Top Ten Books of 2014

The top ten lists are starting to show up in places like The Economist so I thought I'd weigh in a bit earlier than last year.  Here's my top ten list for the year, in some vague order.

1. The event of the year for books is without doubt Nancy Turner's magisterial Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge (McGill-Queen's University Press, @scholarmqup).  Turner's two-volume set is the result of a lifetime of work in coastal Northwestern North America.

2. Another great book in the same series as Turner's (MQUP's Native and Northern Series) is Shelley Wright's Our Ice Is Vanishing/Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq. 

3. Jennifer M. Groh's Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are is an event.  This book summarizes and pushes forward our understanding of the state of the art in brain-space-knowledge, from Harvard UP/Belknap.  This appears in the same year as former McGill student John O'Keefe wins the Nobel Prize alongside May-Britt and Edvard Moser for discovering the role of the hippocampus in human cognitive mapping (aka the brain's GPS). 

4. Benjamin Lytal's A Map of Tulsa made my list this year, one of only two novels to do so.  The link goes to a Guardian review of the book.  It helps, but is not required, to have been to Tulsa or any part of Oklahoma.

5. I believe Jeremy Black's The Power of Knowledge (Yale University Press) could be accurately described as his magnum opus.  It posits information as the historical driver of cartography, power, knowledge, and much else.

6. Maps: Their Untold Stories (London: Bloomsbury), edited by Mitchell and Janes, appeared in my pigeonhole this year for review in Journal of Historical Geography.  It is a fantastic introduction to maps selected from national archives near London.

7. Graham Robb, The Ancient Paths had to make my list for boldness and risk-taking.  The link goes, again, to a Guardian review that does justice, I think, to a book that is well worth reading.

8. Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences (London: Sage) has that Ground Truth-level of impact feeling to it, and I strongly urge anyone with an interest in geospatial technologies, GIS, mapping, data, cartography, mashups, and related topics to read this book.  Could easily be justified as the #1 book for the year.

9. Royal Holloway professor Andrew Motion's The New World (Random House) makes my list due to the quality of the writing and the subject matter.

10.  Ballas, Dorling, and Hennig's The Social Atlas of Europe (Policy Press, distributed by U of Chicago Press) is a kind of event, relying upon cartograms to re-envision Europe using equal- and proportional-area cartographic sensibilities.   

Spatial media/tion by Agnieszka Leszczynski

I'm including a link to a recent Progress in Human Geography article by Agnieszka Leszczynski (University of Birmingham, UK).  I noted in a recent tweet that a new paper by Leszczynski is always an event, and we hope to have her to Royal Holloway soon for a presentation of her work.  Here is the abstract of the latest new theoretical development:

Abstract
This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as ‘spatial media’ to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives of ‘virtual’–‘real’ spatial hybrids by instead understanding spatiality (as the nexus of material sociospatio-technical relations) as always-already mediated – i.e. as the ontogenetic effects of the contingent, necessarily incomplete comings-together of technical presences, persons, and space/place.

Keywords
epistemology, location, materiality, mediation, spatial big data, spatial media

Data revolutions and Google's balloons

Two stories in yesterday's Independent caught my eye.  The stories are not unrelated, though their relation consists almost entirely in an overlap at the geospatial level (meaning the data is georeferenced to known ground control points).

The first story has to do with a push by Government, supported by the Open Data Institute, to provide support in the form of apps for massive new datasets.  Property, rights of way, and flood data (with 15 minute interval water-level measurements), would be available through new mapping apps and Google Maps mashups.  This is part of The Data Revolution noted by Rob Kitchin in which data assemblages and new co-productions of data are emerging and re-coding the world.  Other Open Source Data Values include: "Parking, football and antisocial behaviour" allowing motorists in Westminster to find parking spots; health applications for accessing anonymised patient records; and public building information for valuation and identification of empty building stock.

Source: independent.co.uk

The second story is about Google's balloons, and sets of engineering processes, trials, and tribulations associated with Google's push to provide worldwide wi-fi access.  This is most certainly related to concerns in the ICT4D world around digital divides, access, and mobile technology with expensive reliance upon satellite signals being a prohibitive factor to uptake in many locations.  The entry of potential global wi-fi access would be a paradigm shift in the global south, where Google's efforts are focused.  The south has less land-mass, making it an easier testing ground for the large unwieldy balloons that Google's engineers are barely able to control.

The outlook on both fronts is very promising in terms of broad data access and popular mapping application.  Government and industry will see new forms of innovation and uptake as the push for open government data services to the public proceeds.  The social implications of these two open data initiatives are massive, tying into economics (see the new digital economies alliance for sharing best practices, G8-style, page 25); education (introducing computer science and coding concepts into school curricula); and health (involving new forms of self-identification and verification for access).

