Social networking platforms provide powerful connectivity, but the ability to visually experience connections, make meaning from those connections and actually utilize them to create more meaningful interactions are still limited. This reality motivated the Mapping : Focus project to trace the stocks and flow of concepts at the 2011 Spaces and Flows Conference by illuminating connections made within the event of the conference. These traces of exchange have the potential to serve as a powerful tool for academic collaboration and become a lasting artifact to catalyze future connections.
As a multi-disciplinary team comprised of a graphic designer, a new media artist, and an architect we approached this mapping project with a diverse set of questions concerning how our contemporary world has been re-defined by social networks and connections, how the digital exchange of information has transformed our conception of space, and ultimately how the display of ones position within these networks provides individual agency to contribute to and inhabit these complex networks. Along with these conceptual questions also came a series of technical and logistical questions concerning the tools and platforms available for such exploration and interactivity. Ultimately we arrived at a hybrid mapping process utilizing existing data-management and visualization software in conjunction with a new html code-based tools. Through the products of this process, a viewer can identify patterns within the participants of the conference and can identify shared themes and concepts. Despite the successes of the project, we have only begun to identify the potentials of such a tool in facilitating new cross-disciplinary global conversations within the academic network that precipitate new connections, new understandings, and hopefully contribute to new knowledge.