Archive for the 'writing' Category

May
18

In an article in Cartographica I describe a new tool that I call shaping. The abstract reads:

shaping is a Web-based tool that enables direct manipulations of cartographic space to sculpt, cut, expand, and contract map regions. Breaking with rigid Euclidean understandings of projected space found in GIS, these operations support creative cartographic work that understands space as fluid, dynamic, relational, and situated. Each operation is described in detail, along with possible use cases informed by literature in geography and cartography. Most manipulations of space found in shaping can be translated into QGIS, enabling the transformation of vector and raster layers of geographic information. By enabling direct and real-time manipulation of cartographic space, shaping acts as an expressive tool that engages with geographic information. It is also an example of how accessible tools can be built that are interoperable with existing GIS while still being useful on their own.

Lally, Nick. 2022. “Sculpting, Cutting, Expanding, and Contracting the Map.” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 57 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3138/cart-2021-0013.

If you are fast, you can download a copy using this link. If that doesn’t work, email me and I will send you a pdf. You can find the code for the project and play with the online demo on my github repository: https://github.com/nicklally/shaping

Oct
20

(1) Madison’s Race to Inequity, 2020
This piece was originally written in 2015 for the digital magazine, Edge Effects, following the shooting of teenager Tony Robinson by a Madison police officer. Concerned about our explicit critiques of the police department and mayor, some of the editors attempted to introduce changes to the text that toned down and whitewashed the discussion of Madison’s complex history of anti-Black racism. Feeling that our original statement should appear as originally written, we declined to make the changes. The piece never appeared in Edge Effects. The Abolition Geographies Collective have kindly invited us to include this piece on their website. While it responds to events from over five years ago and while many of the key figures – such as the mayor – have changed, it sadly feels just as timely today. This summer saw widespread mobilizations in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. And the struggle for justice for Tony Robinson continues. We humbly offer this document in solidarity with current police and prison abolition organizing in Madison, UW–Madison, and elsewhere.

Lally, Nick, Elsa Noterman, and Keith Woodward. 2020. “Madison’s Race to Inequity.” Abolition Geographies Collective. https://abolitiongeographies.space/?p=359 || local version

(2) For geographical imagination systems, 2020
For many, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related libraries for programming languages define the terrain of geographical computing today. But what if GIS were locales within wider realms of geographical imagination systems (gis), realms more adequate to diverse theoretical commitments of geographical thought? Examining how various thinkers in spatial theory have conceived of phenomena, space, knowledge, and their entanglements, this article advocates for geographical imagination systems that change the infrastructures of geographical computation and broaden its associated objects of intellectual inquiry. In doing so, it centers questions such as: What if knowledge were understood as interpreted experience? What if phenomena were represented as individuated out of process and internal relations? What if spaces and coordinates were co-produced with phenomena? Interludes juxtapose such considerations with concrete possibilities realized by an experimental prototype gis under development. But, as the article also argues, crucial to the future of geographic computation adequate to geographical inquiry will be diverse creative conversations in code (valued alongside and) intellectually interwoven with scholarly interventions made through mediums such as the written word.

Bergmann, Luke and Nick Lally. 2020. “For geographical imagination systems.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. [Published version (paywall) || Accepted manuscript version (free)]

(3) Computational parasites and hydropower: A political ecology of Bitcoin mining on the Columbia River, 2019

Over the past three years, the dams of Chelan County, Washington, its watershed and fish, the electrical grid and the laborers who maintain it, and cleared land with warehouses filled with computers, have all been enrolled as part of the decentralized digital infrastructure of Bitcoin. While popular accounts of the Bitcoin network correctly report the massive scale of energy it consumes and its potential environmental ramifications, in practice, the material geographies of Bitcoin are highly uneven and intertwined with specific infrastructural, ecological, and economic systems. In this article, we examine Bitcoin’s impacts on Chelan County, untangling the processes that occur as the distributed, digital infrastructure consumes the very real material resources of one place to produce digital goods used in another. In so doing, we examine not only the material costs of networks like Bitcoin, but also their historical ties to older processes of accumulation.

Lally, Nick, Kelly Kay, and Jim Thatcher. 2019. “Computational parasites and hydropower: A political ecology of Bitcoin mining on the Columbia River.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. [Published version (paywall) || Accepted manuscript version (free)]

Oct
7

newspaper1

In his 1961 dissertation, Map Transformations of Geographic Space, Waldo Tobler describes the 1944 maps of Richard Edes Harrison, which assumed a peculiar perspective. While the Soviets may have claimed they were “unscientific” (prefiguring later critiques of the political power of maps), Tobler calls it a “valid projection” that, by the time of his writing, had taken on an added significance as it “shows the earth as it might be seen from an orbiting satellite (48).


from http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~260193~5522900:Europe-as-Viewed-from-the-U-S-S-R-

The geographic importance of satellites as both a tool (ie: remote sensing, satellite imagery, etc) and object of study (ie: mobile maps, military intelligence, surveillance, etc) is well known today in geography. But the geographic imaginary of seeing like a satellite and the desire to see these seeing machines has also been productive in geographic scholarship. For example, Doreen Massey, in her 1993 essay Power geometry and a progressive sense of place, begins with the view of an imagined satellite, one that lies beyond existing satellites, and is able to zoom in on a place. She writes:

what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite toward the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communication in one’s head, then each place can be seen as a particular, unique point of that intersection (61).

