“The aim of Narrating Place is to explore through a series of 45 second video pieces, a diversity of ways of narrating the experience and representation of place.  The phenomenon of place is a rich concept rooted in how we perceive and conceive our environment.  This is a concept which deserves continual critical and exploratory work to develop ways to understand how, through spatial and subjective experience we narrate a particular place. Individuals were invited to contribute to this work based on the curatorial team’s knowledge of their work and interest in the subjective representation of place. The invited participants come from the Americas, Europe and Australasia. The outcome is this rich mix will result in a unique commentary on and contribution to the affective cartographies of place.” (http://narratingplace.info/?page_id=87)

The film, edited by Paul Ritchard, is currently screened at RMIT in Melbourne Australia (until the end of May 2013), then it will be screened at the International Cartographic Conference in Dresden (Germany) in August 2013.

Game Studies emerged as a discipline in parallel with the growth of videogaming in the 1980s (see Salen and Zimmerman 2004) and by 2012 the gaming industry had a global turnover of around US$65 billion.  Maps play a very significant role in many different game genres. From puzzles, to shoot-em-ups, to mazes, quests, sport sims, strategy-based war-games, urban games and geo-caching, mapping represents a largely unquestioned backdrop, but often also delivers a central and active role in game play. From Risk to World of Warcraft, from Harvey Mazzles to street games, from Microsoft Golf, to RunZombieRun mapping matters in game play. However to date the nature of mapping in games has been significantly under-researched.

The need for further research is amplified with the shifts to digital and mobile-based gaming. Geospatial technologies are now guiding players throughout cities that have became game boards. These in site games are redefining the function and the meaning of maps in gaming activities. This dynamic context calls for sustained and critical interest. This workshop focuses upon different sites, and mapping practices enrolled in gaming, exploring the significance of technological change, the cultural significance of mapping and gaming, and the aesthetics and politics of maps in games, and games in maps. Ways of understanding spatial relations implicit in gaming have also shifted over this time, and offer a challenging field for researchers.

We invite critical papers that focus upon amongst other issues:

• The design of maps as game boards
• The links between mapping and different game genres
• Historicizing the changing relationship between games and maps
• The role of the map interface in structuring game-play
• The performative nature of  mapping in game play
• The mapped relations between the world and the game
• The nature of fantasy and imagination in the construction of mapped games
• The affect of mapping in games
• Mobile apps and map game interfaces
• Map puzzles
• Mapping and augmented reality games

Abstracts (250 words) should be emailed to c.perkins@manchester.ac.uk by 30^th April 2013

The workshop is scheduled for Sunday 25th August afternoon and is accompanied by a Playground gaming session organized by Invisible Playground (Note: all the participants of the workshops will automatically be registers to the gaming session)

Invisible Playground is a collective of young Berlin-based artists, game designers and academics. Founded in 2009, Invisible Playground makes site-specific games of various sizes and formats. Drawing from a broad range of influences ranging from experimental musical theater and performance art to video games, the collective develops playful experiences that grant participants entry onto the invisible playgrounds they walk across every day without noticing. Its approach to mapping is closely connected to the notion of site-specific games. A game is site specific if the rules of the game are inspired by and merged with the rules of urban life at a certain site. Hence the game design process often includes mapping of urban dynamics, architecture, infrastructure and stories. In some cases maps are handed out to players during the games for example to help them navigate, to define the boundaries of the playing field or to assign certain rules of movement and interaction to certain locations on the playing field. At the Workshop on Maps and Games, Invisible Playground will offer a game session with a game that is adopted for the Workshop-site and involves map use. The session will also include a short introduction of other relevant projects of Invisible Playground and discussion. Number of players: ca 20 players, playing time: TBD, outdoor location.

