Spatial Machinations
Over on Progressive Geographies Stuart Elden flags a good piece in the Grauniad”¦
Decent piece in The Guardian on maps and projections in relation to Africa. I often use examples just like this at the beginning of courses on territory and geopolitics.
Professor Rob Kitchin is currently engaged in a large five year EU-funded project: The Programmable City, concerned with the role of software on the ongoing production, performance and imagination of cities. Over on the blog for the project they have announced that Prof. Kitchin’s most recent book ‘The Data Revolution’ is now with the publishers, Sage, with a view to publication later this year. I’m looking forward to it”¦
Here’s the book outline blogpost from the Programmable City website:
Rob Kitchin has just submitted the final draft of a new book – The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences – to Sage and it’s moved into production. The chapter titles are below and the book will be published later in the year.
Preface
1. Conceptualising data
2. Small data, data infrastructures and data brokers
3. Open and linked data
4. Big data
5. Enablers and sources of big data
6. Data analytics
7. The governmental and business rationale for big data
8. The reframing of science, social science and humanities research
9. Technical and organisational issues
10. Ethical, political, social and legal concerns
11. Making sense of the data revolution
References
My colleague Clive Barnett has announced a new research-focused book series with Routledge entitled ‘Place, Space and Politics’. I look forward to seeing what kinds of books are published.
Posted on January 22, 2014 by Clive
Routledge have a new research-focussed book series, the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series. I am the Series Editor. Full details of the Series can be found here: Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series. Do feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about the Series, and especially if you have any book ideas you might think will fit. Here is the overview of what the series aims to cover (the list of topics is indicative only):
“The Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series offers a forum for original and innovative research that explores the changing geographies of political life. It seeks to draw into focus emerging interdisciplinary conversations about the spaces through which power is exercised, legitimized and contested. Titles within the series range from empirical investigations to theoretical engagements, and authors include scholars working in overlapping fields including political geography, political theory, development studies, political sociology, international relations and urban politics. The series seeks to engage with a series of key debates about innovative political forms, including topics such as transnational mobilization, global justice movements, global governance, the right to the city, the commons, new public spaces, cosmopolitanism, the digitalization of governance and contention, material politics, new localisms, and policy mobilities; and to address key concepts of political analysis such as scale, territory and public space. This series provides a forum for cutting edge research and new theoretical perspectives that reflect the wealth of research currently being undertaken around new forms of spatial politics.”
Deborah Lupton recently wrote a blog post asking, and answering, the question: why should sociologists study digital media? Her answers are interesting, and are couched in the framework for a book project Lupton is working on around digital sociology for next year. What I idly wondered when reading through the list of answers Lupton provides is: would these make sense for geographers if we replace ‘the social’ with something like ‘space and place’ or ‘the spatial’?
Here’s Lupton’s bulleted list of answers:
There is a hint of disciplinary anxiety about some of this, which is understandable given the contemporary state of academia, but even so I can’t help thinking these questions could be more broadly framed as ‘why social scientists should study digital media’.
Anyway, to answer my own idle question about substituting the focus on ‘the social’ with that of ‘the spatial'”¦ this might work to a lesser or greater extent for some of these questions. As intimated by my comment above, some of the questions are just as much the concern of human geographers (and anthropologists, historians, scholars of politics and international relations [and so on] for that matter) as they are of sociologists. So here’s my attempt at a complementary list of geographically focused answers to the question ‘why should geographers and other social scientists study digital media?’:
I think Lupton provides really good answers to the question of why any scholar should study digital media, they certainly motivate many of my interests in that field.
I have been meaning to write a quick post about this for a while, so this is a ‘late’ announcement”¦
A few months ago I wrote about having two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available online on the Progress web pages. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However, I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.
“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies” revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.
The 20th century is the century of the industrialisation, the conservation and the transmission–that is, the selection–of memory. This industrialisation becomes concretized in the generalisation of the production of industrial temporal objects (phonograms, films, radio and television programs, etc)
[Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Time of Cinema. On the “New World” and “Cultural Exception”‘, p. 106.].
