Call for Papers: Situating the Geoweb as Technoscience

[Craig Dalton]

Call for Papers: Situating the Geoweb as Technoscience

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

9-13 April 2012

Los Angeles, CA

 

Organizers:  

Craig Dalton, Dept. of Geography and Geosciences, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Matthew W. Wilson, Dept. of Geography, University of Kentucky

 

Geographers have given much attention to the ‘geoweb’ in recent years, in attempting to describe or index geoweb instances, or emphasizing the data aspects of the phenomenon (e.g., volunteered geographic information or VGI; data quality/accuracy), their attendant data practices (e.g., crowdsourcing; user-generation of content), and increasingly, the social processes and implications of new geographic information technologies (e.g. economies of the geoweb and new privacy concerns).

Situating the practices that produce/enable the geoweb is key to furthering deep, critical understandings of this phenomena as one part of a broader ‘big data’ movement. This session seeks to develop a critical geography of the geoweb by putting the present geoweb into a broader social context as a technoscientific development. Therefore, we are looking for papers that get beyond the current hype and spectacle around the geoweb to investigate the social histories, stakes, and cultural limits of the geoweb as well as modes of critical geoweb research. These lines of inquiry may allow us to better understand the larger social processes, standpoints, and possibilities of the geoweb. Furthermore, we hope that this session will help launch a conversation about how to do critical geographic research on and within the geoweb. Potential questions or issues we hope to explore in this session include:

- How did the geoweb develop within the social programs of governments, corporations, and other organizations?

- How did FOSS, map-hacking, conspicuous mobilities, etc. become significant to the geoweb?

- How are these social processes and geographies apparent and relevant in today’s geoweb?

- How is the geoweb (socially and culturally) similar and different from other geographic knowledges and geotechnologies?

- Where did the geoweb develop?

- How does this social context shape the limits and possibilities of the geoweb?

- How might geographers perform this kind of research?

Please contact co-organizers Craig Dalton (cda...@bloomu.edu) and Matthew W. Wilson (matthew....@uky.edu) by August 20th if you are interested in participating in this paper session. In your email, please propose a paper title and include a working AAG abstract (250 words).