From 20th to 22nd of November 2014 the Changing Worlds Conference took place in Vienna. A broad range of topics about Ideologies, Utopias and Ambitions in Science and Technology were covered, often reflecting what our own role as researchers/academics/activits/* in all of that is. At the end of the conference we tried out a little "reflective collective positional mapping" exercise. It is something Jackie came up with in the course of hir talk about trans*disciplinarity (last talk in the last panel). The idea was to visualize how we – the assemblage of conference participants – are positioned along the technoscience landscapes and what the hindrances towards transdisciplinary approaches in our work/live are. The purpose of this page is to provide the 'raw' products of this experiment to everyone – especially conference participants – who is interested in doing something with that. For how to use and cite this work, see the section on authorship and licensing at the bottom of this page.

The setting

Before the last panel started, three little index cards where placed on every seat in the audience. In the back of the lecture hall a flip chart and a pinboard where placed. At the end of hir talk, Jackie invited everyone to write down hindrances towards engaging in transdisciplinary practices onto their index cards and to position themselves on the technoscience landscape. The latter is one specific landscape drawn by Jackie onto the flip chart in the back auf the lecture hall for the purposes of visualisation - a two-dimensional diagram spanning two axes:

1. analysing modes of production & technoscience
2. producing technoscientific artefacts

Here are the concrete words with which Jackie inveted everyone to participate in this little experiment:

"And now, to break out a little of our established conference habits, I would like to invite you to participate in a little collective reflective positional mapping exercise – well, I just made that up yesterday. But you may have already wondered what the little coloured cards on your seats are for? I invite you to write down on these cards 0 to 3 (just a suggestions) topics or issues or obstacles, that hinder you to engage in trans*disciplinary practices. Or if everything is fine and nothing hinders you, or if you don't want to engage in such practices right now, you can write that down to. After the panel I will be in the foyer with some board where you can collectively cluster those cards. And there will be a map where you can try to position yourself with little coloured sticker points. This way we might get some picture where we are now – as a temporary assemblage of engaged researcher-activist-publics. I'll also send the results to the conference organisers afterwards so they can send it to everyone of you, so everybody can make use of it - if it turns out at to be useful at all."

So, now, let's see what the outcomes of all this are.

Mappings and clusterings

What you find here is not a detailed analysis, but rather the plain, "raw" result (of course we know that it is always made up to a certain extent) of the mapping and clustering. It is here for the purpose of everyone (especially interested conference participants) to make something with it, if it seems in any way usable to them. Jackie did facilitate the event but the results are the collective effort of many conference participants. See the section on authorship below for how to use and acknowledge this work, if you plan to do so.

First of all, here are the "plain" results as we captured them right at the end of the conference:

The ad-hoc clustering assembles all cards in the way the conference participants have put them on the clustering wall. Due to the ad-hoc character and the conference environment, the clustering effect (that similar cards are grouped) was rather low. Therefore Jackie took all the cards with hir and did a post-hoc reclustering, the results of which you find below. Of course this is only one specific ordering, but it might help to make sense of all the cards - for better reading this post-hoc-clustering is also transcribed to a text file (see below the pictures).

The reclustered cards are transcribed in the file 03-reclustering.txt. Except for two words i hope i was able to decypher all handwriting. If you have corrections, please contact me (see maintenance contact below). Here is the text file embedded as an html object:

Download

You can download this page and all the linked pictures and files as an archive: cw2014-rcpm.tgz

Users of proprietary operating systems (e.g. Windows & Mac) might want to install a Free Software package to open .tgz files (e.g. 7-Zip). For convenience i have also generated an additional .zip-Archive: cw2014-rcpm.tgz

Authorship and licensing issues

The results of the Reflective Collective Mapping Exercise at the Changing Worlds Conference 2014, including this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, by A heterogeneous assemblage of CW 2014 participants. If you have further questions regarding the use of these documents, please contact either Jackie or the conference organizers – for contact details see the next section.

This page was created with self-coded html and styled with Bootstrap. All content, except the bootstrap folder in the download archive is licensed as noted above. Bootstrap itself (contained within the bootstrap folder) is licensed under the MIT license.

Maintenance contact

This page is maintaned by Jackie / Andrea* Ida Malkah Klaura. If you have any add-ons, corrections or suggestions to change this, just send a mail to jackie [ät] diebin [dot] at.

Any errors found on this page are solely Jackie's liability. The conference organizers only were so kind as to help out with taking photos and distributing the link to these results. If you want to reach the conference organizers, take a look at the conference website.