewing both, neither driven by an incessant goal, nor stuck in place by introspective ruminations. Instead, wandering is perhaps best described as a sort of mobile openness. A wanderer is not quite Benjamin’s flâneur, characterised by an “idle yet assertive negotiation of the street” (Coates 28), but also, I would argue, not quite de Certeau’s “Wandersmünner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (de Certeau 93). Wandering requires a concerted effort at non-intentionality. That description may seem to fold in on itself, to be sure, but as the spaces around us are increasingly “canalized” (Rabinow and Foucault) and designed with specific trajectories and narratives in mind, inaction leads to the unconscious enacting of an externally derived intention; whereas any attempt to subvert that design is itself a wholly intentional act. This is why wandering is so difficult. It requires shedding layers. It takes practice, like meditation.In what follows, I will explore the possibility of revelatory moments enabled by the shedding of these layers of intention through my own experience in digital space (maybe the most designed and canalized spaces we inhabit). I come to recognise, as I disavow the designed narrative of game space, that it takes on other meanings, becomes another space. I find myself Being-there in a way that transcends the digital as we understand it, experiencing space that reaches into the past and future, into memory and fiction. Indeed, wandering is liminal, betwixt fixed points, spaces, and times, and the text you are reading will wander in this fashion—between the digital and the physical, between memory and experience, and among multiple pasts and the present—to arrive at a multilayered subjective sense of space, a palimpsest of placemaking.Before charging fully into digital time travel, however, we must attend to the business of context. In this case, this means addressing why I am talking about videogame space in Certaudian terms. Beginning as early as 1995, videogame theorists have employed de Certeau’s notion of “spatial stories” in their assertions that games allow players to construct the game’s narrative by travelling through and “colonizing” the space (Fuller and Jenkins). Most of the scholarship involving de Certeau and videogames, however, has been relegated to the concepts of “map/tour” in looking at digital embodiment within game space as experiential representatives of the place/space binary. Maps verbalise spatial experience in place terms, such as “it’s at the corner of this and that street”, whereas tours express the same in terms of movement through space, as in “turn right at the red house”. Videogames complicate this because “mapping is combined with touring when moving through the game-space” (Lammes).In Games as Inhabited Spaces, Bernadette Flynn moves beyond the map/tour dichotomy to argue that spatial theories can approach videogaming in a way no other viewpoint can, because neither narrative nor mechanics of play can speak to the “space” of a game. Thus, Flynn’s work is “focused on completely reconceiving gameplay as fundamentally configured with spatial practice” (59) through de Certeau’s concepts of “strategic” and “tactical” spatial use. Flynn explains:The ability to forge personal directions from a closed simulation links to de Certeau’s notion of tactics, where users can create their own trajectories from the formal organizations of space. For de Certeau, tactics are related to how people individualise trajectories of movement to create meaning and transformations of space. Strategies on the other hand, are more akin to the game designer’s particular matrix of formal structures, arrangements of time and space which operate to control and constrain gameplay. (59)Flynn takes much of her reading of de Certeau from Lev Manovich, who argues that a game designer “uses strategies to impose a particular matrix of space, time, experience, and meaning on his viewers; they, in turn, use ‘tactics’ to create their own trajectories […] within this matrix” (267). Manovich believes de Certeau’s theories offer a salient model for thinking about “the ways in which computer users navigate through computer spaces they did not design” (267). In Flynn’s and Manovich’s estimation, simply moving through digital space is a tactic, a subversion of its strategic and linear design.The views of game space as tactical have historically (and paradoxically) treated the subject of videogames from a strategic perspective, as a configurable space to be “navigated through”, as a way of attaining a certain goal. Dan Golding takes up this problem, distancing our engagement from the design and calling for a de Certeaudian treatment of videogame space “from below”, where “the spatial diegesis of the videogame is affordance based and constituted by the skills of the player”, including those accrued outside the game space (Golding 118). Similarly, Darshana Jayemanne adds a temporal element with the idea that these spatial constructions are happening alongside a “complexity” and “proliferation of temporal schemes” (Jayemanne 1, 4; see also Nikolchina). Building from Golding and Jayemanne, I illustrate here a space wherein the player, not the game, is at the fulcrum of both spatial and temporal complexity, by adding the notion that—along with skill and experience—players bring space and time with them into the game.Viewed with the above understanding of strategies, tactics, skill, and temporality, the act of wandering in a videogame seems inherently subversive: on