Category: mappings

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Sam Merrill on “Mapping Maps and Gaps: A Critical Digital Cartography of the ‘Mediterranean Refugee Crisis'”

Over on his blog, a little while ago, Sam Merrill blogged an excellent write-up of his participation in the 2016 Digital Methods Initiative Winter School (something I would’ve liked to do but didn’t know about[!] and anyway didn’t have time/funds to do). There’s a lot to think about from Sam’s blogpost, from the politics of different uses of maps in different phonic communities to the discursive politics of ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ and the complex representational politics of different media organisations. Definitely worth a read!

Mapping Maps and Gaps: A Critical Digital Cartography of the ‘Mediterranean Refugee Crisis’

Last month I attended the 2016 Digital Methods Initiative Winter School led by Richard Rogers and his team at the University of Amsterdam. Organised in the format of a data sprint the event saw participants attend a day of keynote talks presented by the likes of, among others, Lilie Chouliaraki, Mathieu Jacomy, Carolin Gerlitz and Rogers himself before turning their attention to a hands-on digital project for the remainder of the week. With the rather clever title of, Otherwise Engaged – Critical Analytics and the New Meanings of Engagement Online the Winter School set out to problematize online engagement and develop new methods by which to measure, visualise and interpret that engagement. The group I joined, which was made up of Natalia Sanchez-Querubin (University of Amsterdam), Rik Smit (University of Groningen), Belal Islim (University of Amsterdam), Quentin Lobbe (Telecom Paris Tech), Gabriele Colombo (Density Design), Suzanne van Geuns (Utrecht University) Jasper Bol (University of Amsterdam), Lars Dellemaan (University of Amsterdam), Hadewieg Beekman (University of Amsterdam) set out to create a digital critical cartography of the so-called ‘Mediterranean Refugee Crisis’ (although this phrase formulation arguable shifts attention from the true location of the crisis in the Middle East) .

Our pilot study compared the maps, images, locations and texts returned by Google searches for the queries ‘refugee routes’ and ‘migrant routes’ in seven languages: Arabic, English, French, Italian, Dutch, German and Spanish. As we expected the result showed the different levels of empathetic distance, dehumanization and solidarity associated with the two terms (refugee and migrants) and reinforced the relevancy of the recent debates in the European press about the responsible use of these terms and the campaign by the UNHCR about the degree to which, in this context particularly, word choice matters. It would take too much space to explain in detail all of the different hybridized digital-human methods that we explored and used over the week not to mention all the multi-leveled findings suggested (but not necessarily confirmed) by our initial interpretive forays. So instead I direct those interested to visit our project wiki, which although still being updated, gives a good idea of what we got up to during the week.

Read the full blogpost.

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Reblog> New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Interesting new book highlighted by Colin McFarlane, including contributions by Rob Kitchin (and team) and Jennifer Gabrys…

New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and myself have just published a new edited book on the ‘smart city’ debate. The book, Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge), is a critical examination of the claims, drivers, imaginaries and consequences of smart city discourses.

As we all know, there is an incredible amount of hype and noise made about smart cities, much of it by multinational corporations like IBM and Cisco in their effort to sell expensive ‘urban solutions’. In this book, we sought to take this debate on by bringing together a group of critical, international and interdisciplinary researchers.Smart urbanism

The book examines how smart city initiatives are being rolled out, and makes a series of arguments that seeks to advance a critical research agenda. It finds, for example, that the discourse is often in reality a justification for the latest round of neoliberal development and displacement. It finds a common tendency to place far too much faith in technology, with far too little attention to the actual urban context. It also finds that most of the time, and despite high profile cases such as Rio’s control room, the smart city discourse is little more than discourse, bolstered by pervasive imagery that globally circulates and effectively constitutes a powerful form of marketing.

