Matthew W. Wilson

'Training the Eye': Formation of the Geocoding Subject

From 2004 to 2007, a nonprofit organization in Seattle conducted over twenty-five street surveys in ten neighborhoods. Participants in these surveys collected geographic data about community ‘deficits’ and ‘assets’ using handheld devices, while walking around their local neighborhoods. These residents marked graffiti, litter, vacant buildings, and abandoned automobiles, as well as, ‘friendly’ business districts, appropriate building facades, and peopled sidewalks—all among their categories of interest, initially borrowed from a New York City foundation responsible for developing the handheld devices. Here, I analyze the geocoding protocol, ‘Training the Eye’, that was created by the New York City foundation and was adapted by the Seattle nonprofit. This technology of citizen engagement in governmental practice enacts an embodied cartographic vision that is productive of liminal subjectivities. These practices of geocoding, of assessing place in space, are intensely bodily, both in their messy enactment of digitally-extended vision and in their data-based imaginings of bodies at the margins. I draw upon theories of the cartographic gaze to discuss how technologies of vision constitute particular urban imaginations and discuss how subjects are formed through the discourses and practices of geocoding.

Data Matter(s): Legitimacy, Coding, and Qualifications-of-Life

Data are central to geographical technologies and provide the pathways in which geographic investigations are forwarded. The mattering of data is therefore important to those engaging in participatory use of these technologies. This paper understands ‘mattering’ both in the material sense, that data are products resulting from specific practices, and in the affective sense, that data are imaginative, generative, and evocative. I examine these senses of mattering, of both presence and significance, in a discussion of a community survey project held in Seattle, USA. During this four-year project, residents in ten neighborhoods were asked to collect data about their community streets using handheld computers. Residents tracked ‘assets’ and ‘deficits’ by locating objects such as damaged sidewalks and graffiti on telephone booths. These data records were then uploaded to a central server administered by a local nonprofit organization. The nonprofit worked with community residents to help link these data about their changing neighborhoods to agencies in the municipal government. Here, I argue that the legitimacy of these data practices is constructed through processes of standardization and objectification and that these processes transduct urban space. I ask, as participatory mapping practices target governing agencies with their data products, what are the implications for the kinds of knowledge produced and for its legitimacy? In other words, how does data come to matter?

Cyborg Geographies: Towards Hybrid Epistemologies

As a mode of critique, the cyborg is often separated from its role as a figuration. This article reviews Donna Haraways cyborg theory to restate the importance of the cyborg as a figuration in critical methodology. Figuration is about opening knowledge-making practices to interrogation. I argue that the cyborg enables this inquiry through epistemological hybridization. To do so, cyborg figurations not only adopt a language of being or becoming, but narrate this language in the production of knowledges, to know hybridly. The epistemological hybridization of the cyborg includes four strategies: witnessing, situating, diffracting and acquiring. These are modes of knowing in cyborg geographies. To underline the importance of this use of cyborg theory, I review selected geographic literatures in naturecultures and technosciences, to demonstrate how geographers cite the cyborg. My analysis suggests these literatures emphasize an ontological hybridity that leaves underconsidered the epistemological hybridization at work in cyborg figuration. To take up the cyborg in this way is to place at risk our narrations, to re-make these geographies as hybrid, political work.

Big Data, social physics, and spatial analysis: The early years

This paper examines one of the historical antecedents of Big Data, the social physics movement. Its origins are in the scientific revolution of the 17th century in Western Europe. But it is not named as such until the middle of the 19th century, and not formally institutionalized until another hundred years later when it is associated with work by George Zipf and John Stewart. Social physics is marked by the belief that large-scale statistical measurement of social variables reveals underlying relational patterns that can be explained by theories and laws found in natural science, and physics in particular. This larger epistemological position is known as monism, the idea that there is only one set of principles that applies to the explanation of both natural and social worlds. Social physics entered geography through the work of the mid-20th-century geographer William Warntz, who developed his own spatial version called “macrogeography.” It involved the computation of large data sets, made ever easier with the contemporaneous development of the computer, joined with the gravitational potential model. Our argument is that Warntzs concerns with numeracy, large data sets, machine-based computing power, relatively simple mathematical formulas drawn from natural science, and an isomorphism between natural and social worlds became grounds on which Big Data later staked its claim to knowledge; it is a past that has not yet passed.

Morgan Freeman is dead and other big data stories

In the context of the feverish pace in which the social sciences are grappling with the implications for a turn toward ‘big data’, I suggest a different starting point: that big data are not necessarily social science data. In this somewhat speculative provocation, I argue that we should lean more on the notion that social media are phenomena and less on the notion that social media are evidence of phenomena. In doing so, I sketch four areas of potential criticality for an emerging big data studies.

