To All Readers
Ghost Metropolis is a work of verbal and visual storytelling. It is a written work of prose, comprising 45 essays in about 300,000 words. Ghost Metropolis is also a work of visual authorship through photography and cartography. Scalar is the platform in which Ghost Metropolis has been authored and its mode of publication. It is a “book” in many traditional senses: It has an overall argument and narrative structure, it is comprised of chapter-like essays, it has bibliographi references. INdeed, it is built on countless printed books of the pre-digital era.
But because it is a Scalar Book, Ghost Metropolis is also a new genre, helping to re-invent the book in the 21st century. It is certainly paperless, and must be read “live” on an Internet connection, as with most newspapers and website today. The reader can approach Ghost Metropolis in numerous ways that are not typical of print or “codex” books. One such opportunity is that the 45 principal essays are also dismantled chronologically, by sections, so that readers can read across the essays at different chronological and thematic layers and paths.
Navigating and reading Ghost Metropolis should be as easy as reading a newspaper or a website. There are many opportunities to jump outside of the present essay to another, or from images to the text that references those images, or from maps to historical narratives about those locations.
Because the author is also the principal cartographer and photographer, his method of “writing” visually merits a few words. Historians have always been clear about their native training to read archival sources and to write argumentative prose narratives about such evidence and its significance to wider concerns. The work of producing critically historical cartography to represent the past of society is less familiar to historians and other scholars accustomed to think of verbal prose as the principal form of historical writing.
The work of my cartography begins with asking research questions, just as in verbal prose historiography. But it also involves analyzing and interpreting historical maps and many layers of data compiled digitally, then designing and producing visualizations of human action in space and time.
The spatial dimension of social life has become an area of burgeoning interest to social scientisfs and humanities scholars in recent decades, and for good reason. But it also very often requires methods and vocabularies that are quite distinct from the methods of verbal prose historiography. The author writes of “inscription” and “footprints” pof institutions, of topographies and topologies, of social distance and geometric distance. Circulations and segregations are highly spatial phenomena, and are treated sptailly through critical prose historiography and through visual argumentation.
Maps come in many varieties. Mine are critical. I create maps to recount what took place. I belong to the school of critical cartography studies, which holds that all maps are embedded in the power relations of the times in which they are produced. Most are “normative,” meaning that they, express biased perspectives in support the of dominant powers of the day. All of the archival cartography used in Ghost Metropolis is handled within a larger framework of this kind of historical criticism. My own original cartography, however, is counter-normative. That means, I am consciously marking and coloring and revealing social landscapes in order to visually uncover and decode the structures of power, privilege, injustice, and also the counter-structures of creative freedom, tolerance, and humanism.
