This article considers how Spatial Big Data is situated and produced through embodied spatial experiences as data processes appear and act in small moments on mobile phone applications and other digital spatial technologies. Locating Spatial Big Data in the historical and geographical contexts of Sydney and Hong Kong, it traces how situated knowledges mediate and moderate the rising potency of discourses of cartographic reason and data logics as colonial cartographic imaginations expressed in land divisions and urban planning continue on, in a world that increasingly values models of calculability, interoperability and authority. It draws on ethnographic material gathered through walking interviews in both cities, and in doing so, it argues that by using ethnographic 'moments', it is possible to decentre the focus on data processes to consider the critical potential of a politics of everyday experiences that produce and reflect the structures of data logics. Through these ethnographic moments, this article examines how mobile technologies are complicit in the production of Spatial Big Data, and the impact this has on the increasing regimentation and surveillance of modes of being and expression via mobile media. At the same time, it will argue that while spatial calculability has expanded from cartographic reason into data logics, the epistemological universality of Spatial Big Data is constantly being resisted-in moments of experimentation, failure, intuition, memory and desire, the ghosts of the incalculable epistemes, experiences and people, forgotten by the emphasis on calculation, continue to speak.
This article examines how maps in location-based mobile games are used as surfaces on which players can inscribe their whereabouts and other local information while being on the move. Using different examples of location-based games (LBGs) to which the map is central, our main argument is that such cartographical LBGs foreground the fluidity of mapping and emphasize the performative aspects of playing with maps. As such, we wish to move away from a conception of maps as representational texts and will show that it is far more productive to approach such cartographical games as processual and navigational practices. Instead of conceiving maps in such games as ‘mimetic interfaces’ (Juul, 2009), they should therefore be approached as what we will call navigational interfaces. To understand them as such, we will combine perspectives from game studies with non-representational understandings of maps as technological and spatial practices as developed in human geography and science and technology studies. By doing so, we wish to instigate a productive interdisciplinary debate about the relation between play and mapping as to deepen our understanding of LBGs as cultural cartographical practices.
The first goal of the Summit was to identify a research agenda on locational information and the public interest, outlining research questions that cut across disciplines, examining the ethical issues that could be addressed to improve the current challenges in spatial analytics, and identifying knowledge gaps that were not yet researched. Many issues could be raised, for example bias and harm to racialized communities. Since not all could be covered, seven groups of agenda items were identified, including (1) Privacy and Anonymization, (2) Data Technology and Its Social-Psychological Dimension, (3) Utility, (4) Technical Approaches to Privacy Protection, (5) Data Infrastructure: Virtual Data Enclaves and Processes, (6) Co-Design and Inclusivity, and (7) Ethical Implications of the User Experience.
In this article, we will use autoethnographic accounts of our use of the Apple Watch to analyse a new type of ludic labour that has emerged in recent years, in which leisure activities are redefined in terms of work and quantifiable data. Wearable devices like the Apple Watch encourage us to share data about ourselves and our activities, dividing our attention in everyday contexts as 'quasi-objects' that need our input to hybridise work and play, offering opportunities to merge leisure and labour, and also the possibility for resistant practices in the interstices between function and failure. We combine perspectives from Science and Technology studies, media studies and play studies, including the 'quantified self' and the 'Internet of Things', to argue that while the Apple Watch moves us closer to merging with the machine, its inability to provide what it promises offers a way out-a more positive understanding of intimate, wearable computing technology.
As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that has been gathered by sensors, devices and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable and knowable spaces, facilitating ever-more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration and categorisation of difference, and structured through particular discourses of smartness, both of which shape the production of space and place on a local and general level. Valorization of data and its analysis naturalizes constructions of space, place, and individual that elide the political and surveillant forms of techno-cractic governance on which they are built.This article argues that it is through processes of measurement, calculation, and classification that "smart" emerges along distinct axes of power/knowledge. Using examples drawn from the British Home Office's repurposing of charity outreach maps for homeless population deportation and the more recent EU EXIT document checking application for European citizens and family members living in the UK, we demonstrate the significance of Gunnar Olsson's thought for understanding the ideological and material power of smartness via his work on the very limits of representation. The discussion further opens a bridge towards a more relational consideration of the construction of space, place, and individual through the thinking of Doreen Massey.
As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that has been gathered by sensors, devices and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable and knowable spaces, facilitating ever-more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration and categorisation of difference, and structured through particular discourses of smartness, both of which shape the production of space and place on a local and general level. Valorization of data and its analysis naturalizes constructions of space, place, and individual that elide the political and surveillant forms of techno-cractic governance on which they are built.This article argues that it is through processes of measurement, calculation, and classification that "smart" emerges along distinct axes of power/knowledge. Using examples drawn from the British Home Office's repurposing of charity outreach maps for homeless population deportation and the more recent EU EXIT document checking application for European citizens and family members living in the UK, we demonstrate the significance of Gunnar Olsson's thought for understanding the ideological and material power of smartness via his work on the very limits of representation. The discussion further opens a bridge towards a more relational consideration of the construction of space, place, and individual through the thinking of Doreen Massey.
This article moves beyond the textuality of the map to focus on the way in which mobile mapping is constructed discursively, semiotically, and experientially. It centers on the autoethnographic and reflective experience of the researcher analyzing video and Global Positioning System (GPS) recordings of walking interviews, during which the interviewees conversed about, and engaged in, mobile mapping practices. This reductive process can be considered in light of its re-presentation to the researcher for analytical purposes—a ghostly abstraction of a past spatial experience. The article considers the manifold hauntings stirred in the process of abstraction and the creation of multiple layers of experience: that of the firsthand experience of the walking interview and that of the secondhand analysis of the video and geocoded data. The discrepancy between firsthand movement and secondhand analysis underscores questions about the relationship between mobile maps, representation, and movement and about those epistemologies and ontologies that haunt the interstices between individual records.
In this paper I consider how debates in critical cartography about the classificatory and calculative logics of the map might be renegotiated through the concepts of “making-kin,” “sympoesis,” and the chthonic. Between Haraway’s (2014) Staying With The Trouble and Foucault’s (2002) writings on mathesis and taxinomia in The Order of Things, I argue that a more situated understanding of mapping—as an entanglement between people, tools, landscapes, cultures—might realise a more open, and more attentive, way of mapping. I return to the popular case study, OpenStreetMap, to excavate how the use and misuse of taxonomic and mathematical logics through its collaborative and amateur affordabilities shed light on different ways of sorting-with the world. I argue that, in the unexpected emergence of proposed classifications (and despite the disciplining power of cartographic discourses), roots of a new and more inclusive cartography linger in the archive, waiting to be fertilsed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.