Brief bio for author:Sybille Lammes is associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. She has published on SF film, games and digital cartography. In recent years her main research subjects have been related to the new media and digital culture. Her research programme in computer games examines how games can function as cultural spaces for new spatial and postcolonial practices. In her latest ERC research project Charting the Digital she looks at how and to what extent digital mapping has altered meanings of media and cartography in daily life. Abstract:In this article I discuss how digital mapping interfaces ask users to engage with images on screens in far more performative and active ways and how this changes the immutable status of the map image. Digital mapping interfaces invite us to touch, talk and move with them, actions that have a reciprocal effect on the look of the image of the map. Images change constantly through absorbing our mobile and physical actions. I approach digital mapping interfaces as mediators: They do not so much collect information as create spatial transformations for the user of the interface, thus instigating new moves on his or her part that are fed once again into the interface. I argue that it is therefore short-sighted to view digital mapping interfaces as mere points of passage. They are better understood as mediators that create spatial meanings by translating between and inviting movements of users, vehicles, programs, etc.

This article examines how maps in location-based mobile games are used as surfaces on which players can inscribe their whereabouts and other local information while being on the move. Using different examples of location-based games (LBGs) to which the map is central, our main argument is that such cartographical LBGs foreground the fluidity of mapping and emphasize the performative aspects of playing with maps. As such, we wish to move away from a conception of maps as representational texts and will show that it is far more productive to approach such cartographical games as processual and navigational practices. Instead of conceiving maps in such games as ‘mimetic interfaces’ (Juul, 2009), they should therefore be approached as what we will call navigational interfaces. To understand them as such, we will combine perspectives from game studies with non-representational understandings of maps as technological and spatial practices as developed in human geography and science and technology studies. By doing so, we wish to instigate a productive interdisciplinary debate about the relation between play and mapping as to deepen our understanding of LBGs as cultural cartographical practices.

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In this article, we will use autoethnographic accounts of our use of the Apple Watch to analyse a new type of ludic labour that has emerged in recent years, in which leisure activities are redefined in terms of work and quantifiable data. Wearable devices like the Apple Watch encourage us to share data about ourselves and our activities, dividing our attention in everyday contexts as 'quasi-objects' that need our input to hybridise work and play, offering opportunities to merge leisure and labour, and also the possibility for resistant practices in the interstices between function and failure. We combine perspectives from Science and Technology studies, media studies and play studies, including the 'quantified self' and the 'Internet of Things', to argue that while the Apple Watch moves us closer to merging with the machine, its inability to provide what it promises offers a way out-a more positive understanding of intimate, wearable computing technology.

Original citation:Hind, Sam and Lammes, Sybille. (2015) Digital mapping as double-tap : cartographic modes, calculations and failures. Global Discourse : an interdisciplinary journal of current affairs and applied contemporary thought . ISSN 2326-9995 (in press In this article, we will ask how Latour's latest project -An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) -can help us to understand the nature of cartographic modes, calculations and failures. To this end, we will argue that in his many readings, specifically digital mapping can be said to operate through a 'double-click' mode which obscures the [REF-REP] crossing of which he now speaks of in AIME. More appropriately, we refine Latour's argument to suggest that contemporary navigational practice involves not simply a 'double-click' mentality but a 'double-tap' one. This action enables the user to not only zoom into the mapping interface -by virtue of a double-tap of a touch-sensitive screen -but also manipulate phenomena in mobile and haptic terms, as if the world was both accessible and knowable through the fingertips. This small tweak in terminology strengthens Latour's account of prevailing modern thinking, to allow for an even more robust analysis to take place. However, Latour is not the first to think in terms of 'modes'. Critical cartographers, for instance, have talked of so-called 'mapping modes'. Latour's ontological pluralism, together with these other cartographic and methodological versions, can help us to identify different operative elements in various digital mapping enterprises. We further argue that there is still considerable value in employing Latour's long-theorized notions of immutable mobility, inscription and calculation, so long as they are updated and refined for contemporary practices, and the various bridging strategies mentioned above are implemented and taken into consideration. In returning to our initial point, we then argue that there are moments in which this double-tap philosophy is laid bare and the seamless linking of the [REF] and[REP] modes of existence unravel. Taking on and extending Latour's interest in 'failure', we argue that the best way to challenge double-tap thinking, in a methodological sense, is to focus on the nuanced nature of digital mapping failures since these are instances that mapping no longer works 'without a hitch'. In such moments, the aura of unmediated technological practice slips. Instead, the bare operational bones are exposed, allowing the user to gain access to its failed state. We substantiate this final argument with reference to two cartographic cases concerning a flood event and a series of protest demonstrations.