The birth of the Internet - nice visual story of the Internet history in the USA with many video clips from key people. But not too sure about the usefulness of their 2007 Internet map!

Revised paper for theme issue of Environment and Planning A has been accepted.

Software, objects and home space

Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin

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 different kinds coded objects is mobilised to transduce space by considering the various ways in which coded objects are reshaping home life in different domestic spaces.

Research Agenda in a Quote

Hello, I recently re-found a quote that I came across a while back. It really summarise nicely my research agenda on politics of visualization and geospatial technologies. Its from a paper on inner workings of GPS by Laura Kurgan:

“But the space or the architecture of the information system that wants to locate and fix us in space has its own complexity, its own invisible relays and delays. The difficulty of charting the spaces that chart the spaces, of mapping the scaleless networks of the very system that promises to end our disorientation, demands redefining the points and lines and planes that build the map, and lingering in their strange spaces and times.” p. 17

Source: Kurgan L. (1994) "You are here: information drift". Assemblage 25, 14-43 (a version of this is available from JSTOR). See also Kurgan's "You are here" exhibition.

PhD Thesis

Understanding Cyberspace Cartographies: A Critical Analysis of Internet Infrastructure Mapping
Martin Dodge, University of London, April 2008.

After a rather protracted and painful process the examiners of my PhD have just agreed the thesis has passed. If anyone is at all interested, you can download the whole thing (warning, its over 13 meg due to many images) or browse by chapter.

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Delineating the Map
Chapter 3. Cyberspace Cartographies
Chapter 4. Imagining Internet Infrastructures
Chapter 5. Statistical Mapping of Internet Globalisation
Chapter 6. Marketing Maps of Internet Networks
Chapter 7. Conclusions: The Cartographic Imagination of Cyberspace
References
Appendix One: Building the Atlas of Cyberspaces
Appendix Two: Statistical Maps of the Internet Globalisation
Appendix Three: Network Marketing Maps from Website Survey

The state of progress I've made on mapping the lanes and paths of greater Glossop area.


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