Surfacing

August 30, 2015 1:15 PM

In Surfacing, you are a signal traveling across the undersea network... In the process, narratives about the history of the cable network, the companies that construct it, and the ecologies that it runs through will orient you in your journey.

A digital mapping project made to accompany a new book on international cable networks, The Undersea Network. Read an excerpt here, or listen to an interview with author Nicole Starosielski on the New Books in History podcast.

posted by latkes (4 comments total)

This is potentially interesting but very difficult to navigate.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:07 PM on August 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Does it cover you, the signal, being split and shipped to Utah forever just in case you, the signal, might have been sent by someone nefarious?
posted by rockindata at 7:18 PM on August 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I agree that it is difficult to navigate, but it's worth a visit if only for the interactive globe projection at the "map" zoom level.

Perhaps this is a simple math/geometry/javascript effect but I was temporarily spellbound watching the continents slide closer together and farther apart, and the great circles traced by the cables turn into the straight lines of a Gnomonic (?) projection as you shift the POV around.
posted by ElGuapo at 9:41 AM on August 31, 2015

Just in case you haven't read it yet, Neal Stephenson's epic "Mother Earth Mother Board" article for Wired.
posted by cardioid at 8:41 PM on September 2, 2015