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Interactive videodiscs: beginnings of multimedia and catalyst for multimedia cartography

In 1985, I was lecturing in the Geography Department at Portsmouth Polytechnic. My lectures focused on cartographic design and production which focussed on the manual production of colour separation artwork, as part of the photo-mechanical production process, that led to subsequent printing via the printing press. Even thoughmy lecturing programme at the time was focused around paper production and delivery of geographic information, I was searching for an alternative, non-printing, and non-computer-driven, alternatives for portraying geographic information. I had experimented with interactive slides, film, photography, and television. In looking for a medium that would allow me to experiment with a conglomerate of graphics +maps, what I found in 1985 was interactive videodisc. In that year, I attended the Association of British Geographers conference and heard a paper presented by Doctor Helen Mounsey on Birkbeck College’s involvement in the development of the BBC/Philips/Acorn Computers-supported Domesday Project interactive videodisc. I later visited Birkbeck College in London in 1985, where I was briefed about their involvement in the project and viewed the ‘real thing’. The Domesday project was produced to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the original Doomsday Book of 1085. It was seen as a contemporary version of the 1085 book and a contemporary (1985) record of the geography and social activities carried out throughout Great Britain. Rather than being stored and delivered as a bound paper book, as the original Domesday records did, this product was a hybrid analogue/digital product. The possibilities of what could be achieved by interposing a computer and software between the keyboard and tracker ball allowed for the frames on the video disc to not just be viewed sequentially, but a specific frame could be viewed, frames could be played as movies and these could be accompanied by text and sound. It must be noted that the Domesday videodisc wasn’t the first geographically-related videodisc package. This was the Aspen Movie Map Project (1978), developed at the MIT Architecture Machine Group. This package used videodiscs, controlled by computers, to allow the user to ‘drive’ down corridors or streets of Aspen, Colorado (Negroponte, 1995a). Exposure to this videodisc system changed completely how I thought about how geographic information could be delivered, and it was the catalyst for my research in interactive integrated multimedia cartographic systems over the following 35 years.