one hand, by undergoing a destination-less exploration of game space, I am rejecting the game’s spatial narrative trajectory; on the other, I am eschewing both skill accrual and temporal insistence to attempt a sense of pure Being-in-the-game. Such rebellious freedom, however, is part of the design of this particular game space. AC:R is a “sand box” game, which means it involves a large environment that can be traversed in a non-linear fashion, allowing, supposedly, for more freedom and exploration. Indeed, much of the gameplay involves slowly making more space available for investigation in an outward—rather than unidirectional—course. A player opens up these new spaces by “synchronising a viewpoint”, which can only be done by climbing to the top of specific landmarks. One of the fundamental elements of the AC franchise is an acrobatic, free-running, parkour style of engagement with a player’s surroundings, “where practitioners weave through urban environments, hopping over barricades, debris, and other obstacles” (Laviolette 242), climbing walls and traversing rooftops in a way unthinkable (and probably illegal) in our everyday lives. People scaling buildings in major metropolitan areas outside of videogame space tend to get arrested, if they survive the climb. Possibly, these renegade climbers are seeking what de Certeau describes as the “voluptuous pleasure […] of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (92)—what he experienced, looking down from the top of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s.***On digital ground level, back in 1759, I look up to the top of St. Paul’s bell tower and crave that pleasure, so I climb. As I make my way up, Non-Player Characters (NPCs)—the townspeople and trader avatars who make up the interactive human scenery of the game—shout things such as “You’ll hurt yourself” and “I say! What on earth is he doing?” This is the game’s way of convincing me that I am enacting agency and writing my own spatial story. I seem to be deploying “tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised” (de Certeau 96), when I am actually following the program the way I am supposed to. If I were not meant to climb the tower, I simply would not be able to. The fact that game developers go to the extent of recording dialogue to shout at me when I do this proves that they expect my transgression. This is part of the game’s “semi-social system”: a collection of in-game social norms that—to an extent—reflect the cultural understandings of outside non-digital society (Atkinson and Willis). These norms are enforced through social pressures and expectations in the game such that “these relative imperatives and influences, appearing to present players with ‘unlimited’ choices, [frame] them within the parameters of synthetic worlds whose social structure and assumptions are distinctly skewed in particular ways” (408). By using these semi-social systems, games communicate to players that performing a particular act is seen as wrong or scandalous by the in-game society (and therefore subversive), even when the action is necessary for the continuation of the spatial story.When I reach the top of the bell tower, I am able to “synchronise the viewpoint”—that is, unlock the map of this area of the city. Previously, I did not have access to an overhead view of the area, but now that I have indulged in de Certeau’s pleasure of “seeing the whole”, I can see not only the tactical view from the street, but also the strategic bird’s-eye view from above. From the top, looking out over the city—now The City, a conceivable whole rather than a collection of streets—it is difficult to picture the neighbourhood engulfed in flames. The stair-step Dutch-inspired rooflines still recall the very recent change from New Amsterdam to New York, but in thirty years’ time, they will all be torched and rebuilt, replaced with colonial Tudor boxes. I imagine myself as an eighteenth-century de Certeau, surveying pre-ruination New York City. I wonder how his thoughts would have changed if his viewpoint were coloured with knowledge of the future. Standing atop the very symbol of global power and wealth—a duo-lith that would exist for less than three decades—would his pleasure have been less “voluptuous”? While de Certeau considers the viewer from above like Icarus, whose “elevation transfigures him into a voyeur” (92), I identify more with Daedalus, preoccupied with impending disaster. I swan-dive from the tower into a hay cart, returning to the bustle of the street below.As I wander amongst the people of digital 1759 New York, the game continuously makes phatic advances at me. I bump into others on the street and they drop boxes they are carrying, or stumble to the side. Partial overheard conversations going on between townspeople—“… what with all these new taxes …”, “… but we’ve got a fine regiment here …”—both underscore the historical context of the game and imply that this is a world that exists even when I am not there. These characters and their conversations are as much a part of the strategic makeup of the city as the buildings are. They are the text, not the writers nor the readers. I am the only writer of this text, but I am merely transcribing a pre-programmed narrative. So, I am not an author, but rather a stenographer. For this short moment, though, I am allowed by the game to believe that I am making the choice not to transcribe; there are missions to complete, and I am ignoring them. I am taking in the city, forgetting—just as the design intends—that I am the