Geography is in the midst of a digital turn. This turn is reflected in both geographic scholarship and praxis across sub-disciplines. We advance a threefold categorization of the intensifying relationship between geography and the digital, documenting geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital. Instead of promoting a single theoretical framework for making sense of the digital or proclaiming the advent of we conclude by suggesting conceptual, -disciplines.

New spatial media – the informational artefacts and mediating technologies of the geoweb – represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web‐based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change. Drawing upon evidence from an inductive analysis of five online initiatives that engage new spatial media in activism and civic engagement, we explore new dimensions of the knowledge politics advanced through new spatial media and the mechanisms through which they emerge. ‘Knowledge politics’ refers to the use of particular information content, forms of representation or ways of analysing and manipulating information to try to establish the authority or legitimacy of knowledge claims. The five new spatial media initiatives we analyse here introduce new dimensions to the modes of collecting, validating and representing information, when considered against practices of many activist/civic encounters with other kinds of geographic information technologies, such as GIS. The significance of these practices is not in their (arguable) newness, but rather their role in advancing different epistemological strategies for establishing the legitimacy and authority of knowledge claims. Specifically, these new knowledge politics entail a deployment of geovisual artefacts to structure a visual experience; a prioritisation of individualised interactive/exploratory ways of knowing; hyper‐granular, highly immediate, experiential cartographic representations de‐coupled from conventional practices of cartographic abstraction; and approaches to asserting credibility through witnessing, peer verification and transparency.

In this paper, I examine the convergence of big data and urban governance beyond the discursive and material contexts of the smart city. I argue that in addition to understanding the intensifying relationship between data, cities, and governance in terms of regimes of automated management and coordination in ‘actually existing’ smart cities, we should further engage with urban algorithmic governance and governmentality as material-discursive projects of future-ing, i.e., of anticipating particular kinds of cities-to-come. As urban big data looks to the future, it does so through the lens of an anticipatory security calculus fixated on identifying and diverting risks of urban anarchy and personal harm against which life in cities must be securitized. I suggest that such modes of algorithmic speculation are discernible at two scales of urban big data praxis: the scale of the body, and that of the city itself. At the level of the urbanite body, I use the selective example of mobile neighborhood safety apps to demonstrate how algorithmic governmentality enacts digital mediations of individual mobilities by routing individuals around ‘unsafe’ parts of the city in the interests of technologically ameliorating the risks of urban encounter. At the scale of the city, amongst other empirical examples, sentiment analytics approaches prefigure ephemeral spatialities of civic strife by aggregating and mapping individual emotions distilled from unstructured real-time content flows (such as Tweets). In both of these instances, the urban futures anticipated by the urban ‘big data security assemblage’ are highly uneven, as data and algorithms cannot divest themselves of urban inequalities and the persistence of their geographies.

The geoweb represents a profound shift within regimes of the production, dissemination, and institutionalization of geographic information. Going beyond early geographic accounts of the geoweb that engage it as an extension of Web 2.0, this paper situates the emergence of the geoweb within the neoliberal political economic restructuring of the state. Drawing upon evidence of state, market, and citizen practices around Web-based spatial media and geoinformation, I argue that as the state is 'rolling back' from public aspects of the cartographic project, market regimes of governance are simultaneously 'rolling out', subsuming the mapping enterprise to the imperatives of technoscientific capitalism.

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This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as 'spatial media' to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives of 'virtual'-'real' spatial hybrids by instead understanding spatiality (as the nexus of material sociospatio-technical relations) as always-already mediated -i.e. as the ontogenetic effects of the contingent, necessarily incomplete comings-together of technical presences, persons, and space/place.

‘Platform urbanism’ has recently gained traction as a designator for emergent dynamics and material configurations associated with the increasing presence of digital platform enterprises in cities. Initial scholarly engagements with platform urbanism have tended to coalesce around critiques of digital platforms as progenitors of inevitably dystopian urban futures. In this paper, I advance a counter-topographical minor theory of platform urbanism. I do so by drawing on Legacy Russell's notion of the glitch as a tendency toward both error and erratum (correction) in digital systems, mobilizing space/times where platforms appear ‘glitchy’—unexpectedly, otherwise than anticipated, or not at all—as the margins of platform urbanism. Through the narration of three specific platform/city interfaces from the minors of their glitchy margins, I capture the ways in which platform–urban configurations are demonstrably open to negotiations, reconfigurations, and diffractions through tactical maneuvers rooted in everyday digital practices of urban denizens. Theorized from the minor, platform urbanism is a phenomenon that may beget an array of possible outcomes that remain shapeable by mundane tactical interventions in the platform-mediated present. This ultimately underwrites possibilities for more hopeful digital urban politics, theory, and futures.

It is even more remarkable to some of us that up to this point, there has been no thoroughgoing discussion by GIS practitioners and theorists about the epistemology of their subject, the ontology of their objects, and the political commitments embedded in their practices.(Pickles 1997, p. 364) Abstract Metadata are an extant mechanism for conveying ontological information about semantic data. Metadata have the advantage of being institutionally and structurally ensconced in GIS. At present, however, they lack fields to express information beyond the technical and geometric domain. This paper describes a framework for the creation of extended metadata for non‐spatial attributes, with the goal of incorporating ontological context. We use an informatics interpretation of ontology which refers to the total universe of discourse associated with a given attribute (database field). In other words, an ontology is the possible range of meaning offered by an encoded field. Current ontology research in GIScience has focused on data structuring and modelling. Implementation of these schemes demands restructuring of existing relational database models. An alternative is to extend current metadata schemes (e.g. ISO 19115) to include context‐based and tacit information about semantic attributes. Such ontology‐based extended metadata permits data selection and interoperability decisions that are ultimately more defensible. We have developed eight preliminary fields to add to existing metadata frameworks that will enable ontological context to travel with the data. This paper illustrates a preliminary implementation based on the integration of non‐commensurate cadastral data. The results illustrate the value of ontology‐based metadata in highlighting descriptive and substantive differences between similar classification systems. Recognition of semantic heterogeneity is the basis for creating defensible data linkages between multiple datasets. The development of ontology‐based metadata is profoundly different from the current trend to incorporate ontological context at the model level in GIScience. It is pragmatic, however, in that it presents a vehicle for incorporating use‐context with data in a manner that is accessible; requires little re‐engineering; and is intuitively understood by GIS users. Moreover, ontology‐based metadata are a mechanism for addressing Pickles’ (1997) concern about the ontology of spatial objects in GIS.