A splendid Sunday afternoon in cold autumn sunshine walking around the Kinder reservoir. The views up hill to Kinder Scout were great but I did not quite have the time or energy to walk up to the top. Next time....

I still can't quite get used to having such amazing scenery just 15 minutes drive from home. I wondering why I stayed in London for so long!

I managed to get hold of a copy of the Chinese translation of my book Mapping Cyberspace.

Google Earth as the 'view from nowhere': The spatial politics of
high resolution satellite imagery

I have also co-organised with Chris Perkins another double session at AAG 2007. I think we have an excellent set of paper and two interesting discussants.

Description: Google Earth, and various internet portals, offer ubiquitous high-resolution satellite imagery at unprecedented detail to a global audience through simple interfaces. The capabilities and technical beauty of Google Earth, in particular, has garnered wide spread praise and a rapidly growing fan-base. Given this impact, now is an apposite time for considered reflection on exactly what can been seen with satellite imagery and thinking through the spatial politics of newly accessible images of the world.

Session I:

1. John Cloud, Google Earth through a Keyhole

2. Steven Livingston, NGOs as intelligence agencies: The empowerment of civil society by commercial remote sensing

3. Robert Barr, Seeing nothing from nowhere - Google Earth and the
illusion of information

4. Matthew Zook & Mark Graham, The creative reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace

5. Discussant: Daniel Z. Sui


Session II:

1. John Paul Jones & Paul Kingsbury, III, Beyond Apollo and Adorno: Dionysus and Walter Benjamin on Google Earth

2. Stephane Roche & C Caron, Deconstructing Google Earth's images with the Spatiograph

3. Anders Wästfelt, Continuous landscapes in finite space-analysis of remote sensed images as a source in social science

4. Francis Harvey, Nowhere is everywhere? Towards post-modernist ubiquitous computing-based geographic communication

5. Discussant: Jeremy Crampton

Sponsorships: Communication Geography Specialty Group

Our paper in Geoforum on "the automatic management of drivers and driving spaces" is online on the ScienceDirect site under 'Articles in Press'. I expect it to be 'properly' published in 2007.

Software and Space

I have been co-organising sessions on the spatialities of software for the next AAG meeting in April 2007 with Matt Zook and Rob Kitchin. We have put together a good set of papers on I think.

Title: Software and Space I

Description: Unpacking the automatic production of spaces: Over the past thirty years, the practices of everyday life have become increasingly infused with and mediated by software. Whatever the task - domestic living, working, consuming, travelling or communicating - software increasingly makes a difference to how everyday life takes place. Software is embedded into objects and systems as a means to enhance and manage usage and is pivotal in linking together disparate and distributed infrastructures. It also enables new and refined processes through the generation, storage, profiling, screening and communication of data about individuals, objects, and transactions. Importantly, software has profound spatial effects, both through the automatic production of space that generates new spatialities (Thrift and French, 2002; Dodge and Kitchin, 2005a) and the creation of software-sorted (Graham, 2005) or machine readable (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005b) geographies that alter the nature of access and governmentality. Given that the AAG meeting in 2007 will take place in the San Francisco Bay the central node in the design and promulgation of software it seems an apposite place to initiate a wider ranging discussion on the role of software in the production of space.

Anticipated Attendance: 45

Organizers: Martin Dodge, Matthew Zook

Chairs: Robert Kitchin

Participants:

Presenter: Warren Sack, The Spaces of Open Source Software Design

Presenter: Robert Kitchin, Software, blogjects and automagical spaces

Presenter: Greg Elmer, Disaggregating the Web: The Space of Tags

Presenter: Mimi Sheller, Re-thinking Smart Mobilities: Agency and Creativity in the Appropriation of Space

Presenter: Barney L. Warf, Warped Dioramas: The Rhizomatic Spatialities of Videogames,
Co-Presenter: Ian Shaw

Title: Software and Space II

Participants:

Presenter: Andrew Leyshon, The software slump: code and the crisis of the recording studio sector

Presenter: Simon Parker, Class places and place classes: the spatialisation of class and the automatic production of space

Presenter: Paul C. Adams, Ground-Truthing Code

Discussant: Nigel J. Thrift

Sponsorships: Communication Geography Specialty Group