only one here, the only person in the entire world, indeed, the person for whom this world exists.While wandering, I also experience conflicts and mergers between what Maurice Halbwachs has called historical, autobiographical, and collective memory types: respectively, these are memories created according to historical record, through one’s own life experience, and by the way a society tends to culturally frame and recall “important” events. De Certeau describes a memorable place as a “palimpsest, [where] subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence” (109). Wandering through AC:R’s virtual representation of 1759 downtown New York, I am experiencing this palimpsest in multiple layers, activating my Halbwachsian memories and influencing one another in the creation of my subjectivity. This is the “absence” de Certeau speaks of. My visions of Revolutionary New York ablaze tug at me from beneath a veneer of peaceful Dutch architecture: two warring historical memory constructs. Simultaneously, this old world is painted on top of my autobiographical memories as a New Yorker for thirteen years, loudly ordering corned beef with Russian dressing at the deli that will be on this corner. Somewhere sandwiched between these layers hides a portrait of September 11th, 2001, painted either by collective memory or autobiographical memory, or, more likely, a collage of both. A plane entering a building. Fire. Seen by my eyes, and then re-seen countless times through the same televised imagery that the rest of the world outside our small downtown village saw it. Which images are from media, and which from memory?Above, as if presiding over the scene, Michel de Certeau hangs in the air at the collision site, suspended a 1000 feet above the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial, rapt in “voluptuous pleasure”. And below, amid the colonists in their tricorns and waistcoats, people in grey ash-covered suits—ambulatory statues; golems—slowly and silently march ever uptown-wards. Dutch and Tudor town homes stretch skyward and transform into art-deco and glass monoliths. These multiform strata, like so many superimposed transparent maps, ground me in the idea of New York, creating the “fragmentary and inward-turning histories” (de Certeau 108) that give place to my subjectivity, allowing me to Be-there—even though, technically, I am not.My conscious decision to ignore the game’s narrative and wander has made this moment possible. While I understand that this is entirely part of the intended gameplay, I also know that the design cannot possibly account for the particular way in which I experience the space. And this is the fundamental point I am asserting here: that—along with the strategies and temporal complexities of the design and the tactics and skills of those on the ground—we bring into digital space our own temporal and experiential constructions that allow us to Be-in-the-game in ways not anticipated by its strategic design. Non-digital virtuality—in the tangled forms of autobiographical, historic, and collective memory—reaches into digital space, transforming the experience. Further, this changed game-experience becomes a part of my autobiographical “prosthetic memory” that I carry with me (Landsberg). When I visit New York in the future, and I inevitably find myself abruptly met with the façade of St Paul’s Chapel as I round the corner of Church Street and Vesey, I will be brought back to this moment. Will I continue to wander, or will I—if just for a second—entertain the urge to climb?***After the recent near destruction by fire of Notre-Dame, a different game in the AC franchise was offered as a free download, because it is set in revolutionary Paris and includes a very detailed and interactive version of the cathedral. Perhaps right now, on sundry couches in various geographical locations, people are wandering there: strolling along the Siene, re-experiencing time they once spent there; overhearing tense conversations about regime change along the Champs-Élysées that sound disturbingly familiar; or scaling the bell tower of the Notre-Dame Cathedral itself—site of revolution, desecration, destruction, and future rebuilding—to reach the pleasure of seeing the strategic whole at the top. And maybe, while they are up there, they will glance south-southwest to the 15th arrondissement, where de Certeau lies, enjoying some voluptuous Icarian viewpoint as-yet unimagined.ReferencesAtkinson, Rowland, and Paul Willis. “Transparent Cities: Re‐Shaping the Urban Experience through Interactive Video Game Simulation.” City 13.4 (2009): 403–417. DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298458.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002. Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41. DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.12381.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Flynn, Bernadette. “Games as Inhabited Spaces.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture and Policy 110 (2004): 52–61. 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DOI: 10.1177/1555412019845593.Lammes, Sybille. “Playing the World: Computer Games, Cartography and Spatial Stories.” Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 3 (2008): 84–96. DOI: 10.1080/10402659908426297.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Laviolette, Patrick. “The Neo-Flâneur amongst Irresistible Decay.” Playgrounds and Battlefields: Critical Perspectives of Social Engagement. Eds. Martínez Jüristo and Klemen Slabina. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2014. 243–71.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002.Nikolchina, Miglena. “Time in Video Games: Repetitions of the New.” Differences 28.3 (2017): 19–43. DOI: 10.1215/10407391-4260519.Rabinow, Paul, and Michel Foucault. “Interview with Michel Foucault on Space, Knowledge and Power.” Skyline (March 1982): 17–20.

