The 'rant' about the status of mapping in British Geography was now been accepted for publication in Environment and Planning A. A revised draft titled "Reclaiming the map: British Geography and ambivalent cartographic practice" is available. Hopefully, the final version will be published fairly quickly.

New York Talk Exchange project

hi, I just came across details on a new exhibition in New York, organised by Carlo Ratti and colleages. Described as follows:

"New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world."

The underlying concept of this project reminds me of Jean Gottman's classic work in the late 1950s trying to map out telephone call flows. Some of this was published in Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1961), with thematic maps like the one below.

Maps as Method conference session at RGS-IBG

I have co-organised a triple session at the up coming RGS-IBG conference with Chris Perkins. You can read the abstracts of the papers being offered.


Session description:

These sessions are jointly organised with the Maps in Society Commission of the International Cartographic Association. Their goal is to challenge the inexorable decline in map use by demonstrating the capabilities of geographers and others to work creatively through cartography. The aim is to foster a theoretically informed discussion around the different ways maps have been, are being, or could be employed in geographical research, learning and teaching. Papers address technological solutions offering innovative ways forward, in very different contexts, as well as confronting taken-for-granted notions around the status of mapping practices inside and outside the academy. They focus around the creation of a product, on pedagogic progress, on different kinds of community engagement and on the methodological and philosophical implications of mapping as method. Taken together they show how maps can make a positive difference to what we do, and that working through maps can be both creative and emancipatory.


Session 1

Mashup Cartography for Data Exploration
Jason Dykes, City University
Jo Wood, City University
Aiden Slingsby, City University

Tranquillity Matters Too - Mapping Tranquillity
Helen Dunsford, Northumbria University
Duncan Fuller, Northumbria University
Claire Haggett, Newcastle University

Geography Made by Outsiders? Maps and the Google Generation
Pablo Mateos, UCL
Paul A. Longley, UCL

Teaching and Learning the City through Participatory Mapping
Libman Kimberly, City University of New York

Mental Mapping as a Methodology: Its Evolution, Its Usefulness, and the Ways in which We May Analyze Them
Jen Gieseking, City University of New York

Session 2

Noise to Signal Ratio - Mapping the Boundaries of Science as Art and Art as Science
Muki Haklay, UCL
Christian Nold, UCL

Getting the Words onto the Map: Walking Interviews, Rescue Geography and the Joys of KML Phil Jones, University of Birmingham
James Evans, University of Manchester
Jane Ricketts University of Birmingham

Using Maps Creatively to More Critically Understand the Creative City
Chris Brennan-Horley, University of Wollongong
Chris Gibson, University of Wollongong

Interactive Community Mapping in London
Coleen Whitaker, London 21 Sustainability Network
Louise Francis, London 21 Sustainability Network


Session 3

Cartography - A Discipline of Two Halves
Mike Wood, Aberdeen University
Mike Smith, Kingston University

Comics & Table Saws: Experimental Cartography Methods for Recovering Ontology
Jeremy Crampton, Georgia State University
John Krygier, Ohio Wesleyan University

A Vision of Britain through Time: Publishing an On-line Historical Atlas for Everyone
Humphrey Southall, Portsmouth University

Mapping Narratives
Mei-Po Kwan, Ohio State University

A new paper, 'Software, Obects and Home Space', just finished and submitted to a journal for review. The draft is available as a NIRSA Working Paper. Comments and criticism are welcome.










Software, Objects and Home Space

Martin Dodge, University of Manchester
Rob Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Abstract
Through a series of interrelated developments, software is imbuing everyday objects with capacities that allow them to do additional and new types of work. On the one hand, objects are remade and recast through interconnecting circuits of software that makes them machine-readable. On the other, objects are gaining calculative capacities and awareness of their environment that allow them to conduct their own work, with only intermittent human oversight, as part of diverse actant-networks. In the first part of the paper we examine the relationship between objects and software in detail, constructing a taxonomy of new types of coded objects. In the second part we explore how the technicity of coded objects is mobilised to transduce space by considering the various ways in which coded objects are reshaping home life in different domestic spaces.

A significant growth in coverage in OpenStreetMap for the Glossopdale area in the last week or so. RichardB has added a lot of street data for Hadfield and Gamesley. The map has also grown around the edges with a few new tracks and footpaths I have put in.