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MIKE DUGGAN

Cultural Geographer /

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ABOUT ME

Mike Duggan holds a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, working in partnership with the Ordnance Survey on studying everyday digital mapping practices. Mike is primarily interested in the intersections between technology, culture and everyday life. He has studied everyday mapping practices, the lived experiences of the sharing economy and video conferencing platforms. He a director of the Livingmaps Network and the editor-in-chief of the Livingmaps Review, a bi-annual journal for radical and critical cartography, which welcomes a range of submission styles from academics, artists, activists and others interested in maps and mapping practices. His latest book is All Mapped Out, is published by Reaktion Books (2024).

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ALL MAPPED OUT

A unique approach to maps, exploring how they have shaped society and culture. Maps go far beyond just showing us where things are located. All Mapped Out is an exploration of how maps impact our lives on social and cultural levels. This book takes readers on a journey through the fascinating history of maps, from ancient cave paintings and stone carvings to the digital interfaces we rely on today. But it’s not just about the maps themselves; it’s about the people behind them. Discover how maps have affected societies, influenced politics and economies, impacted the environment, and even shaped our sense of personal identity. Mike Duggan uncovers the incredible power of maps to shape the world and the knowledge we consume. This is a unique and eye-opening perspective on the significance of maps in our daily lives.​

Buy here

Reviews

Cultural geographer Duggan works in partnership with the UK national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, to study everyday digital-mapping practices. Important as it is, digital mapping is not superseding analogue maps, he observes in his global history of cartography, which begins with Palaeolithic carvings. Sales of Ordnance Survey paper maps are rising, perhaps because of their convenience. “Although digital maps are improving constantly in accuracy and design, they do not always live up to those promises.”

Nature Magazine

 

Anyone reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never look at a map in the same way again . . . By examining the complex ways in which maps shape our lives, from the politics they create to the emotional responses they evoke, Duggan’s book proceeds to demonstrate that maps deal not only with the cartographic features of our world but “play an important role in who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going."

Morning Star

 

Broad in compass and ambitious in scope, this new look at the map in the digital age is fascinating. Mike Duggan’s journey through maps takes us to places, landscapes and times past, present and future, traversing a busy and sometimes complicated picture and engaging with theoretical views on cartography as well as the pragmatics of how maps shape our lives. All Mapped Out helps us to see maps differently, as well as understand how maps continue to influence us. Compelling and engaging, this book will appeal to cartophiles everywhere.

Keith D. Lilley, Professor of Historical Geography, Queen’s University Belfast

 

All Mapped Out is an entertaining adventure for everyone who loves maps, both real and imaginary, analogue and digital. Mike Duggan – in this reliable guide to an unreliable technology – invites us to re-examine our assumptions about the spatial representations of not only unfamiliar places, but the sites we inhabit with meaning and call home.

Phil Cohen, Livingmaps Network

 

From travelling London in the backseat of a black taxi to following grizzly bears and migrants, rally drivers and Tube riders, geocachers and map collectors, All Mapped Out offers a provocative and surprising study of maps and mapping. In this journey, we encounter maps scratched onto rocks and materializing on plasma screens, maps made of words and sounds, and even maps meant to be seen by the eyes of self-driving cars rather than of humans. Mike Duggan asks questions of our present reliance on digital mapping: how the technologies subtly pervade our lives, condition our consumption habits and even shape our experience of the world. 

Veronica della Dora, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

 

All Mapped Out is a freewheeling journey through a conceptual terrain with few distinct borders. While treading deep into critical questions about the power and practices of contemporary maps, Duggan also includes plenty of compelling excursions through cartographic history. 

Garrett Dash Nelson, President and Head Curator, Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library

PAST PROJECTS

ZOOM OBSCURA

Introducing a new project that uses artistic intervention to challenge the data collection practices of videoconferencing.

More info here and here 

Now exhibiting at InSpace in Edinburgh 

LOCATIVE MEDIA FOR EARTHLINGS IN A CHANGING WORLD

Locative Media Summer School

More info here

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OUTSMARTED?

Communication infrastructures and students’ pathways to navigating London as a digital city

Inspired by critical technology, urban and education studies, the Outsmarted project, led by Dr Alevizou, worked with KCL students from Digital Humanities and Liberal Arts to explore their experiences of London in terms of culture and communication infrastructures, places and spaces for knowledge, learning and leisure. Deploying a range of participatory pedagogies and qualitative methods, as well as creative and computational thinking, it drew insights into students’ understanding of the ‘digital’ (culture, media, connections, networks and infrastructures and frames surrounding ‘appification’) in the city.

