Street-level: Google Street View’s abstraction by datafication

Abstract

While aerial photography is associated with vertical objectivity and spatial abstractions, street-level imagery appears less political in its orientation to the particularities of place. I contest this assumption, showing how the aggregation of street-level imagery into “big datasets” allows for the algorithmic sorting of places by their street-level visual qualities. This occurs through an abstraction by “datafication,” inscribing new power geometries onto urban places through algorithmic linkages between visual environmental qualities, geographic information, and valuations of social worth and risk. Though largely missing from media studies of Google Street View, similar issues have been raised in critiques of criminological theories that use place as a proxy for risk. Comparing the Broken Windows theory of criminogenesis with big data applications of street-level imagery informs a critical media studies approach to Google Street View. The final section of this article suggests alternative theoretical orientations for algorithm design that avoid the pitfalls of essentialist equations of place with social character.

Business Ethics and Quantification: Towards an Ethics of Numbers

“…Neoliberal governance by objectives, specifically, is a case in which quantitative indicators play a central role (Bruno et al 2014a , b ; Thévenot 2011 ). Particularly around basic social institutions like health care (Ruckstein and Schüll 2017 ), transport and traffic control (Shapiro 2018 ) or trade (Davis et al 2012 ), state and market actors may converge around quantitative techniques that mix political and economic objectives (e.g., Mennicken and Espeland 2019 ). Some warn that such techniques give rise to technologies of surveillance, valuation and ranking (van Dijk 2014 ) that combine the most draconian parts of states and markets in a hybrid of quantified governance.…”

“…Practices of capture relate to the objects of quantification in various ways, with different implications for the phenomena which are quantified (Pink and Lanzeni 2018 ). In some cases, lived phenomena may seem to naturally afford quantification, for example, quantities of goods that are easily measured or discrete objects whose countability does not require extraction from entangled webs of other objects (cf., Shapiro 2018 ). Other aspects of social life may be made amenable to quantification only after high levels of processing, manipulation, or abstraction, such as the case with psychological variables like well-being (Alexandrova 2012 ) or sociological concepts such as class (Desrosières 1993 ).…”

Special Section Editorial: Toward a Geographical Software Studies

“…Dalton notes that Google's business model, focused on ad-driven revenue generation, influences the ways people get navigation information and even the ways they interact with their environments. Aaron Shapiro also critiqued a Google product, drawing connections between broken windows policing strategies and Google Streetview's urban epistemologies 49 . Streetview's processes of creating information from visual artifacts informs users of the phenomena that should be important for them and the kinds of urban spaces citizens should visit or avoid; the ultimate implication of this "informaticization" is disproportionately negative impacts on marginalized communities.…”

Mapping II: News media mapping, new mediated geovisualities, mapping and verticality

“…Moving downward from the satellite viewpoint and mobile drone perspective, there are interesting developments in ground-level geovisualities and mapping of place. Here the action of tilting the camera through 90 degrees and the reduction of verticality can be read as a move from the disembodied ‘view from nowhere’ to a more human-scale and embodied sense of place: ‘street-level imagery is always explicitly grounded in a somewhere ’ notes Shapiro (2017: 2, original emphasis); ‘its emphasis on the particularities of place rather than cartographic abstractions of space makes it seem progressive, absolved from the visual-semiotics of scientific rationality or objectivity’.…”

“…Power et al, 2012). As Shapiro (2017: 11–12) points out: ‘aggregation and abstraction by “datafication” of street-level imagery have the potential to inscribe new power geometries onto urban places through algorithmic linkages between visual environmental qualities, geographic information, and valuations of social worth and risk’.…”