If identity is a construct—and, more critically, a construct defined and developed through relationships with others in public and private spheres—then an understanding of the processes, mechanisms and platforms by which individuals disclose information about themselves is crucial in understanding the way identity, community and culture function, and the way individuals can intervene in the functioning of culture.In this issue of M/C Journal, contributors from the U.S., U.K., and Australia consider the personal, professional and social consequences of disclosure in autobiographical art, community art, online media, and a range of other communicative and cultural practices. Approaching the topic from the perspective of those who disclose, and from the perspective of those who interpret disclosures by or about others, the contributors raise a range of questions about the way in which individuals are currently negotiating the difficult, risky business of disclosure. The articles develop a diverse, yet surprisingly coherent, body of theorisation, constantly returning to the motivations that underpin disclosure, the way disclosure can be interpreted or coopted by others, and, as a result, an overarching concern with the modes, mechanisms and contexts, rather than the content, of disclosure.Disclosure can be defined as a voluntary or involuntary communication of facts, information, feelings or beliefs as part of a social interaction. What the contributors to this issue demonstrate, however, is that disclosure is never neutral—it is always burdened by a complex set of positive and negative valuations of its status. It acts as a revelation, confession, or confirmation of personal characteristics an individual is suspected or expected to possess; and it is readily coopted as part of a continuing cultural labour to categorise and control specific identity positions. Certainly, the ability to open up and share of oneself continues to be seen as integral to the development of agency, a healthy personality, and healthy interpersonal relationships (Cozby 77; Frattaroli 823). As Joanne Frattaroli argues, psychological theory has validated the Freudian argument that disclosing information, thoughts and feeling to others, including therapists —especially feelings about the challenges an individual has encountered in their life—can be seen as cathartic, assisting individuals to release and regulate their emotions (824). Many of the contributors to this issue consider the personally transformative potential of disclosure—for instance, Petra Kuppers, Jill Dowse and Luis Sotelo-Castro. All three authors cite personal transformation as a potential consequence of participatory arts practices which involve disclosure. Their analyses of the personally empowering potential of such activities are, however, tempered by a clear recognition that such disclosures operate in a context where all participants in the interaction are involved in negotiations regarding agency, and access to position, recognition or power. This is a negotiation apparent in Jill Dowse’s description of her voluntary self-disclosures in a very public arts project, and, equally, in Christine Lohmeier’s description of her involuntary self-disclosures via Facebook during an ethnographic research project, Nick Muntean and Anne Petersen’s analysis of celebrity self-disclosures on Twitter, or Michelle Phillipov’s study of media responses to young people’s self-disclosures on the social networking site MySpace. Understood in a social context, disclosures are bound up with what Erving Goffman has called impression management strategies, and are characterised by the more or less conscious efforts at definition, redefinition, discretion, deceit or manipulation designed to control the impression an individual conveys many contributors to this issue unpack. For Goffman, the social stakes of self-presentation “set the stage for a kind of information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation and rediscovery” (8) in which both individuals and society are implicated. “In Goffman’s framing of these acts of self-presentation”, as award-winning U.S. performance maker, facilitator and scholar Petra Kuppers says in our feature article, “performance and dramaturgical choices are foregrounded: impression management is an interactive, dynamic process. Disclosure becomes a semiotic act, not a ‘natural’ unfiltered display of an ‘authentic’ self, but a complex engagement with choices.” Whilst disclosure has been linked in popular discourse to values such as authenticity, authority and “truth,” our contributors highlight the fact that acts of disclosure are not—or, at least, not simply—about a personal decision to show some aspect of a (presumed) pre-existing self to the public. Disclosures are semiotic acts, ideological acts, and, above all, performative acts, which construct, rather than just convey or confirm, specific identities and realities. The subject of disclosure does not have control over the meanings attributed to it. Whilst the disclosure of personal information via language, movement, or the more subtle gestural registers our contributors discuss here, can be a deliberate