Questions related to the gaming session can be sent to barbara.piatti@karto.baug.ethz.ch and sebastien.caquard@concordia.ca

Quays Culture presents NVA’s Speed of Light at MediaCityUK, an extraordinary public art performance that is set to bring Salford’s waterfront to life from 8pm on 21, 22 and 23 March. A centrepiece of the Edinburgh International Festival and recently staged in the docklands of Yokohama in Japan, the night-time work uses light, intentional movement and sound to change the way we see and feel about a chosen environment. Hundreds of runners in specially commissioned LED light suits will create beautiful, choreographed patterns of light flowing over bridges and around public spaces and buildings that surround Salford Quays. Free and non-ticketed for the watching audience, it can be seen as a piece of abstract art on the grandest scale: monumental but surprisingly quiet and reflective.

http://futureeverything.org/summit/art/quays-culture-presents-speed-of-light/

The other one will focus on the artistic points of view of the relationships between narratives and cartography. It will be published in NANO – New American Notes Online (issue 6) and co-edited by Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen.  NANO is a peer-reviewed online journal capable of publishing a full range of media and designed to encourage new interpretations and new possibilities. We are particularly interested in submissions that explore and articulate representations of place via narrative structures, especially the different ways such places and structures are recorded, communicated, and critiqued.  We invite submissions that address forms of these two broad questions:  how do narratives traverse through a “somewhere”?  And, equally important, how are real and imagined places narrated?  Acceptable formats, sizes and lengths are listed below.

Schedule:
Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:
- Jan. 28th, 2013: Call for papers
- Jun. 28th, 2013: Deadline to submit full papers & works to Laurene Vaughan (laurene.vaughan@rmit.edu.au) and Matthew Bissen (mdbissen@gmail.com)
- Aug. 30th, 2013: Comments sent by the editors to the authors
- Oct. 18th, 2013: Final version of the papers & works submitted by the authors to NANO for the review process (For the detailed instructions to the authors, please look at the web site of NANO: http://www.nanocrit.com/~nanocrit/submissions-information/)
- Nov. 15th, 2013: End of the review process
- Jan. 31st, 2014: Final versions of the selected papers sent by the authors to NANO
- May 2014: Publication of the special issue in NANO

(This will coincide with the publication of work in the parallel issue on Cartographies and Narrative in The Cartographic Journal)

Submission Guidelines:
Format Guidelines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:
Papers with images –3,500 words maximum; 15 images maximum in high resolution—JPEG format preferred
Film Shorts –5-10 minutes maximum using .mov, .mp4, or .wmv formats
(min res = 426 x 400, max res 1920 x 1080)
Sound Essays – 10 minutes maximum using .mp3 encoding at bitrates above 256 kbit/s (preferred)
Electronic submission preferred. Text submissions should be sent as an email attachment using MS Word (doc.) or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Refer to the list above for multimedia submissions. Do not include your name on the attached document, but do include your name and the title of your note in the body of your email. All manuscripts should follow MLA guidelines for format, in-text citations, and works cited.  Please send any questions that you have to Laurene Vaughan (laurene.vaughan@rmit.edu.au) and Matthew Bissen (mdbissen@gmail.com).

Copyright and Permissions:
NANO expects that all submissions contain original work, not extracts or abridgements. Authors may use their NANO material in other publications provided that NANO is acknowledged as the original publisher. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for reproducing copyright text, art, video, or other media. As an academic, peer-reviewed journal, whose mission is education, Fair Use rules of copyright apply to NANO. Send questions to the editor.

We would appreciate it if you could inform us in February if you plan to submit a paper or work to one of these special issues.

Please feel free to contact Sébastien Caquard or William Cartwright concerning The Cartographic Journal, and Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen concerning NANO.

In order to further explore these relationships between maps and narratives, the commission on Art and Cartography of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has organized a workshop on this thematic in Zurich in June 2012 . We are now seeking academic and artistic contributions to be published in two special issues of two academic journals.

One will be published in The Cartographic Journal and co-edited by Sébastien Caquard and William Cartwright. It will compile a range of academic papers providing more of a cartographic perspective on the relationships between maps and narratives. The second one will focus on the artistic points of view of the relationships between cartography and narratives. This second special issue will be co-edited by Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen and it will be published in a multi-media focused journal (more details about this publication available soon). Both of these issues will be cross-referenced to give more visibility to the publications as well as to support the interdisciplinary dimension of this project.

Here are the main deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in The Cartographic Journal:

- Dec. 19^th, 2012 – Call for papers

- April 30^th, 2013 - Deadline to submit full papers (4,000 – 5,000 words) to Sébastien Caquard (sebastien.caquard@concordia.ca) and William Cartwright (w.cartwright@rmit.edu.au)

- May 31^st, 2013 – Comments sent by the editors to the authors

- June 30^th, 2013 – Final version of the papers submitted by the authors to The Cartographic Journal website for the review process (For the detailed instructions to authors, please look at the web site of The Cartographic Journal)

- Aug 31^st, 2013 – End of the review process

- Dec. 31^st, 2013 – Final versions of the selected papers sent by the authors to The Cartographic Journal

- May 2014 – Publication of the special issue in The Cartographic Journal

A mesmerising visual display unfolds each night on the ascent to the summit as hundreds of runners wearing specially designed light suits take to the intricate path networks below. As a member of the walking audience you become part of the work, carrying portable light sources set against the dark features of the hill.

Each individual performance is created by collective action, landscape and weather, offering a rare perspective on the cityscape, night skies and the sea and hills beyond.

http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/246791-nvas-speed-of-light/

The Sound of the Earth is a content of Yuri Suzuki`s spherical record project, the grooves representing
the outlines of the geographic land mass. Each country on the disc is engraved with a different sound, as the needle passes over it plays field recordings collected by Yuri Suzuki from around the world over the course of four years; traditional folk music, national anthems, popular music and spoken word broadcasts.
An aural journey around the world in 30 minutes.

It is an interesting project with over 150 literary works included categorised into:

1. Rural Dreams
2. Dark Satanic Mills
3. Wild Places
4. Beyond the City
5. Cockney Visions
6. Waterlands

What caught my attention was the description of Wild Places,

‘Wild landscapes such as moors and heaths can be overwhelming and unknowable, presenting challenges to the human mind. [...] Encounters with the wild can equally be transformative for writers, enlarging their ordinary limits of perception, and prompting spiritual renewal’

It was enlarging the ordinary limits of perception that intrigued me, is this what neocartography could be, what makes these places enlarge the ordinary limits of perception?

I like to think that it is something along the lines of ‘GeoSensitivities’ that these places are transformed/transcend the ordinary limits through literature or cartography. These sensitivities could be along the lines of what psychogeography explores:

• human beings walking (not cars)
• lost found making the unimaginable, imaginable
• new maps can smell
• experiential & hidden

These are some of the views that @FelphamPA proposes, is it partly that place of magical realism in literature, these non existent environments (enhancements) that enlarge the ordinary limits of perception?

It could be these devices literature/geosensitivities that could provide the wonder, or as FelphamPA quotes:

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/writingbritain/about/

Share your own tales with an interactive map http://www.bl.uk/pin-a-tale/pin-a-tale-map.aspx

You might also like http://www.poetryatlas.com/

‘we simply cannot ignore the fact that the public interacts with and learns about history primarily through film. What we can do instead is talk about the events of the past represented in film and use that dialogue as a place of learning.’

This site is a wonderful reference with every entry having a visual poster for each film, along with a short synopsis, year, director of course country. I agree and love their idea of  initiating a dialogue with people learning through the films, just feel there needs to be an online method through their site to offer it.

http://www.filmstory.org/

I would love if they could combine their resources with the the Cornerhouse (Manchester, UK) Film Map as their’s has some films linked to footage/trailers as opposed to posters, and in addition to Film Story, has linked cast data, running time & importantly, a tool to instigate a dialogue with a comments section.

http://www.cornerhouse.org/film/film-map

I’m sure that interaction can be much more than just comments, polls, video, auditory…. and the relationships could be visualised more such as genres, this site (like it also does with literature mapping really well) could be a good feature for genre http://www.movie-map.com & I would love to know the correlation of where films were set to where they were depicting. http://www.themoviemap.com/film-locations/featured/. For instance if it was trying to represent historic periods in film, where was the location in the modern day to achieve the old, or was it just in a studio fictionally?

I’m sure they could be informed by the work of http://www.literaturatlas.eu/en/ to help realise innovative visual relationships of history, fiction & geography.

Maybe a timeline control linked to the map, http://code.google.com/p/timemap/ could be a useful feature.

Great resources