This is a different view than that of the totalizing vision of the technologically-enhanced primate eye seeing through a satellite that Donna Haraway has critiqued:

Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters (581).

Massey doesn’t use the imaginary of satellite vision to produce an all-knowing perspective (she may even be reiterating contemporaneous critiques of David Harvey’s totalizing views, see for example Boys Town by Rosalyn Deutsche), instead she zooms in to a particular place. But the zoomed-out satellite view is still important in seeing the vast global networks that intersect in each particular place, allowing her to call for a “global sense of the local” (68).

If the imagined satellite view is productive in Massey’s work, Trevor Paglen flips the script by attempting to photograph the visual traces of satellites that are ostensibly hidden from view. His The Other Night Sky photographs are produced through detailed research that enables us a technologically-mediated view of the watchers:

The Other Night Sky” is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites, space debris, and other obscure objects in Earth orbit. The project uses observational data produced by an international network of amateur satellite observers to calculate the position and timing of overhead transits which are photographed with telescopes and large-format cameras and other imaging devices.

paglen

from: http://www.paglen.com/?l=work&s=othernightsky&i=5 KEYHOLE 12-3/IMPROVED CRYSTAL
Optical Reconnaissance Satellite Near Scorpio (USA 129)
C-Print 48 x 60 inches
2007

But there are limits to vision, both in the imaginary of seeing like a satellite (Massey) and in visualizing the visualizers (Paglen). Louise Amoore, in her recent article on ‘the cloud’ writes:

Among the critical geographical accounts of cloud computing, the desire to wrest the cloud into an intelligible form similarly finds expression in methods of visualization. The geographer and artist Trevor Paglen seeks to ‘make the invisible visible’, reflecting that ‘the cloud is a metaphor that obfuscates and obscures’ the material geographies of the ‘surveillance state’ (Paglen, 2014). Paglen’s work is concerned with bringing the geopolitics of cloud computing back into a human line of sight through visualization. His methods deploy optical devices of many kinds to bring back into human vision that which would otherwise exceed the limits of observation. His ghostly images of the NSA’s data centres are photographs taken at night with a long-focus lens from a helicopter; and his photographs of the secret installations of military and drone bases in the Nevada desert are taken with adapted telescopic instruments of astronomy (Paglen, 2010).

The optical instruments deployed by Paglen belong to a paradigm of observation in which, as Peter Galison describes, one is offered ‘a direct view’ of things otherwise ‘subvisible’ (1997: 72). As Paglen accounts for his own work:

My intention is to expand the visual vocabulary we use to see the US intelligence community. Although the organizing logic of our nation’s surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings … if we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse the vast intelligence infrastructure. (2014, my emphasis)

So, for Paglen the challenge is to ‘expand the visual vocabulary’ in order to see more clearly the geopolitical technologies of security, or rather to bring into vision the things which would otherwise be obfuscated by the cloud.

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Ingrid Burrington’s Networks of New York, from: http://lifewinning.com/projects/networks-of-new-york/

But, as Amoore argues, this security apparatus of which satellites are a part, exceed our capacity to visualize them:

To be clear, the point is that the desire to ‘open the black box’ of cloud computing and to expand the visual vocabulary of the cloud, to envision the cloud and its properties in geographic space, dwells within and alongside the paradigm of observation. In Stephen Graham’s work on cities and warfare, for example, he writes of ‘systems of technological vision’ in which ‘computer code tracks and identifies’ (2011: 66). Such technologies of vision, it has been noted across political geography, operate increasingly along vertical dimensions, requiring new forms of critical observation and attentiveness (Graham, 2016). The emphasis in political geography has been placed overwhelmingly on bringing the abstract world into vision. There are, however, crucial aspects of these technologies which cannot be brought into human vision where, for example, algorithms are communicating with other algorithms at speeds beyond human observational capacity (MacKenzie, 2016).

These algorithms that exceed human observation have important implications for Massey’s view—how we can observe (or even imagine to observe) algorithmic flows that have increasingly become points of connections between places? Shannon Mattern writes about the proliferation of ‘field guides’ that aim to make the cloud legible, and asks, quoting Amoore, what if we view the cloud “not as a place but as analytic”? She observes:

And maybe these attempts to “wrest the Cloud” too often resort to artificial methods. Is pinpointing “where the data live” akin to shooting the bird, rendering it conveniently compliant, in lieu of a more contextual examination? Is Amoore correct, that the Cloud explorers who seek its manifestations in particular sites and screens fundamentally “misunderstand” the Cloud’s calculative forms, and the way it alters “the character of what or who can be sensed or perceived”? Recent guides to the Cloud-on-Earth seek to render coherent and intelligible an apparatus that’s built on “partial and indeterminate lines of sight” and patterns of organization. Perhaps we should think about the Cloud instead as “a bundle of techniques acting upon the threshold(s) of perceptibility,” resistant to field kits and guidebooks.

Mattern and Amoore raise important methodological questions, especially for geographers, as we grapple with understanding and representing networks that become visible in particular places, but whose calculative logics exceed observation.

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I might also add that visualizations that imagine the view from above can have important implications for our surveillance imaginaries (as I’ve called them elsewhere). Consider, for example, this creepy GOP ad that popped up on my Twitter feed:

screen-shot-2016-10-05-at-9-11-24-am

Aug
24

Madison, WI is home to some of the worst racial disparities in policing, incarceration, education, poverty, and employment in the country (see the Race to Equity report or the Wisconsin State Journal summary). In the last year, paralleling the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, groups like the Young Gifted and Black Coalition (YBG) have organized to address these disparities through direct action, training, coalition building, and education. One of their demands is for the Dane County Jail to release 350 Black prisoners to reflect the demographics of the county, where Black people make up 6% of the county population and nearly 50% of the jail population.

In an open letter to the Madison Police Chief, YGB recognizes the role of policing practices in producing these disparities, citing reports that show Black people in the county are eight times more likely to be arrested than whites (this number is probably closer to eleven in the city of Madison). In response, they call for self-determination and an end to interactions with the police. In his patronizing response, Madison Police Chief Koval instead vows to increase police presence in neighborhoods of color, denying the role of policing practices in producing and/or upholding the city’s longstanding disparities. Similarly, Mayor Soglin has dismissed such critiques, saying racial bias in policing is “the wrong question to be asked,” instead deferring blame onto “the entire criminal justice system.”

With these divergent views on policing in mind, I began searching through police incident reports to see if they would reveal spatial or racial patterns of policing. I was particularly interested in revealing police patrol patterns to substantiate claims made by YGB and others that communities of color are over-policed. Patrol patterns are not made public by the city, but as others have observed, the presence of police in affluent Madison neighborhoods is minimal. To gather the data, I first keyword searched and then read police incident reports to determine incidents that happened while an officer was on patrol, not precipitated by a service call. I then searched court records to determine the race of those arrested (only cases that went to trial showed up on this search, which accounted for about 75% of incidents) and mapped the results. I found that arrests were clustered on the busy East Washington Avenue that traverses the isthmus, the bar and restaurant-filled State Street that connects campus with the Capitol building, and three communities in South Madison with high Black populations. I also found profound racial disparities in who was targeted and arrested in patrol stops, mirroring the findings in the Race to Equity report.

policeInMadison8

click to enlarge

Of course, there are limitations to this map. First, it is based on a limited amount of data, in large part because incident reports do not necessarily indicate when an officer was on patrol. Only through keyword searches and close readings was I able to build this database. Second, incidents only enter the city database if they are deemed to have “significant public interest.” The criteria for this categorization, as far as I am aware, is not made explicit by the city. Third, many incidents involved multiple people, which is not represented on this map. And last, I have not yet attempted to map the spatial distribution of the race of those involved, which may reveal other patterns. Despite these limitations, the map does reveal patterns that substantiate claims of uneven policing across the city.

Aug
24

The last year has found me fully immersed in the process of writing—a process that is constantly evolving as I experiment with new ways of thinking through words. I have been particularly interested in the ways that this blog might become part of that process. Beyond the more modest ambitions of opening a space to share work outside of academic paywall systems, encouraging me to develop a more regular writing practice, connecting with others in a more immediate way, and providing a place to assemble and test out ideas, I’m interested in the ways that blogging might push my thinking in new directions. Lauren Berlant, in reference to her blog Supervalent Thought, observes in an interview:

Supervalent Thought was an attempt for me to learn how to write, which is to say to learn better ways of mediating all the things I can bring to address a problem – in particular problems of seeing the subject constituted in non-sovereignty, in relationality, in the middle of the affective event. I think the practice of it has changed my writing a lot – one way I can tell this is that when I am writing I tend not to be blogging. I work on my entries, usually, for a long time. Because they really are thought by way of writing, and not just thought in writing, not just opinion.There was a little polemicism in the beginning, because I was writing during an intensively political season: but generally I see the blog entry as a staging area for feeling out the contours of a problem that was raised in an encounter. As for readers: I am really happy to be read, and occasionally the comment section induces interesting responses, but it’s also constrained, a little monologuish. I get lots of provocative email about entries, but I don’t write hoping to induce a response. I write hoping to move a problem somewhere, and in moving to open it up to different kinds of encounter with it, which changes its resonance and consequence and thereby its very structure.

Derek Gregory, who writes nearly everyday on his blog Geographical Imaginations, similarly reflects on his experience of blogging and its impact on his writing in a 2012 entry. In a more recent post, writing for a new book titled How We Write, blogging again is mentioned as an important part of his writing process.

And so begins this experiment in form, a public research notebook, really, which will contain and connect various issues in software, geography, politics, theory, visuality, and art, alongside the occasional bicycle.

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For more discussions on academic blogging, see Sam Kinsley’s blog post “Being a Sharing Academic,” which links to a lot of good resources, including Anne Galloway’s dissertation chapter on blogging.