The general modus operandi is the one used by Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the OULIPO, in Exercises in Style, translated into English by Barbara Wright.
It’s a collection of 99 retellings of the same two-paragraph pointless anecdote, each time in a different style, once as a math problem, once as alexandrines, once as an inventory and so on.
| Methodology
A photograph of a rather trivial subject (a clothes rack) was purposively chosen, to focus on the mapping process itself, rather than on the politics or veracity of complex facts that would have been involved in a geographic map. The methodology was the following: 1. Once a list of potential mapping subjects has been established, I allowed myself up to 60 minutes to consider and design each map. The short period of time was set in order to keep the approach instinctive. 2. The 60 minutes being over I then analysed each map to determine what was working, what wasn’t, and how it could be made successful. This evaluation of each system was done under the following criteria: a.What is mapped? The result of this evaluation appears under each map. 3. The maps have then been submitted to critiques from my peers by email. A comment section has then been added to the Thing-mapping website to allow an on-going feedback, a critical analysis of my own critical analysis. |
Progression
The Thing-Mapping Project started as a research on different methods of information mapping. The original focus was to explore what where the different levels of information contained within an object or an image. A requested feedback led the work to evolve from being an experimental approach to information mapping to generating an on-going shared analyse of the systems of representation used. Resolution The website becomes not only a work in progress experiment, but also a shared research tool on information visualization gathering comments on different mapping systems. |