Taylor Shelton

Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography:

As digital social data have become increasingly ubiquitous, many have turned their attention to harnessing these massive data sets in order to produce purportedly more accurate and complete understandings of social processes. This intervention addresses the relationships between geography and big data and their intertwined futures. We focus on the impacts of an age of big data on the discipline of geography and geographic thought and methodology, as well as how geography might provide a useful lens through which to understand big data as a social phenomenon in its own right. Ultimately, we see significant potential in big data, but remain skeptical of the prevalent discourses around it, as they tend to obscure, more than reveal, the complexity of social and spatial processes.

Social Media and the City: Rethinking Urban Socio-Spatial Inequality Using User-Generated Geographic Information

Big data is increasingly seen as a way of providing a more ‘scientific’ approach to the understanding and management of cities. But most geographic analyses of geotagged social media data have failed to mobilize a sufficiently complex understanding of socio-spatial relations. By combining the conceptual approach of relational socio-spatial theory with the methods of critical GIScience, this paper explores the spatial imaginaries and processes of segregation and mobility at play in the notion of the ‘9th Street Divide’ in Louisville, Kentucky. Through a more context-sensitive analysis of this data, this paper argues against this popular spatial imaginary and the notion that the Louisville’s West End is somehow separate and apart rban planning from the rest of the city. By analyzing the everyday activity spaces of different groups of Louisvillians through geotagged Twitter data, we instead argue for an understanding of these neighborhoods as fluid, porous and actively produced, rather than as rigid, static or fixed. Ultimately, this paper is meant to provide a conceptual and methodological framework for the analysis of social media data that is more attentive to the multiplicity of socio-spatial relations embodied in such data.

The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes

This article combines geographical studies of both the Internet and religion in an analysis of where and how a variety of religious practices are represented in geotagged Web content. This method provides needed insight into the geography of virtual expressions of religion and highlights the mutually constitutive, and at times contradictory, relationship between the virtual and material dimensions of religious expression. By using the spatialities of religious practice and contestation as an example, this article argues that mappings of virtual representations of material practices are important tools for understanding how online activities simultaneously represent and reproduce the material world.

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.

Rethinking the RECAP: mapping the relational geographies of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky

ABSTRACT The idea of concentrated poverty has long held a prominent place in understandings of racial and class inequality in American cities. While the spatial concentration of the poor is undoubtedly an important aspect of this story, concentrated poverty research suffers from a number of conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Through a case study of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky, this paper draws on relational socio-spatial theory and critical GIS in order to offer a constructive critique of conventional concentrated poverty research. The paper demonstrates that while concentrated poverty and affluence are both on the rise in recent years, concentrated affluence actually represents a more widespread problem within the city. At the same time, the paper visualizes how these processes are fundamentally interconnected and co-produced through property ownership, where the extraction of rents from areas of concentrated poverty works to simultaneously produce areas of concentrated affluence elsewhere in the city.

The Urban Geographical Imagination in the Age of Big Data

This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the ‘new urban science’ and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn’t necessarily produce a single, greater understanding of the city as it actually is, but rather a highly variegated series of essentialized understandings of the city that render it knowable, governable and intervene-able. Through the construction of new, data-driven urban geographical imaginaries, these projects have opened up the space for urban interventions that work to depoliticize urban injustices and valorize new kinds of technical expertise as the means of going about solving these problems, opening up new possibilities for a remaking of urban space in the image of these sociotechnical paradigms. Ultimately, this paper argues that despite the importance of Big Data, as both a discourse and practice, to emerging forms of urban research and management, there is no singular or universal understanding of the urban that is promoted or developed through the application of these new sources of data, which in turn opens up meaningful possibilities for developing alternative uses of Big Data for understanding and intervening in the city in more emancipatory ways.

Information Society, Geography of

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by E. Sheppard, volume 11, pp. 7464–7468,

Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender

Geography, like any discipline, is prone to fads. This is not to say that such fads are necessarily devoid of substance; rather, it is to point out the extent to which we are quick to latch on to i...

A Review of “Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life”

and metabolic relations with human and other ecological processes. Water needs to be seen in ecological as well as in bio-political terms. This, in turn, permits the continuing politicization of water while acknowledging the multiple material, bio-physical, cultural, and ecological relations through which the hydro-social cycle operates. This is a claim for considering the politics of urban metabolism as a socio-ecological project. Reframing water as such, Bakker argues, moves the debate beyond the public–private dichotomy, the limitations of a distributive justice paradigm, and the ambiguities of communal solutions and opens the possibilities for a politicization of water that recognizes (rather than silences) “the inevitable tensions between representation and participation, technocracy and democracy, centralized oversight and local preferences, and economic exigencies and environmental imperatives” (p. 227). This is a call for a democratization of environmental governance, one that moves beyond the state-versus-the-market smokescreen and insists on the centrality of people’s voices in the environmental governance of their life worlds. With a perfect and subtle mix of theoretical argument, empirical analysis, emblematic water “vignettes,” and political passion, this book is poised to become a landmark publication that will transform the terrain of urban water analysis and, more important, the vantage point from which to think through and practice urgently needed alternative water strategies.