Geospatial analysis and social critique alike must heed these new developments, consider them using our best scholarly tools, and offer considered comment.  The new developments are very exciting and it is clear that we are entering a brave new world of the data revolution.

Place-memes in Indigenous Communities (Guest Blog)

Check out my guest blog post on the McGill-Queen's University Press website, in support of Maps and Memes.  (Reblogging from www.mqup.ca)

Straight Line (Psycho) Mapping and the HS2

According to Tom Jeffreys, author of an interesting story on psychogeography and mapping in yesterday's Independent, all maps lie, especially when they are produced in support of the proposed HS2 route in the UK.

Placing himself firmly in a tradition of systematic wanderers, mappers, and psychogeographers such as Iain Sinclair and Guy Debord, Jeffreys notes that the field of wandering psycho-mappers is saturated, especially in urban milieux.  His mapping project starts from Euston and makes its way through countryside, starting out through the Edgelands (aka The Unofficial Countryside) now favoured by these oddly motivated individuals, the counter-mappers.   Sinclair himself did something like this in London Orbital, and as we know Sinclair sets the gold standard (alongside Self, see below) for truly psycho geographies.

How does a person actually walk in a straight line anywhere anymore?  Answer: they don't (and Jeffreys didn't either).  The author of Mind the Gap only made it through about half of his planned 10 day journey, resorting to hitching a ride in a car to complete the London-Birmingham leg.

What is the point of walking in a straight line, other than to demonstrate spatial stubbornness, prove a point, and achieve pyrrhic victory, of the sort people like Will Self seem to favour in the absolutely fabulous Psychogeography (in which he 'walks' from London to New York via their airports/airplanes)?

The answer: to show that all maps lie, that the ground truth is never what we think it is, and that it is full of local ephemera, individual perceptions, and communities in jeopardy of being sliced in half by the lines the map introduces into life-worlds willy-nilly should we choose to follow its dictates blindly.  Which is exactly what the mappers of the HS2 are proposing to do.  Therefore, read this article:  Mind the Gap.

Origins OVERLAY

"The visits to Harvard from these three prominent landscape planners provided a survey of the state of the art to the group that emerged from the Laboratory" -Nick Chrisman, Charting the Unknown (page 43)

GIS undoubtedly has its origins in the concept of the overlay.

Precisely who invented the overlay technique first or used it most effectively is debatable.

Attributing this technique to any one individual would be both fruitless and misleading.

Techniques were shared at the Harvard Graphics Laboratory in 1967, with visits from Angus Hills, Philip Lewis, and Ian McHarg (Chrisman, 2006, page 42).

Hills was associated with Tomlinson's Canada GIS and the Canada Land Inventory, but as Chrisman (2006, page 42) notes, "Hills's was the [technique] that needed GIS the least" because "each of the CGIS layers depended on expert photointerpretation."

Lewis (from the University of Wisconsin) used transparent map overlays to explore environmental corridors.

McHarg was famous for using comprehensive datasets cumulatively to delineate areas of constraint/possibility in the theory and practice of design with nature.

Source: Wiley

Design With Nature is classic of early or proto-GIS thinking.  I checked out McHarg's book from Bedford Library just to have a look at it again.  

Snow used overlays as well, a good century or more before McHarg.  You can check out the classic text on cholera, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, on Google Books.  

This post is an overlay of converging possibilities that fed into what is emerging in recent decades as a very plural universe of GIS possibility. 

References:
Chrisman, Nick.  2006.  Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS.  Redlands: ESRI Press.

GIS Tools for Critical Thinking

GIS is a literal and metaphorical set of tools for critical thinking. Taking inspiration from two books (Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking; and Gilles Deleuze's Spinoza) "GIS Tools for Critical Thinking" is a planned Place Memes mini-series.

These short conceptual reflections (of which I have approximately 100 potential sketches listed in my notebook) will go beyond the glossary or dictionary format, towards what Deleuze was doing in Spinoza, namely, adumbrating or outlining a new theory of practice.

My new theory of GIS practice is a radical programme for transforming how we think about GIS.  It is also a radical re-thinking of thought itself using GIS tools to drive the programme.  Dennett's memes are relevant here for deconstructing all-too-easy assumptions about what (we think we know) GIS is in order to transform what GIS can be.

Philosophical and practical implications will be considered without distinguishing between theory and practice.  For example, I would like to begin by examining overlay and proximity metaphors as used not only by John Snow, but also by poets, philosophers and critical geographers.  Stay tuned