choice in art, or in daily life, disclosure also happens in the extra-textual zones that exist beneath, in-between or beyond the elements of the communicative interaction participants can control. These actions can be hijacked by others, or by the media, and can leave individuals vulnerable to culturally reductive readings. Kuppers, for instance, provides a compelling account of the way she has felt the weight of long-established cultural narratives closing off her own reading of other people’s disclosures about disease and disability—“Yes, we know this story: we can manage her identity for her, and his social role can click into fixity.” As Kuppers reminds us, the right to speak of one’s self, and the right to a receptive audience, is hard earned. Disclosure can lead to closures as identity positions grow inflexible and oppressive under the weight of unexamined discourse.The struggle for control over the processes, mechanisms and platforms of disclosure, and the tactics individuals use to try to take control of or challenge the meanings their disclosures are accorded, is a recurrent theme throughout this issue. Our contributors read this struggle in terms of vulnerability, power, and the performative construction of identity, drawing attention to the way disclosure can operate as a mode of liberation, as a liability, or both at once.In the feature article, Petra Kuppers explores the performance of disclosure, circling around concepts such as intimacy, convergence, form, interactivity and specificity, and exposing fault lines in the practice of self-disclosure which are later taken up by other contributors. Using a performance-as-research perspective, Kuppers’s article takes the reader through the practical implementation of disclosure practices in performance making, exploring the sensuous, painful, powerful risks of telling personal stories to others and the difficulties of framing these stories in ways that connect to other performers and audiences. Drawing on examples from her work as Artistic Director of the long-running international performance project The Olimpias, including the performance workshop series Burning, and historical witnessing, and the inquiry “anti-archive” The Anarcha Project, Kuppers asks how artists using disclosure can form sensual, interactive, ethical, active responses to human lives. Through reference to artistic and theoretical responses to this sort of work, Kuppers argues that experimental forms of performance-making offer disclosures that are “matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness.” She suggests that these “disclosures are in time and space: they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge,” but rather a porous and crumbling “vessel” for the precious secrets and revelations of lived experience.Jill Dowse, actor and director for Foursight Theatre, a long-running women’s performance company based in Wolverhampton in the U.K., also addresses the performance practices of bodies in public space. Dowse analyses her own performance practice as a participant in the public art piece One and Other by Antony Gormley in London’s Trafalgar Square throughout the summer of 2009. Dowse explores her impulse to apply to be one of the 2,400 U.K. citizens chosen to have one hour on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. She explains how the project forced her to examine her relationship to her own artistic practice, as she negotiated the physical height of the plinth, her own vertigo, and the equally dizzying national expectations and commercialisation of the project by the media. Through reference to the work of Rachel Rosenthal, Dowse teases out the ways in which the process of making and enacting a performance work is a mediated process of disclosure and how subjects in acts of disclosure struggle for control over both the representation of self and the content and form of the communication which ensues in order to “re-imagine [the] relationship with fear and challenge, recognising, even in the core of fear, the potential for transformation.”Artist and scholar Jenny Lawson provides another perspective on the difficult negotiations involved in disclosing the self in performance, unpacking the ways in which she has used the meanings attached to the making and sharing of food to disclose, confess and deconstruct elements of her own cultural identity in her interactive, durational performance If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake. Lawson situates her work in the context of others who have used a relationship to food to “confess” aspects of their lives, comparing and contrasting celebrity chef Nigella Lawson’s use of intimate confessions about food, cooking and eating to construct a marketable media persona with performance artist Bobby Baker’s use of intimate confessions about food, cooking and eating as part of “a field of resistant arts practice through which she discloses her often painful and difficult relationship to femininity and the domestic.” Paying particular attention to the way boundaries between public and private, fact and fiction, are crossed in the “mock-autobiographical” performances of Nigella and Baker, Lawson points to the way relationships to food reflect broader cultural anxieties about the body, identity and femininity. Lawson argues that her own durational performances play with autobiographical disclosures that position her quite literally in the “Domestic Goddess Hall of Fame,” drawing attention to her own subjectivity (and failings), and inviting audiences—for