Small moments in Spatial Big Data: Calculability, authority and interoperability in everyday mobile mapping

Abstract

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.

The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism

“…But, in the ways that this spectacle accumulates and is created through the data of everyday life, in the ways that it is made scalable, embodied, situated, and partial (Wilmott 2016), it is always open to contestation through that 'co-constitutive milieu' of humans and their use of the technologies they create. While there are other ways to break apart the seeming totality of 'Big Data' (See, for example, work on data assemblages as in Kitchin 2014, Kitchin andLauriault 2014, andelsewhere), it is through the Situationist practice of the dérive that we find the ability to 'attack the 'enemy' at his base, within ourselves' (Trocchi 1964in Marcus 1989, to begin to contest that 'corporeal corkscrew inwards.…”

Data Derives: Confronting Digital Geographic Information as Spectacle

“…But, in the ways that this spectacle accumulates and is created through the data of everyday life, in the ways that it is made scalable, embodied, situated, and partial (Wilmott 2016), it is always open to contestation through that 'co-constitutive milieu' of humans and their use of the technologies they create. While there are other ways to break apart the seeming totality of 'Big Data' (See, for example, work on data assemblages as in Kitchin 2014, Kitchin andLauriault 2014, and elsewhere), it is through the Situationist practice of the dérive that we find the ability to 'attack the 'enemy' at his base, within ourselves' (Trocchi 1964in Marcus 1989, to begin to contest that 'corporeal corkscrew inwards.…”

Questioning “digital ethnography” in an era of ubiquitous computing

“…Elsewhere in anthropology, media studies, and sociology, a diverse range of "digital ethnographies" have already provided much needed insight into how ubiquitous and pervasive computing, in its many forms, is having an impact on social life, spatial practices, and notions of being in everyday life (Hine, 2000(Hine, , 2015Horst & Miller, 2012;Ito, Matsuda, & Okabe, 2005;Lupton, 2014). Despite a notable few seeking to examine specific everyday digital mapping practices (see Brown & Laurier, 2012;Laurier, Brown, & McGregor, 2016;Wilmott, 2016), questions still remain as to why geographers have so far broadly neglected ethnographic approaches to studying "the digital" considering the significant interest in ethnographic and ethnomethodological approaches taken elsewhere (see, for example, Anderson, 2012;Cloke et al, 2004;Laurier, 2009Laurier, , 2010Novoa, 2015;Spinney, 2006;Paterson, 2009;Vannini, 2012Vannini, , 2015Wiley, 2002) and its general interest in digital technologies such as the internet (see Kinsley, 2013). As a discipline yet to widely adopt this approach to the digital age, but nonetheless inching towards its own digital turn, 1 it is timely to question what a digital ethnography in geography might be.…”