16:00 - Sybille Lammes (NL) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University. In recent years, her research has focused on the function of computer games as cultural spaces and the impact of digital maps on the meanings of media and cartography. In her talk she will address the curious treatment of time related to mapping practices in so-called historical strategy games. “What is striking about maps that figure in such games is that they are at the same time highly contemporary and highly historical. Their contemporary dimension lies in their transformative qualities that make them changeable and malleable at a speed that we haven’t known before. This is a feature they share with other recent digital cartographical practices such as navigation devices and Google Earth. Their historical dimension is actually also related to this transformability: players are not just reading maps, but constantly influence the shape and look of the map itself. This is reminiscent of maps and cartographers before the Renaissance when maps were used and made in much more personal, and probably slower, ways”.