But the book also finds openings in the smart city discourse, including in the actions of social movements, civil society groups, and critical researchers to use or promote digital technologies in more socially and ecologically relevant ways. In these efforts, it is urbanism and social justice that inform whether or not digital technologies are useful, as opposed to the positivist view that technology can be added to cities awaiting ‘enhancement’ through sensors, dashboards and real-time data management. But as the book shows, it would be far too simple to argue that there is an ‘alternative’ smart city discourse that opposes a ‘mainstream’ discourse, partly because the various overlaps between what may initially appear mainstream and alternative, and partly because many critical initiatives with digital technology reject the entire smart city discourse altogether while others seeks to reframe it.

Here’s the list of contributors and chapter titles:

  1. IntroductionAndrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin
  2. Smart cities and the politics of urban dataRob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
  3. IBM and the visual formation of smart citiesDonald McNeill
  4. The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in IndiaAyona Datta
  5. Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: Beyond the rhetoricNancy Odendaal
  6. Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart cityJennifer Gabrys
  7. Smart-city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through codeFrancisco Klauser and Ola Söderström
  8. Geographies of smart urban powerGareth Powells, Harriet Bulkeley and Anthony McLean
  9. Test-Bed as urban epistemologyNerea Calvillo, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier and Wolfgang Pietsch
  10. Beyond the corporate smart city?: Glimpses of other possibilities of smartnessRobert G. Hollands
  11. ConclusionsColin McFarlane Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin
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CFP> Mapping (from) the minor of big data?

Here’s an interesting call for papers for the Association of American Geographers conference next year (2016), posted to Crit-Geog by Wen Lin…

Call for Papers:

Mapping (from) the minor of big data?
AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco
29 March to 2 April 2015

http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting

Organizers:
Wen Lin, Newcastle University
Matthew W. Wilson, University of Kentucky

“The minor is not a theory of the margins, but a different way of working with material. “¦ It is about the conscious use of displacement.” (Katz 1996, 489)

“Clearly, the technology has the potential to disenfranchise the weak and not so powerful through the selective participation of groups and individuals.” (Harris and Weiner 1998, 69)

Recent years have seen the explosive growth of geospatial data produced and shared by vast, diverse users, facilitated by an array of information and communication technologies and mobile devices. There is a burgeoning body of work attempting to theorize and investigate these processes and practices, with notions including neogeography (Turner 2006), volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007), maps 2.0 (Crampton 2009), vernacular mapping (Gerlach 2014), alt.gis (Schuurman 2015), and a form of geographic big data (Mooney 2015). Significant efforts have been made to examine a range of issues derived from such phenomena regarding ways of mapping, data quality, and associated socio-political implications concerning power, equity and knowledge. Attention has been given to the empowering and emancipatory potential of new ways of mapping and storytelling, while questions have also been raised about possible implications of surveillance, population control, and unevenness of knowledge production.

Yet, there remains much to be known about those mapping efforts that are seemingly on and in the margins of ‘big data’, from those less active contributors, or by actors in relatively marginalized positions. Such efforts may constitute counter-hegemonic knowledge production (Harris and Weiner 1998, see also Elwood 2015) or may be alternatively understood as a kind of minor data (to draw upon ‘minor theory’ in Katz 1996).

This session intends to contribute to these vibrant discussions by engaging with documenting efforts of mappings and data construction that might be of a much smaller quantity in the wake of big data. We welcome papers addressing theoretical, methodological, and empirical investigations of these mapping efforts situated in a variety of contexts. Questions may include, but are not limited to:

  • How might we engage with mapping the minor in the context of big data?
  • In what ways are data generated, represented, or curated by those who might be from a more marginalized position in these mapping efforts?
  • In what ways are geospatial technologies used, reconfigured, or contested in these mapping efforts?
  • In what ways is knowledge (re)produced in these mappings?
  • What are the challenges of tracing and documenting mapping efforts from the margins?
  • What might be the broader implications of these accounts?