instance, by photographing themselves interacting with Lawson and her cakes—to participate in a potentially transformative consideration of their own position in the process of constructing a self-narrative through food, cooking and eating.Whilst Kuppers, Dowse and Lawson’s articles on disclosure, and the way identity is constructed or deconstructed through the performance of disclosures that operate at the nexus of self, other, identity, memory, history and the media, all speak from the perspective of the performer or performance maker, Luis Sotelo-Castro shifts our attention to the positioning of participants in such performance practices. Sotelo-Castro examines the potential cartographic (self-mapping) power of site-specific, participant-led performance practices. His work explores the theoretical concept of “positioning,” and the ways cartographic practices “present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.” Through an examination of Running Stitch (2006), a performance and visual art project by Jen Southern (U.K) and Jen Hamilton (Canada) in Brighton in the U.K., Sotelo-Castro examines the revelation and concealment that occurs when audiences are asked to enact and interact with the spaces around them and the problems which occur when there are no appropriate, collective methods for capturing the participants’ potentially transformative disclosures and realisations embedded in the design of these projects.Donna Lee Brien and Jennifer Phillips investigate works that involve autobiographical confession and disclosure, again drawing attention to the complex relationships between fact and fiction that characterise such works, and the way the audience’s extra-textual knowledge of the subject of the disclosures (at times pleasurably) effects the audience’s engagement with such works.Brien looks at fictionalised disclosures of biographical information in literary and theatrical texts. She explores how “contemporary authors play with, and across […] boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure.” Brien examines the example of Australian playwright Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe. In Georgia, Brien finds that the biographical facts alongside dramatic (invented) elements creates a nuanced response to the complex subjectivity and history of this well-known artist. The piece also exposes the pitfalls facing authors who negotiate the expectations of readers and critics on the continuum between private “facts” and creative “expressions.”Phillips also explores literary fictions and disclosures and audience expectations. She highlights the exorcism of personal and professional ghosts in the “mock-disclosures” of author Bret Easton Ellis. Phillips examines Ellis’s 2005 novel, Lunar Park. In it she finds a complex game occurring, where Ellis includes overtly autobiographical data that is suspect, incorrect or misrepresented in order to respond to critics’s and readers’s assumptions about this previous fiction works as somehow autobiographical. “It is possible,” Phillips says, “to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts.” Phillips argues that these mock-disclosures go further than just responding to the critics, in fact acting as a form of closure for both the public controversies surrounding his depiction of violent deaths in American Psycho, and more subtly for personal tragedy in the author’s life, especially for the death of his father, who at the close of the novel is depicted memorialised in the pages of a novel.In the final section of this issue, Christine Lohmeier, Nick Muntean and Anne Petersen, and Michelle Phillipov take up the question of the way new technologies impact on the logics, mechanisms and processes of disclosure. They examine the part strategic efforts at closure through disclosure can play in constructing an image of the self for a specific online audience, the boundaries between public, private, fact and fiction in online disclosures, and the way such disclosures can become the locus for broader conversations about identity, relationships and the functioning of culture. As danah boyd has argued, “technology that makes social information more easily accessible can rupture people’s sense of public and private by altering the previously understood social norms” (14). For boyd, the locus of increased anxiety about the disclosure of private information in contemporary technoculture is not so much about the substance of the private information disclosed, but, rather, about people’s struggle to negotiate the processes by which the information is concealed or disclosed. “The reason for this is that privacy is not simply the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes,” which may be set as seen or unseen. Rather, boyd says, “it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual feels when negotiating data” (14). Lohmeier, Muntean and Petersen, and Phillipov all focus on specific forms of personal, professional and social vulnerability that arise as a result of such negotiations, unpacking the way in which individuals and cultures respond to this vulnerability. Lohmeier turns our attention to the complexities of constructing a self through voluntary and involuntary disclosures on social networking sites such as Facebook, within the specific context of ethnographic research with communities. Using her own ethnographic fieldwork with Cuban-American communities in Florida as an example, Lohmeier considers the way the challenges that have always accompanied the researcher’s attempt to position him or her self, and disclose an appropriate amount of information about him or her self, are further complicated in a contemporary context where study participants can Google the researcher and construct their own perception of the researcher’s identity on the basis of information placed on sites like Facebook. In doing so, Lohmeier raises important questions about the way the researcher’s identity is negotiated and constructed by the researcher and the research participants over time, about the co-presence of personal and professional identities on online platforms, and the lack of methodological and institutional frameworks to assist the researcher in dealing with these questions. She argues that “my wariness of disclosing too much of myself, aspects of my identity that would threaten my performance as a ‘stable researcher self,’ held other parts of my fragmented identity captive” during and after the research process. Petersen and Muntean examine the way in which the rapid proliferation of new modes of probing into personal lives in contemporary technoculture has prompted celebrities to make use of social networking technology, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to take back control of the star image on which their career success and their value as a cultural commodity is based. “Through Twitter,” Muntean and Petersen say, “the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation,” as studio systems and strict control by publicists once tried to do. For Muntean and Petersen, though, the authenticity attributed to celebrity tweets is an ideological act, and Twitter itself is “a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the mindset of technoculture.” Twitter operates in the space between what they call the “conspiratorial mindset,” as a mode of desire intent on discovery of the secret, and the “celebrity subject,” as the unknowable excess that gives substance or orientation to that mode of desire. Muntean and Petersen argue that it is the modality of the seemingly unrehearsed, self-revelatory disclosures on Twitter, rather than the actual object or content of such disclosures, that is central in constructing the inherently unstable subjectivity of both the celebrity and the fan.Phillipov closes this issue with a timely analysis of cultural anxiety about the types of disclosure new media technology makes possible, focusing on the way Australian news media reports attempted to link the murder of Carly Ryan and the suicides of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in 2007 to their participation in emo subculture, and their presence on the MySpace social networking site in which this subculture is seen to flourish. Phillipov highlights the paradoxes embedded in the news reports on these tragic events. In particular, she unpacks the way the young women’s disclosures on MySpace were “seen as simultaneously excessive and inadequate”—revealing private feelings in a way that left them vulnerable to adult predators, but, at the same time, placing these revelations on a platform where they could be kept hidden from adults who might have helped them. Drawing on John Hartley’s theorisation of news reporting about young people, Phillipov casts the news commentators’s tenuous attempts to link the deaths of Ryan, Gater and Gestier to emo, and to excessive disclosure on MySpace, as what Hartley calls a “cultural thinking-out-loud” (17) in which discussion of the events themselves quickly became the basis for attempts to articulate and explore broader anxieties about the “unknowability” of youth and youth culture.What Phillipov and our other contributors make clear is that the risks, perils and pleasures of self-disclosure are always tied to the subject’s ability to negotiate not just the content of their disclosures, but the cultural mechanisms and discourses that frame their disclosures, and that this negotiation always occurs at the nexus of the individual, medium, and culture. Our contributors point to the level of individual or cultural self-consciousness embedded in many forms of disclosure, and the factors that, as Kuppers argues, make speaking as, about or of a self a challenging, confronting yet compelling prospect for the individual (as in Kuppers, Dowse, Lawson, Lohmeier, and Muntean and Petersen’s articles), for the audience (as in Kupper, Sotelo-Castro, Brien, Phillips, and Muntean and Petersen’s articles), and for the culture (as in Phillipov’s article). Though they cover a diverse cross-section of contemporary forms of disclosure, the articles in this issue capture a profound anxiety about disclosure that coheres around a conflicting desire to both deterritorialise and reterritorialise, both liberate and arrest, the meanings attached to self-narrations. They also highlight the way in which the phenomenon boyd has called social convergence underpins anxieties, and negotiations, about what people choose to disclose. As boyd says, “social convergence occurs when disparate social contexts are collapsed into one […] Social convergence requires people to handle disparate audiences simultaneously without a social script” (18). In one way or another, most of the contributors to this issue point to the way that convergence—of fiction, factual, public and private details about an artist’s life, a celebrity’s life, a researcher’s life, or a teenager’s life “normally” articulated in separate contexts for separate audiences—challenges their control over their self-disclosures (18), impacts on the way they negotiate their self-disclosures, and shapes the way