Following on from the post I made a few months ago, providing a version of a paper entitled ‘memory programmes‘ that I gave at the “Conditions of Mediation” conference at Birkbeck in June, I wanted to share some thoughts I have included in a recent submission around the theme of the ‘industrialisation of memory’, following Stiegler (as above), and the discourses of the ‘smart city’. I play around with the suggestion of the formation of a ‘municipal memory‘, which could be considered one of the cornerstones of what Nigel Thrift has diagnosed as “Lifeworld Inc.“.
While the lines drawn on maps, policed at crossings and customs posts, can apparently clearly delineate a border, other technologies that can also (be used to) place us, on one side of a border or another, may ebb and flow with atmospheric, material and technical differences. In particular, the relatively well known tendency for the cellular mobile phone system to record the location of a given device (via triangulation) as some distance from the actual physical location has been interrogated and played with by artists and activists alike.
One such meditation on the vagaries of the locational capabilities of the GSM system is the Border Bumping project. Julian Oliver has played around with how we traverse borders by examining how phones register with the network and redrawing a map of the borders accordingly. Oliver has created an app that lets owners of Android phones contribute to the project.
Here’s a nice video exploring ‘Border Bumping’:
Matt Wilson has blogged that he has an interesting new paper coming out in a special issue of the Journal of Transport Geography. See below:
Thanks to the invitation and editorship of Seraphim Alvanides and Kate Pangbourne, I’m happy to share the preprint of a forthcoming article in a special issue of the Journal of Transport Geography: Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future. The preprint copy is available here.Wilson, Matthew W. forthcoming. “Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future.” Journal of Transport Geography.
Abstract:
Arguably, there have been few shifts in the GISciences so paradigmatic as the emergence of locationally-aware mobile devices. GISc researchers in the US have witnessed these changes in just the last crop of PhD students, with topics on location-based services, the geoweb, volunteered geographic information and neogeography, somewhat eclipsing earlier, trendy topics on web-based GIS and interactive digital cartography. Indeed, there are new important players in GISc, with training in and outside of Geography, with backgrounds as diverse as the engineering/computational sciences and the digital humanities as well as critical human geographies. Mobilities researchers, qualitative GIS scholars, cyberinfrastructural scientists, and social and cultural geographers have configured research programs around the proliferation of locationally-aware devices and the ‘big data’ that have emerged from them. In this viewpoint, I shall outline these diverse developments and sketch what I argue are the foundational issues that comprise a research agenda with and about geospatial technologies in the location-aware future: technological development, the social life of data, and the everyday practices around mobile digital devices.
There are a number of people engaging in really thoughtful and thought-provoking artistic, activist and political engagements/interventions with geographical (topographical) technologies, which are very much worth paying attention to. Work by Jordan Crandall, Laura Kurgan, Lisa Price and Trevor Paglen, amongst others, I think offers some really interesting ways of critically thinking about, and engaging with, the various kinds of mappings we (as socieities) are variously undertaking for sometimes not-so-benevolent causes.
Laura Kurgan’s recent Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics has attracted some deserved attention by geographers and, in a similar vein to Patrick Crogan’s excellent Gameplay Mode, offers an interesting critical engagement with the military origins of satellite mapping and imaging technologies. Kurgan argues that we cannot stand at a ‘critical distance’ to evaluate these technologies but rather – we are “addressed by and embedded within them”. Thus – “Only through a certain intimacy with these technologies–an encounter with their opacities, their assumptions, their intended aims–can we begin to assess their full ethical and political stakes” (page 14).
Columba Peoples, from the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, has written a good review of Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance for the open access book reviews section of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, which is online here and well worth a read.
Also, Laura Kurgan and Trevor Paglen engaged in a fascinating conversation about their practice at Columbia University earlier this year, which was recorded and is available on YouTube:
Note: Trevor’s mic doesn’t work very well and he’s muffled for a bit at the beginning but it gets fixed so stick with it!
Following on from my recent post about two new articles, I thought it apposite to highlight a couple of extended quotes from Bernard Stiegler’s work that I think offer a good critical response to the persistent use of the metaphor of ‘virtual space’ and its apparent immateriality. I am posting this as much as a reminder for myself as because I hope it is of interest to others too. I will leave commentary on these passages for another time… Continue reading “Stiegler on ‘immateriality’ and ‘virtual spaces’”