If you are interested in participating in this session, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Wen Lin (wen.lin[at]ncl.ac.uk) and Matthew W. Wilson (matthew.w.wilson[at]uky.edu) by Friday, 2 October. Please note that we are attempting to bring alternative perspectives and positions to this discussion, in alignment with this recent manifesto on the gender and racial composition of AAG panels (http://www.knowledgepolitics.org/2015/09/07/the-unbearable-white-maleness-of-aag/).

References:

Crampton, J. 2009. Cartography: performative, participatory, political. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6): 840-848.

Elwood, S. 2015. Still Deconstructing the Map: Microfinance Mapping and the Visual Politics of Intimate Abstraction. Cartographica, 50(1): 45-49

Gerlach, J. 2014. Lines, contours, legends: coordinates for vernacular mapping. Progress in Human Geography, 38(1): 22-39.

Goodchild, M. 2007. Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69: 211-221.

Harris T., Weiner D. 1998. Empowerment, marginalization, and “community-integrated” GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 25(2): 67-76.

Katz, C. 1996. Towards minor theory. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 14: 487-499.

Mooney, P. 2015. An Outlook for OpenStreetMap.  In J. Jokar Arsanjani, A. Zipf, P. Mooney, M. Helbich (eds.) OpenStreetMap in GIScience: Experiences, Research, and Applications. Cham, Springer, pp. 319-314.

Schuurman, N. 2015. What is alt.gis? Introduction to the Special Issue. The Canadian Geographer, 59(1): 1-2.

Turner. A. 2006. An Introduction to Neogeography. O’Reilly Media, Sebastapol, CA.

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Round-up of the Programmable Cities Data & the City Workshop by @mhaklay

A great couple of posts offering an overview of the Data & the City workshop over at NUIM just before the RGS-IBG conference last week, very much worth reading:

Data and the City workshop (day 1)

Data and the City workshop (day 2)

Plus, there are some videos of the first session over on the Programmable Cities website. Here’s Rob Kitchin offering an interesting and informative overview of histories and key issues for studying data in/and cities:

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Museum of Contemporary Commodities

I have meant, and singularly failed, to blog about this fantastic project for a while, so I mean to makes amends now:

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is an artistic, collaborative and activist project cooked up by the excellent Paula Crutchlow – who just so happens to be a PhD student in Exeter Geography Dept. The project is a collaboration with my colleague Ian Cook and several other interesting and exciting people – not least the folk at Furtherfield.

Funnily enough, I learned about MoCC when it was in its larval stages before I joined the department at Exeter – Ian and Paula held a ‘Thinkering Day’ here in Devon and we explored some ideas around what MoCC could be… the event was supported by REACT (hence why I learned about it) – here’s a snazzy video:

You should definitely explore the MoCC website to learn more, but here’s how MoCC is explained on the Furtherfield website:

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff – it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse full of stuff as if it were a museum, and all the things in it part of our collective future heritage.

Imagine yourself as this museum’s curator with the power to choose what is displayed and how. To trace and interpret the provenance and value of these things and how they arrived here. To consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or far away, and how and why it connects them.

What do we mean by things or stuff? Everything that you can buy in today’s society. The full range of contemporary commodities available to consume.

Please join us on our journey by browsing and adding to our collection, attending an event, and becoming a researcher. We are currently curating connections between trade-place-data-values.

There are further events planned and lots more exciting things to come so keep an eye on both the Furtherfield and the MoCC websites.

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Reblog> New Publication: Crossing Over into Territories of the Body (Area)

Really interesting new article out in Area by Jen Jack Gieseking:

New Publication: Crossing Over into Territories of the Body (Area)

I am pleased to report that my new article in Area, “Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City,” is available via preview! As I am unable to pay the $3k-$5k fee to make this article open access (per the Wiley-Blackwell requirement to do so), you can (legally) download a pre-print version of the article for free by clicking here are on the image to the left. Enjoy! The abstract is also below. Many thanks to Sara H. Smith and her student colleagues who brought to life the AAG 2012 sessions on bodies, borders, and territories together and this following special issue.

