William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace”, for his 1982 short story Burning Chrome to create a “a narrative engine, and a territory in which the narrative could take place”. Twenty years on, cyberspace is world’s narrative engine: and an uncharted territory to which the world is still coming to terms. Political, industrial, and civic leaders [...]
Mapping the Political Contours of Cyberspace
Dissecting the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement
As part of The Independent’s visual mapping of the election and its aftermath, we have broken down the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement into an interactive visual graph that lets you comment on and rate each of the proposals. By surfacing their shared agenda for the next Parliament explicitly in this way, the Conservatives [...]
Visualizing Middle East Peace
The events in Israel and Gaza this year have prompted gloomy prognoses for the prospects for peace; a mood deepened by the mixed signals from the Israeli election and the latest developments with Iran. Lord Patten, writing for European Voice last month, struck a particularly bleak note: "However tough things looked in the past, I [...]
Obama: Making Sense of the World?
And so the kaleidoscope turns, and we see the world anew. Or do we? Barack Obama’s inauguration today as the 44th President of the United States of America, marks the end of a remarkable personal and national journey. Arrival at such a destination is a cause for global celebration. But as with all great journeys [...]
Mapping the Crisis in Gaza
As the What Should Obama Do Next? map began to address the unfolding events in Gaza last week, it was soon apparent that the immediate crisis and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict merited detailed consideration on a new map. To this end, Independent readers and the Debategraph community have begun to seed a map on the [...]
Towards Live Government…
The Independent’s mapping project, What Should Obama do Next? , is one of multiple initiatives appearing across the web linked to the Presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. As Jimmy observed in his blog on the Huffington Post, mastery of internet campaigning is not the same as delivering government via the web. So it has been [...]
Help us map the mind of the blogosphere
Cross-posted from: Independent Minds To celebrate the launch of The Independent Minds blogs, and as part of our Obama project with The Independent newspaper, we are launching a global experiment to map the mind of the blogosphere. Source: Matthew Hurst’s Blogosphere Meta-Core. Not all of it, obviously… not, for example, the part that’s thinking about [...]
What should Obama do Next? The Independent series launches…
In the build up to Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, The Independent and Debategraph have teamed up to give the world a chance to map and explore what Obama should do next. Click here for the map. Over the next 10 weeks, Independent readers and the Debategraph team will develop a series of interrelated [...]