Esther Weltevrede is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. She is coordinator of the digitalmethods.net (DMI), which aims to develop novel methods and tools for studying the web. Since 2007 she is a member of govcom.org, a foundation dedicated to development of political tools on the web.
Weltevrede was one of the 25 'embedded researchers' who attended PICNIC08 on invitation of PICNIC.
“We are in an age of meta exploration” is the final comment of Ben Cerveny’s talk on ‘The Alchemy of Understanding.’ Data visualization provides scholars novel means to study the physics of the Web as it provides new insights on data-land. Mapping data spaces can give us insights beyond our imagination; it is like “discovering Atlantis.”
Physics is the science of matter-land and its motion, as well as space and time. Physics is an experimental science and conducted in order to understand how the world around us behaves. The data-lands of the Web are not often regarded as having physics in the traditional understanding of the notion. The desire to study the Web in order to understand its behavior does however gain relevance. Cerveny argues data visualization is the way to transform data spaces understandable. Materializing information, data visualization entails mapping the physics of data spaces in order to study and understand the space and its dynamics.
In the data spaces of the Web locations, things and people are reduced to information, while at the same time creating new information-based geographies. Although space and place are often used interchangeably, place allocates a finite location, whereas space is the experience of a place. In other words, space is how we do place, how we practice place. The distinction is similar to the semiotic distinction between structure (langue) and articulation (parole). Place is a structure, space its articulation. In the data-lands of the Web these notions get inverted. If space is a practiced place, then, the Web instead practices space. On the Web, space becomes the structure, place its articulation. Connecting one location to another through links, making friend connections on SNS, a new manner of space and place is marked. Locatable communication flows become the articulation of the physics of data spaces.
My research project is about exploring novel cartography for the Webs. Including Web spaces such national Webs, which have a geographical component, but also mapping the conceptual Web spaces created by various search engines. It is an effort to understand the physics for each data space through mapping. In studying the Web, the alchemist-like undertaking is to turn data spaces into understandable and mapped places.
Viewing the Web as a medium of location, one that is grounding specific data places, the challenge is to technically locate and demarcate places of the Web. “The World According to Google” is one way to start thinking about national Webs from a locative technical point of view. For Digital Methods Initiative, Erik Borra and I made a country domain map of the Web, using number of estimated pages indexed by Google Region Search to size country domains. Region Search is a relatively novel feature of Google Advanced Search, which allows one to query Webs based on geographic location. The method for this map is fairly simple: query all Google Regions for their assigned domain (e.g. Netherlands for .nl, Tuvalu for .tv) and scale relatively to other country domains on a world map. The map digitally grounds Google Web space and tells us something about which are the most actively used country domains according to Google in the region it is assigned to.
Considering the national from a Web perspective is a shift in focus to the national as a practiced place; as a technologically locatable construction. This case the study is based on two technical arrangements that order the data-land of the Web nationally: the Domain Name System and ordering device Google. Both these arrangements have their own technical specificity, which need to be taken into account when performing research with them. In the age of meta exploration, the question is how we can find data-lands, map them, and diagnose them taking the medium’s specificity in account.
