About BQC

...it is still the case that no one lives in the world in general. Everybody, even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving, lives in some confined and limited stretch of it - ”the world around here” ~ Clifford Geertz

About Me

I'm an academic currently on sabbatical; teaching and living in Portugal, a place I'm only just getting to know. So maps mean quite a bit to me at the moment and I use them on a daily basis. In my weaker moments I've also been heard to join my three year old in stirring renditions of "I'm the map, I'm the map" from Dora the Explorer. But even in my normal pointy-headed life in Australia I have a bit of a thing for maps and mapping. I'm currently participating in a couple of collaborative research projects that use different types of maps; we are mapping post-war migrant cinema in Melbourne; mapping the distribution patterns of foreign-language films and more broadly investigating how various mapping systems might more usefully capture historical change over time. As part of a teaching project in Porto my students are mapping cinemas in that city and I'm working on a database of cinemas and film screenings in Lisbon in the mid-1930s which will form the basis for further mapping. Closer to home I'm collaborating on a detailed study of the importance of rivalry in the development of city identities, particularly the famous rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney.

About this blog

BestQualityCrab is a mapblog that is really a bit of an experiment on my part. It starts from the belief that blogs are usually created around time-centred ways of organising thoughts and narratives. BestQualityCrab starts from the idea that blog thinking and narratives can be organised in terms of space and place as well as time.

So I guess this blog is my small contribution to what has been described by those people with a knack for a good phrase as either the “topographical turn” (Weigel 2002), the “spatial turn” (Schlögel 2003) or “topological turn” (Günzel 2005). And as they say...one good turn deserves another...

Credits

BestQualityCrab grew out of a series of conversations between Deb Verhoeven and Robyn Logan, Virginia Murdoch and William Donovan. And, though they probably didn't realise it, with Brian Morris, Kate Bowles and Colin Arrowsmith. While Deb yakked, most of the hard work was done by Inventive Labs.

Once you are able to accept that space can be curved and time is relative ... wearing stripes with plaids seems relatively normal ~ Albert Einstein