Knowledge Cartography

November 11, 2010
Stacey Mason

Knowledge Atlas - Spaces from Marco Quaggiotto on Vimeo.

Knowledgecartography.org offers an interesting approach to expanding knowledge representation beyond the standard visual metaphors, and they have interesting ideas on maps used for narrative tools.

Just like a text, the map makes selections on reality, distorts events, classifies and clarifies the world in order to selections better tell a particular aspect of a territory, an event, a space. When used with malice, it can hide, conceal, falsify or diminish a reality through the construction of an ideological discourse, in which the communicative aims are hidden to the user. In this context, the term ‘map’ is a synonym of visual narration of space: a cultural artefact created by an author to describe a space according to an objective.

Knowledge Cartography stems from Communication Design PhD research at the Politecnico di Milano by Marco Quaggiotto, so we should expect some interesting updates to what is already a promising idea.

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