Read the whole post.

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What might happen when ‘things’ design themselves?

I’ve been meaning to flag this for a while… Chris Speed at Edinburgh (who gave the ‘dancing with data‘ talk I posted a while ago) is leading a project called ThingTank:

The ThingTank project identifies that ‘things’ may soon know more about lives than we do and may also be able to make suggestions about what is missing. The purpose of this project is to explore the potential for identifying novel patterns of use within the data that is streamed through the interaction between people and things, and things and things. Our project builds on research and innovation that has been established by the three investigators across the fields of Internet of Things, Social Experience Design and Machine Learning. Through a better understanding of how what data can tell us about how we use objects, new models of use will emerge and reinvigorate the role of things and people within design and manufacturing.

The project offers some interesting provocations both as research outcomes and as innovation in methods. It’s worth looking at this write-up by Chris on his website Fields.

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The web and its territories

(Well… DNS and territories)

Two things I’ve read recently converged in my mind and reminded me of work in geography undertaken a while ago about the ways apparently abstract or immaterial aspects of the internet are intimately tied up with traditional geo-political borders and territories.

First, as James Bridle finishes his essays about geographic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) for the Citizen-Ex project – its really interesting to reflect on the often fraught and muddy geo-politics of the domain name system (DNS), which Bridle expresses beautifully. The stories about the Libyan (.ly), Syrian (.sy) and British Indian Ocean Territory (.io) domains are especially arresting.

Second, over on Culture Digitally, Adam Fish wrote a post about the growth in interest in the high seas, the upper reaches of the atmosphere and space for creating extra-legal territories for ‘unencumbered’ innovation and for the delivery of services without the need for territorial wrangling:

Technical approaches towards national internet sovereigntyincluding IP address blocking, domain names, key words, and packet filtering. Non-technical forms of censorship include laws, regulations, threats, bribes, and arrests of publishers, ISPs, and authors. Reporters without Borders identifies 19 countries – including the US and the UK – along with Cuba, China, Iran, and North Korea, all of which use one or several of these tactics to create a distinct national internet.

Certainly, what governments want for their people and what the people want for themselves frequently diverge. But while we may agree that internet censorship by authoritarian dictatorships is an affront to free communication, can we really put our faith in Facebook’s drones? It is possible to overthrow a government and depose a dictator but it is nearly impossible to revolt against corporate drones and extraterritorial CEOs.

Both of these reminded me of a few things in geography: of work in  by Mark Wilson about 15 years ago and (of course) by Matthew Zook (also about 15 years ago [e.g.]) concerning the economic geographies of the infrastructures of the internet(s). It also strongly reminded me of Alexander Murphy‘s paper in the Annals of AAG a couple of years ago about ‘Territory’s continuing allure‘. It is interesting, amongst the hyperbole of immateriality and of ‘off-shore’ data centres through which our exhaust data are analysed and sold on, that (the idea of) territory maintains certain kinds of political-economic importance in particular circumstances.

As Murphy contends (in a different context but I suggest the argument holds in relation to the examples above):

if Agnew (1999, 504) is right that the spatialities of power will change “as material conditions and associated modes of understanding of them change” (italics added), then the continu- ing hold of modernist conceptions of territory on the political–geographic imagination (see Gregory 1994) must be seen as fundamental to any effort to understand the character and prospects of the current system (p. 1214)

…

Novel spatialities of power call out for a reinvention of the linguistic terms and conceptual frameworks we use to make sense of the world (see, e.g., Allen’s [2011] call for a consideration of what he terms topologies of power). At the same time, if we are to make sense of the circumstances and struggles shaping the political future, we must not underplay territory’s continuing ideological hold and practical significance … We also need to factor in the enduring significance of territorially based worldviews that continue to shape the perspective and ideas of billions of people–and by extension the institutions and regimes that circumscribe their lives.(p. 1224)