After my project proposal had been accepted, I have attended a workshop at ETH Zurich, titled “Cartography & Narratives” organised by Barbara Piatte, Sébastien Caquard and Anne-Kathrin Reuschel in last summer. The goal of the workshop was to explore “mapping as a conceptual framework to improve our understating of narratives”. Narratives are “an expression in discourse of a distinct mode of experiencing and thinking about the world, its structures, and its processes“ (White 2010) or any cultural artefact that ‘tells a story’ (Bal 2009).
I decided to investigate the photo-sharing platform Flickr as vehicle of narratives (think: the slide show of pictures from a trip, be it directly on the camera’s screen or as an image projected onto your living room wall, as one of arguably the most ubiquitous types of every day narrative).
I have uploaded a preliminary result of my workshop paper on Vimeo (view it large, for good quality):
The movie shows the temporal and spatial patterns that emerge, when we conflate 80’000+ images taken by 4’000 photographers over the course of several years in the city of Zurich, Switzerland (I only looked at georeferenced photographs). See the description of the video on Vimeo for full information.
I will post more about the workshop results and further work, shortly.