Situating Neogeography: A Paper Session at the AAGs

'Neogeography' (Turner 2006) and 'volunteered geographic information' (VGI) (Goodchild 2007) have raised the specter of Geography's own identity-crises. Accordingly, GIScientists and theoreticians have turned their attention to these emergent phenomena, seeking to account for their nascence. Early attempts to 'situate' VGI have overwhelmingly focused on the 'technical,' emphasizing changes in content delivery over the Web, the build-up of broadband infrastructure, and the rise of Web 2.0 applications for everything from blogging, to social networking, and making maps. While new media technologies have allowed the rapid collection and delivery of spatial information on a diversity of computing platforms including mobile technologies, their inception and proliferation does not occur in a social vacuum. As per culture and new media theorist Henry Jenkins (2004), the technological shifts evidenced as part of 'new media' and Where/Web 2.0 are always preceded by the cultural.

Thus beyond a pronounced series of technological shifts, 'neo-geo' constitutes, and is implicated in, changes to the cultural sphere, capital, and commodity flows. Moreover, it involves a fundamental shift in geographic knowledge production and practice. The boundaries between expert and amateur, artist and scientist, and author and audience are increasingly the substance of new mappings.

In this session at the 2010 AAG meetings in Washington DC, we consider the multiple ways in which new practices around emergent geospatial information technologies are situated -- asking not only how geographical knowledges are given meaning in this representative moment, but how, more diffusely, the practices of mapping have themselves come to be, and are made meaningful. 

Organizers:
Matthew W. Wilson, Dept. of Geography, Ball State University
Agnieszka Leszczynski, Dept. of Geography, U. of Washington

Chair: Sarah Elwood, Dept. of Geography, U. of Washington

Presenters:

1. Jin-Kyu Jung, U. of North Dakota, Revisiting Constructive Grounded Theory toward the reaction of Neogeography
2. Matt McCourt, U. of Maine Farmington, and Owen Dwyer, Indiana U-Purdue U-Indianapolis, Neogeographic Conversations: Situating and Sharing Students' Landscape Investigations
3. Agnieszka Leszczynski, U. of Washington, Neogeo as Neolib? Towards a Preliminary Political Economy of VGI
4. Wen Lin, U. of Wisconsin La Crosse, Emerging neogeographic practices in China: (new) spaces of participation and resistance?
5. Mark Graham, U. of Oxford, Paperclips, Plastic Buckets, and Pork Pies: Potentials for the Peer Production of Transparency