Nicholas Jenkins and Erik Steiner-- Soft City: A Biomorphic Map of London

Date
Tue November 29th 2016, 12:00 - 1:15am
Event Sponsor
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)
Location
Wallenberg Hall, 4th Floor, Room 433A
Nicholas Jenkins and Erik Steiner-- Soft City: A Biomorphic Map of London

“The Birds” photo by Dun.can/Flickr.

This talk, presented by Nicholas Jenkins (PI on the in-progress Kindred London digital humanities project) and Erik Steiner (Co-Director of the Spatial History Project at CESTA), focuses on a new map of London’s neighborhoods that Jenkins and Steiner have created for use in Kindred London

The Steiner-Jenkins map is an effort to identify and outline some 260 neighborhoods of London, giving a new set of shapes and forms to the city’s districts as identified by daily experience and collective understanding. The map, part tool and part artwork, the product of both research and imagination, draws on a wide range of printed sources, social media, administrative data, colloquial descriptions, commercial mapping sites and personal accounts. The result is a “soft city”, a representation of space that (like all maps) draws lines and edges. But the visual forms in play here are biomorphic not jagged, softly curved not angular, and the Steiner-Jenkins map tries to embrace the human reality of overlapping definitions of place and of perceptual uncertainties.

Modern mapping systems thrive on a claim to being comprehensive, objective and absolute. But culturally-defined places, like those which are the subject of the Steiner-Jenkins map, are spatially contentious, defined from the bottom-up, and evolving. What is more, they don’t conform to the invisible barriers put up by administrative definitions of space (census blocks, precincts, zip codes). Neighborhood definitions are democratic, mutable and subjective; as such, they play a major role in organizing citizens' behavior. For these reasons, the Steiner-Jenkins biomorphic map of London brings into view important disciplinary questions about subjectivity, ambiguity and the aesthetic within the field of the spatial humanities.

Nicholas Jenkins is the Primary Investigator for the forthcoming Kindred London and for Kindred Britain, described by the Economist as "an amazing digital humanities website that traces relations between 30,000 British people.” He has edited a Lincoln Kirstein Reader and co-edited and contributed to three volumes of Oxford University Press's "Auden Studies" series.

Erik Steiner is the co-director and co-founder of the Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). A former President of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), he is an award-winning interaction designer and cartographer working at the intersection of technology, creative arts, and academic scholarship in the humanities, social, and environmental sciences.  

This event is hosted by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) as a part of its biweekly seminar series focusing on using the latest technological innovations to pursue humanistic inquiry. 

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