New Special Issue of E&PA: Situating Neogeography

The new special issue of Environment and Planning A on neogeography edited by Matthew Wilson and Mark Graham, and featuring a handful of pieces by members of the Floatingsheep team and other friends of the sheep, is now out and available to download. The complete table of contents is below:

Theme issue: Situating neogeography

Guest editors: Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Guest editorial
Situating neogeography
Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Neogeography and volunteered geographic information: a conversation with Michael Goodchild and Andrew Turner
Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Crowdsourced cartography: mapping experience and knowledge
Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin

Situating performative neogeography: tracing, mapping, and performing “Everyone’s East Lake”
Wen Lin

Neogeography and the delusion of democratisation
Mordechai (Muki) Haklay

Commentary: Political applications of the geoweb: citizen redistricting
Jeremy W. Crampton

Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the web

Mark Graham, Matthew Zook

Featured graphic: Mapping the geoweb: a geography of Twitter
Mark Graham, Monica Stephens, Scott Hale

p.s. feel free drop Mark a note if you don't have institutional access to journal and would like email copies of any of the articles. 

Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code

We are very happy to report that a paper that that Mark, Matt, and Andrew Boulton have been working has just been accepted for publication in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The paper is titled Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code and the abstract is below:

With the increasing prevalence of both geographic information, and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities,’ this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmentations realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised, and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Please send Mark an email if you would like a pre-publication copy. We would welcome any thoughts and comments you have about the paper.

(we'll leave it to you to work out what nyancat has to do with anything in this post)

Floatingsheep at the AAG in NYC

With the Annual Meetings of the AAG hastily upon us (are we alone in having our internal clock totally thrown off because of the February meeting?), we wanted to save everyone the work of finding us in the hefty printed conference schedule and share what sessions we'll be participating in throughout the week. While this list includes only those sessions that four of us will be formally participating in, there are countless others on that we'll certainly be attending as well. If you see us around the conference, come say hello!

Thursday, February 23rd
5pm-8pm
Development Geographies Specialty Group Pre-Conference
Mark will be presenting a short paper entitled "Uneven Geographies of Knowledge: The Internet and the Need for Broader Participation" as one of "7 Pleas to Policymakers" at the Development Geographies Pre-conference.

Friday, February 24th
10am-11:40am
Theorizing the Geoweb II
Monica will be presenting a paper, co-authored with Antonella Rondinone, entitled "Gendering the GeoWeb: Analysing demographic difference in user generated geographic information". This session is organized by friend of the sheep Matt Wilson, and has a counterpart session immediately before, as well.

12:40pm-2:20pm
Applications of the GeoWeb: utilizing user-generated content for geographic research
Monica organized this session with Antonella, and Taylor will be presenting the paper "The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes", co-authored with Matt and Mark and forthcoming in The Professional Geographer next year.

Saturday, February 25th
8am-9:40am
Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice
Matt and Mark organized this paper session, where they'll also be presenting some of our research on language in the geoweb with the paper "Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the web". Muki Haklay of UCL and fellow friend of the sheep Jeremy Crampton from UK will also be presenting in this session.

Sunday, February 26th
5pm-9pm
IronSheep
You ought to know about this by now. We'll all be heading straight from this event to the Kentucky-Arizona Wildcat Party. If you can't make it out to IronSheep, we hope to see you at the party.

Monday, February 27th
12:40pm-2:20pm
Mapping Cyberspace and Social Networks III
Monica will be a discussant for this session featuring a variety of papers exploring methods for quantifying and mapping data from online social networks.

Tuesday, February 28th
8am-9:40am
IronSheep: an open session dedicated to lightning mapping and and understanding VGI in the "wild"
After a day of digesting IronSheep goodness, we'll reconvene in an open panel on Tuesday morning to discuss what happened and what we can learn from it.

2pm-3:40pm
Volunteered Geographic Information: Does it have a future?
Matt will be on this provocatively-named panel, organized by Sarah Elwood, Dan Sui and Michael Goodchild, looking at the big picture of research on VGI and what directions it might take in the future. Other panelists include Paul Longley of UCL and Nadine Schuurman of Simon Fraser.

**In a quasi-homage to our frequent object of study, Google, do note the special banner at the top of the blog that we have created for our collective visit to New York City.