Neogeography and volunteered geographic information: a conversation with Michael Goodchild and Andrew Turner

Goodchild: Neogeography implies a reinventing of geography, in which the traditional roles of expert producer of geographic information and amateur user have broken down, with the amateur becoming both a producer and user—or what some have termed a prosumer. Implicit is a defi nition of geography as a discipline devoted to the production of geographic information; most contemporary geographers would fi nd this naive, since it places emphasis on the collection and compilation of mere facts, and may seem therefore more allied with the discipline of cartography than geography. VGI also addresses the production of geographic information, emphasizing the voluntary nature of much contemporary activity, and distinguishing it therefore from its professional or authoritative equivalent, which has traditionally been the preserve of national mapping agencies and commercial map-makers. It thus focuses on the production of geographic information, rather than on the entire discipline of geography. It leaves open the question of whether other aspects of the discipline of geography, including the analysis and modeling of phenomena distributed over the surface of the Earth, can also be subject to a breaking down of the distinction between expert and amateur. Both terms describe the results of a dramatic meltdown in the initial costs of entry into map-making, due to the widespread availability of GPS and other means of determining position, and access to advanced cartographic skills encapsulated in software.

Practicing GIS as Mixed Method: Affordances and Limitations in an Urban Gardening Study

Geographic information systems (GIS) represent more than a tool for spatial data handling. Qualitative and mixed-methods approaches with GIS value the suite of spatial methods and technologies, while typically showing a marked sensitivity toward issues of subjectivity, knowledge production, exclusion, reflexivity, and power relations. Although recent research in the use of qualitative GIS demonstrates the ways in which spatial representations and analyses can be used as part of critical geographic inquiry, there remain significant opportunities to demonstrate and synthesize the particular affordances of these approaches. Alongside broader developments in public scholarship and the digital humanities, mixed-methods research with GIS is coming of age, as technological innovations are easing access to data and access to visualization and analytical tools for some. The implications of these developments at the level of knowledge construction within community-based, critical research have been underexplored, however. What are the specific affordances of mixed-methods research with GIS? How are mixed-methods knowledges made and worked through community engagement? Here, we trace how qualitative GIS methods uniquely enable multiple narratives to change the ways in which GIS is practiced. To illustrate this process, we present findings from the use of qualitative GIS to study urban gardening in a postindustrial, Midwestern city. Key Words: critical GIS, qualitative GIS, urban gardening, urban geography.

Revisiting critical GIS

Even as the meeting ‘revisited’ critical GIS, it offered neither recapitulation nor reification of a fixed field, but repetition with difference. Neither at the meeting nor here do we aspire to write histories of critical GIS, which have been taken up elsewhere.1 In the strictest sense, one might define GIS as a set of tools and technologies through which spatial data are encoded, analyzed, and communicated. Yet any strict definition of GIS, critical or otherwise, is necessarily delimiting, carving out ontologically privileged status that necessarily silences one set of voices in favor of another.

Paying attention, digital media, and community-based critical GIS

New web-based architectures and capacities for digital storage have made online social interactions more significant, discursively and materially. Increasingly, these media-centric shifts toward the online and the interactive have enabled for-profit and nonprofit organizations to capture the attention of potential customers and constituents through social and spatial media. In research on the everyday information- and data-practices of community-based organizations, websites and their mobile applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Pinterest are examined as the emerging media toolset to build sustained connections to funders, constituents, and other members. These technologies and these new pressures around their utilization have made the daily work of nonprofits more complex. As the landscapes of digital media continually shift their interfaces, protocols, and membership settings (including privacy configurations), I suggest that this new normal – persistent change – presents challenges for collective memory and the attention-work of community-based organizations. Taking up and responding to concerns around the implications of digital information technologies on memory and culture, this paper highlights struggles over externalization as significant to the everyday work of collective action.

Flashing lights in the quantified self-city-nation

In the quantified self-city-nation, the flickering of screens, the dynamics of real-time data and the prospect for behavioural change intersect in a glossy imaginary where being technologically fashionable and facile supersedes concerns of differential docility. In other words, the technophilic projections of the coming society do very little to grapple with inequalities across human and non-human life. Instead, we are assured of the untapped potential at the touch of the flat screens in some of our pockets, that the possibility of our ‘fittest’ bodies and ‘smartest’ cities rests with individual behaviour. At moments, the hyperbole of the ‘smart city’ feels much like ‘flashing … lights’, to reference and invoke Kanye West (2007). It is akin to ‘showing off’, flexing a representational muscle that attempts to frame discussion not around the implications of quantified self-city-nation ‐ around who, what bodies will benefit ‐ but around how quantified, how smart, how flash these systems can be. Gee whiz. Enter the media observation deck of Rio’s Center of Operations. In Figure 1, the image to the right displays what can be seen from above the command centre, while the image to the left provides a viewpoint on the ground floor, generally off-limits to the public. This centre has quickly become the poster child celebrating new public‐ private partnerships in the securitization of urban space ‐ and more importantly the securitization of perception ‐ such that mobile capital finds a nurturing nest in global cities that manage their (visible) precarity well. Rob Kitchin and his programmable city research team have well-documented a typology of these emerging systems of indicators, benchmarks and dashboards. They suggest, and I underscore, that many smart city advocates view these systems as enacting measurements, and not productions, of the urban. Kitchin, Lauriault, and McArdle (2014) discuss this epistemological uneasiness, and encourage a different approach to dashboard development: ‘that they do not reflect the world as it actually is, but actively frame and produce the world’.