To read more about the project and download the toolkit, please click here 

CHARTING NEW TERRAINS

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Counter-Mapping Research and Pedagogy in the UK and India

In 2023 I started a collaboration with Savyasachi Anju Prabir (National Institute of Design, India) to develop a teaching and research collaboration around the theme of counter-mapping in the UK and India. Two summer schools took place in 2023; January at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and June at King's College London. This collaboration is supported by the NID and KCL Global Engagement Partnership fund

PUBLICATIONS

Please contact me if you would like a copy of the following

JOURNAL ARTICLES

BOOKS

Elsden, C., Chatting, D., Duggan, M., Dwyer, A. and Thornton, P. (2022). Zoom Obscura: Counterfunctional Design for Video-Conferencing. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22). 

Kiminami, C. A. G. & Duggan, M. (2022). Locative media communities, social media and cultures of enthusiasm. International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media. (online first).

Duggan, M. (2021). Embracing the plurality of the carto-sphere. Dialogues in Human Geography (online first).

Duggan, M. (2021). Cruising landscape-objects: inland waterway guidebooks and wayfinding with them. Cultural Geographies, 29(2): 167-183.

Duggan, M. (2019). Cultures of Enthusiasm: An Ethnographic Study of Amateur Map-Maker Communities. Cartographica, 54(3): 217-229.

Duggan, M. (2019). Spatial Media and Cycling Spaces: A Theory of Coded Attractors. Area, 52(2): 322-328.

Duggan, M. (2018). Navigational Mapping Practices: Context, Politics, Data. Westminster Papers in Communication, 13(2): 31-45.

Duggan, M. (2017). Questioning ‘Digital Ethnography’ in an Era of Ubiquitous Computing. Geography Compass, 11(5): 1-12.

Duggan, M. (2017). The Cultural Life of Maps: Everyday Place-Making Mapping Practices. Livingmaps Review, 3

BOOK CHAPTERS

Duggan, M. (2024). All Mapped Out. London: Reaktion Books. 

Cohen, P. and Duggan, M. (2021). New Directions in Radical Cartography: Why the Map is Never the Territory. Rowman & Littlefield.

Arcidiacono, D. and Duggan, M. (2019). Sharing Mobilities: Questioning Our Right to the City in the Collaborative Economy. London: Routledge (Forward by Juliet Schor)

Duggan, M. (2021). Mobile, spatial and locative media. In: von Benzon, N., Holton, M., Wilkinson, C. and Wilkinson, S. (Eds). Creative Methods for Human Geographers. London: Sage. (pp. 245-258).

Duggan, M. (2018). The Lived Experiences of a Digitalising World. In: Gäbler, K. and Felgenhauer, T. (Eds). Geographies of Digital Culture. London: Routledge. (pp. 71-83).

BOOK REVIEWS

Duggan, M. (2020). Review Essay. Rossetto, T. (2019). Object Oriented Cartography: Maps as Things. Livingmaps Review, 8

Duggan, M. (2019). Review Essay. Edney, M. (2019). Cartography: The Ideal and its History. Livingmaps Review, 7  

Duggan, M. (2015) Book Review. Wilken, R. & Goggin, G. (2012). Mobile Technology and Place. Routledge, London. Society and Space 

Duggan, M. (2014). Book review. Miller, D. & Sinanan, J. (2014). Webcam. Polity Press, Cambridge. Society and Space

DOCTORAL THESIS

INTERVIEWS

Duggan, M and Kiminami, C. (2021). Reflecting on Locative Media Art 

With Fred Adam and Geert Vermeire. Livingmaps Review, 10

Mapping Interfaces: An Ethnography of Everyday Digital Mapping Practices. (2017). Awarded by Royal Holloway University of London

COURSES TAUGHT

I teach on a range of undergraduate and graduate-level courses in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London

These have included:

History of Networked Technologies 

Theories of New Media 

Digital Foundations II 

Digital Foundations III

Big Data, Culture & Society 

Contemporary Trends in Digital Theory 

Cultural Analytics 

Introduction to Digital Culture and Society 

The Sharing Economy and its Discontents 

Digital Entrepreneurship 

Digital Industries and Internet Culture 

London as a Digital City 

Micro Perspectives on the Digital Economy

Ethnography for the internet 

Maps, Apps and the Geoweb

CUSTOM LOOPS

Image by Kelly Sikkema
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