I’m trying to find a way to show how the Dutch landscape changes continually as seen when travelling on the canals and rivers. One glides from scene to scene – as if in a play almost – from Golden Age to Industrial Revolution to Agro-Industrial Complex and back again. With nature reserves and recreational areas thrown in for good measure.

The strict conditions that the Dutch government has placed on where to build and what to build show themselves in these transitions.

Later: learned the word ‘rurban area’ as an area that has both urban and rural characteristics [here]. It was in one of the articles Steven Devlemick sent me to help me on in formulating my research questions and research approach. Did I mention that I am looking at a PhD ….. ?

Not sure I’ve hit the spot yet with the ships journal shown here that I tried for size. I did try to be systematic, my algorithms were a. a photo at every bridge b. a photo every half hour c. photos of people active on or next the water. In sorting, I may have overvalued the goodlooking images …

I have new algorithms in mind. From the series I did I quite like the images that are half water, half land, so I’ll do more of these, at random intervals I think, but now I will document both sides of the waterway as the reality of boating is that one slides – rather slowly – between two banks.

Also I liked the many many bikers, so I’ll take a better camera (all of the images shown are done with my Iphone) and snap images when a cyclist shows. If ‘spatial quality consist of ‘use-related value, experience-related value and future value’ [here] this I could visualise use-related value (speed cyclists) and experience-related value (recreational cyclists) and even future value (cyclists going from A to B). Many of the cyclists have something heroic, too – man in battle with the elements.

The success [of the bycicle] had less to do with Dutch DNA or the country’s flatness than with a combination of factors, including bicycle-friendly representatives, strong bourgeois cultures, urban-planning choices, late automobility, and governmental policies. Oldenziel & de la Bruhèze 2011

Later: could also try out words – a stream-of-conscious thing. This would be a form of intuitive mapping, a deeply personal map-making effort, mapping things that I have words for, that I recognise, that register with me, that are ‘on my map’.. Could also be triangulated ….

Later: an example – the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project, which pioneered the use of individual mapbiographies [here] – it was in one of Stevens articles.

Later: the challenge – make maps that are not naive (naive as in: unaware of political, social, ecological issues in an area) but also not strict representations of strict facts (the location of a canal, a house). That express my take on an area but are of interest to others.

Mitigating against this vision of a critical past has been the conflation of
cartography – a comparatively recent professionalization of mapmaking dating to the first third of the nineteenth century – with the whole of mapmaking, much of whose history preceded the development of cartography, and the balance of whose history has run parallel with it. A strategic move in this conflation was the effort on the part of Max Eckert and others to articulate mapmaking around a hegemonic vision of timeless principles (what Arthur Robinson called “The Essential Cartographic Process”) in an
effort to recast mapmaking as a science, as a Wissenschaft, rather than a form of human communication closer to writing. As a science, cartography was understood to progress from the solution of one problem to another – as other sciences were construed – and its past was recast as a seamless accumulation of know ledge and technique [here]

To exaggerate only a little, maps do not communicate knowledge; they stimulate and suggest it. [here]

These ongoing developmens [computers, mobile phones] have clearly inspired new interest in research to predict and explain the effectiveness of geo-visualizations as communication tools, understood broadly to include
knowledge discovery as well as confirmation.[here]

Undoubtedly professionalization, with its guidelines and texts, handbooks
and standards of practice, constituted a form of anxiety reduction during a period of rapid growth in mapmaking, pushing aside any need for an overwhelmed class of mapmakers to directly confront the problem of knowledge. [here]

Later: need to think about the path that goes from perception to information to knowledge to meaning.

We study spatial concepts in their creative context instead of as detached concepts. Namely, we want to understand how the concepts have been used and in which settings, including for example the state of the art of
policy ambitions and movements in spatial analysis. This kind of reasoning fits a genealogic research approach, in line with Foucault (1977, 2003; and cf. part 1.3). The genealogy-researcher gives an overview of the developments of an issue by producing a genealogy. He explores trends and breakpoints of the developments; ‘randomness, discontinuity and power’ are central issues (Foucault in Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000; p. 224). In our case, we look for ‘surprising’ situations in spatial conceptualisation, which are rooted in the ‘will to order’ of planners in combination with their expression of spatial understandings. [here]

Found footage: