RSS FeedToward a Geographical Software Studies 1: Political economy and infrastructures
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM
Laura Beltz Imaoka (University of California, Irvine), The Immaterial Value of Proprietary Software: Platforming ArcGIS
Ashwin Jacob Mathew (University of California, Berkeley/Packet Clearing House), Protocol as a Fieldsite
Till Straube (Goethe University Frankfurt), Seeing Like a Stack
Will Payne (University of California – Berkeley), What’s in a (Neighborhood) Name? Location-Based Services and Contested Delineations of Place
Discussant: James Thatcher (University of Washington – Tacoma)
Toward a Geographical Software Studies 2: Language and tools
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 1:20 PM – 3:00 PM
Matthias Plennert (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Analyzing the hidden backbone of an open-data-project: a genealogy of the OpenStreetMap data model
Warren SACK (University of California – Santa Cruz), Out of Bounds: Language Limits, Language Planning, and Linguistic Capitalism
Luke R. Bergmann (University of Washington), Speculative computing: toward Geographic Imagination Systems (GIS)
Pip Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London), The Production of Context and the Digital Reconstruction of Language
Discussant: Cheryl Gilge (University of Washington)
Toward a Geographical Software Studies 3: The visual and control
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 3:20 PM – 5:00 PM
Craig M. Dalton (Hofstra University), Seeing with Software: Mobile device users’ geographic knowledges
Aaron Shapiro (University of Pennsylvania), The Surface of Things: Google Street View, Computer Vision, and Broken Windows
Louise Amoore (Durham University)
Teresa Scassa (University of Ottawa), Mapping Crime: Civic Technology in the Emerging Smart Cities Context
Discussant: Clare Melhuish (University College London)
Toward a Geographical Software Studies: methods and theory
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 5:20 PM – 7:00 PM
Elvin K. Wyly (University of British Columbia)
Pip Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Daniel G. Cockayne (University of Kentucky)
Keith Woodward (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Monica Degen
Discussant: Matthew W. Wilson (Harvard University)
Session Description: A growing body of recent geographic scholarship has focused its attention on software and algorithms. Some of these studies analyze geographic technologies —GIS and the geoweb, for example— as such, while others investigate a myriad of digital technologies that have become ubiquitous within the spaces of everyday life. These software/code objects interact with and modulate the world in complex ways, enact processes that connect humans and nonhumans, and become entangled with social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Moreover, software created to visualize data is used to produce knowledge about urban environments and everyday life, but obscure the processes and contexts which underlie its development. Engaging these topics, geographers have developed concepts like the “automatic production of space” (Thrift and French 2002), “software-sorted geographies” (Graham 2005), and “code/space” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) to describe how software and space are co-constituted in the contemporary world. Productive research is building on these topics to explore new ways geographies are produced (Rose, Degen, and Melhuish 2014), governed (Amoore 2011), materialized, represented (Woodward et al. 2015), and lived through software (Kinsley 2014).
This session seeks to bring together a range of spatial thinkers who are producing new studies, theories, and methods for understanding and producing software. We welcome submissions that address all facets of software: the context of its production, its internal operational logics, the material work it does in the world, and its spatial distribution of social and political effects.
Sponsorships: Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group
Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group
Political Geography Specialty Group
