As well as this, the authors brought together here refer to the wealth of Internet projects addressing the conditions of browsers, proprietary commercial software and traditional representation methods in order to be able to devise technical or artistic alternatives and critical reflections. Hence Rudolf Frieling's essay «The Archive, the Media, the Map, and the Text» serves as an introduction to the various connections and perspectives associated with these issues. Its arguments extend from the expansion and increasing dissolution of fixed knowledge systems, then on into the 20th century with its databases that placed the encyclopaedic motif on a newly configured, dynamic and networked platform. Today the term ‹mapping› does not just relate to the new electronic territories that are in a state of permanent change and thus intend to convey a spatial sense of this field using new, time-based data-gathering methods and innovative imaging forms.

But it is the metaphor of space with cartographers navigating through it at all appropriate? Christine Buci-Glucksmann's philosophically oriented

introduction in her essay «From the Cartographic View to the Virtual» follows precisely these trains of thought associatively: «For, with Deleuze, the map as an artefact is a ‹plateau› with various layers and access points sketching a new form of seeing - and that is a projection of infinity in top view—and new kinds of abstraction, of abstractions as diagrams.» In contrast with this, in «Beyond the Archive: Bit-Mapping», Wolfgang Ernst insists on a mathematical and topological perspective, presenting digital mapping precisely as a field that goes beyond all spatial metaphors. «From the point of view of media archaeology, cyber‹space›is not about images, sounds or texts, but about bits.»

Particular interest is also taken in new ways of mapping visual or audiovisual documents: a technical innovative approach to searching for images with images is presented by Stéphane Marchand-Maillet in «Image Search or or Collection Guiding») while Graham Harwood, in «Nine(9) – Linker and other Subjective Mappings», has produced a collective map of a community in a project that was particularly concerned with the social interaction involved in