audiences, media, and cultural authorities react to their self-disclosures. Whilst conscious of the risks that arise when facets of a fragmented identity momentarily cohere in an act of disclosure, including the risk that identities will be essentialised by the weight of expectation culture attaches to such acts, our contributors focus on the creative dimensions of disclosing. These articles highlight the way individuals and societies use the communicative modes and mechanisms of disclosure in order, as Kuppers says, to “think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge,” feeling our way towards new formations of identity and culture, whether liberatory or oppressive, transformative or reintegrative. Whilst self-disclosures cannot always be perforated, contaminated or re-performed in ways that elide recuperative readings, through a focus on the slippery productive and performative dimensions of disclosure, our contributors remind us of the important cross-disciplinary work that is going on in the ongoing negotiation of identity, culture and community. Referencesboyd, danah. “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14.1 (2008): 13–20.Cozby, Paul C. “Self-Disclosure: A Literature Review.” Pschological Bulletin 79.2 (1973): 73–91.Frattaroli, Joanne. “Experimental Disclosure and Its Moderators: A Meta-Analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 132.6 (2006): 823–865.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1973. Hartley, John. “‘When Your Child Grows Up Too Fast’: Juvenation and the Boundaries of the Social in the News Media.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 12.1 (1998): 9–30.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 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Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gower, Eric. “When the Virtual Becomes the Real: A Talk with Benedict Anderson.” NIRA Review, 1996. 19 Apr. 2010 ‹http://www.nira.or.jp/past/publ/review/96spring/intervi.html›. Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Ito, Mizuko, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Out, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Japanese American National Museum. “Discover Nikkei: Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants.” Discover Nikkei, 2005. 4 Oct. 2010. ‹http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/›. Lama, Abraham. “Home Is Where the Heartbreak Is for Japanese-Peruvians.” Asia Times 16 Oct. 1999. 6 May 2010 ‹http://www.atimes.com/japan-econ/AJ16Dh01.html›. Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0. Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Leurs, Koen. Identity, Migration and Digital Media. Utrecht: Utrecht University. PhD Thesis, forthcoming. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Etnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Mo. “Marokkanen met Brainz.” Hyves, 23 Feb. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010. ‹http://marokkaansehersens.hyves.nl/›. Odin, Jaishree K. “The Edge of Difference: Negotiations between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial.” Modern Fiction Studies 43.3 (1997): 598-630. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Narratives @ Home Pages: The Future as Virtually Located.” Colonies – Missions – Cultures in the English-Speaking World. Ed. Gerhard Stilz. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. 396–406. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Subjects and Migration.” Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women's Studies. Ed. Gabrielle Griffin and Rosi Braidotti. London: Zed Books, 2002. 205–20. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 83-99. Schäfer, Mirko T. Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. Van Doorn, Niels, and Liesbeth van Zoonen. “Theorizing Gender and the Internet: Past, Present, and Future.” Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics. Ed. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard. London: Routledge. 261-74.

Es wird heute weltweit versucht, Konzepte für vielfältige taktile kartographische Medien zu entwickeln, die vorrangig der allgemeinen Orientierung und Mobilität, aber auch verstärkt dem Wissenserwerb, z.B. im Geographieunterricht an Schulen für Blinde und Sehbehinderte, dienen sollen. Diese Konzepte müssen von denen der &quot;visuellen Kartographie&quot;1 zwangsläufig mehr oder weniger abweichen und auf weitgehend anderen Methoden, Regeln und Techniken beruhen. Wesentliche und durch die Praxis verifizierte Erkenntnisse der visuellen Kartographie sind der taktilen Kartographie zugänglich zu machen bzw. in/an diese zu adaptieren. Trotzdem dürfen grundlegende Theorien und Erfahrungen der Kartengestaltung und Kartennutzung für Sehende nicht völlig negiert werden.

Es wird heute weltweit versucht, Konzepte für vielfältige taktile kartographische Medien zu entwickeln, die vorrangig der allgemeinen Orientierung und Mobilität, aber auch verstärkt dem Wissenserwerb, z.B. im Geographieunterricht an Schulen für Blinde und Sehbehinderte, dienen sollen. Diese Konzepte müssen von denen der &quot;visuellen Kartographie&quot;1 zwangsläufig mehr oder weniger abweichen und auf weitgehend anderen Methoden, Regeln und Techniken beruhen. Wesentliche und durch die Praxis verifizierte Erkenntnisse der visuellen Kartographie sind der taktilen Kartographie zugänglich zu machen bzw. in/an diese zu adaptieren. Trotzdem dürfen grundlegende Theorien und Erfahrungen der Kartengestaltung und Kartennutzung für Sehende nicht völlig negiert werden.