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Themesicon: navigation pathMapping and Texticon: navigation pathInternetmapping
 
 
 
 
 

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according to the ISP, seeking to highlight who ‹owns› the largest sections of Internet topology. This project is ongoing and the data is archived and available to other researchers to utilise. Over time, it is hoped that the data will be useful for monitoring growth and changes in the structure of the Internet. The experience gained in mapping the Internet is also being applied commercially, using network scanning and visualization techniques to chart the structure of corporate intranets to identify security weaknesses and unauthorized nodes.

 

Conclusions

I have argued in this paper that mapping can be used to look «inside the Internet cloud,» providing a significant analytical tool for managing Internet infrastructure, developing and implementing policy, and understanding the information economy. Maps can be used to reveal the range, extent and density of Internet infrastructure in relation to realworld geography at a variety of scales. I finish on a note of caution, however. While mapping is a useful strategy, with many of the maps visually striking and persuasive,

 

they need to be created, used and interpreted with care for several reasons. Firstly, map-making is now much easier to do, but it is not necessarily a quick fix to understand the Internet. Like any 19 chosen mode of analysis, the potential of mapping has external practical constraints, including data availability and data quality and the level of user knowledge. There are also issues to consider relating to the ethics and responsibility of researchers producing maps of the Internet. The processes of data selection, generalisation and classification and the numerous map design decisions mean that one can never remove the subjective element in map-making. As Monmonier notes: «… any single map is but one of many cartographic views of a variable or a set of data. Because the statistical map is a rhetorical device as well as an analytical tool, ethics require that a single map not impose a deceptively erroneous or carelessly incomplete cartographic view of the data. Scholars must look carefully at their data, experiment with different representations, weigh both the requirements of the analysis and the likely perceptions of the reader, and consider presenting complementary

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