AAG sessions - Is Google Good For Geography? Web2.0 and the Political Economy of User Generated Geographical Knowledge

Hello, Matt Zook and myself have pulled together a double session with 9 papers and a discussant for next AAG annual meeting.

The contributors are as follows:

• Elad Segev, Intentional and Unintentional Biases in Google Earth and Google Maps
• Tim Wallace, Has Google Homogenized our Landscape?
• Marc Boeckler, Tourism and Imaginative Geographies 2.0
• Andrew Boulton, Problematizing participation in the geoweb: Google Maps and the ideology of invitation
• Jeremy Crampton, Mapping Without a Net: Only for Google to Rope Us In?
• Matthew Zook, Mapping the GeoWeb: The Spatial Contours of Web 2.0 Cyberspace
• Sean Gorman, Can the GeoWeb Get the Public to Care about Geography? The Positive Externalities of a Web Enabled Ecosystem
• Michael Crutcher, Placemarks and Waterlines: Racialized Cyberscapes in Post Katrina Google Earth
• Richard Tomlinson, The Influence of Google on Urban Policy in Developing
• Countries
• Michael F. Goodchild, Discussant
  

Note, we have not decided quite yet on the planned running order of
presentations.

A list of the paper abstracts is here.

Fame at Last! I recently submitted a photograph I took on the nearby hills to the local free newspaper, the Glossop Advertiser. This week they printed it in their Reader's Views feature.

The photograph is reproduced below. It shows aircraft crash debris on Mill Hill, with a view of Bleaklow in the background.

A word cloud created from the text in a Rethinking Maps, an edited book I am trying hard to finish off. The image was created using Wordle, a fun online for generating clouds.

Atlas of Cyberspace book - full content for free!


A book I co-authored with Rob Kitchin in 2001 is now available for free online. The book is basically out of print now, so we decided to get the copyright back from the publisher Pearson. (The full content can be downloaded here, made available on Creative Commons License. )



Dowload for free:

• Full book - low resolution graphics - 28 MB pdf

• Full book - high resolution graphics - 228 MB pdf

Download by sections (warning some pdf files are very big):

• Cover (552 KB pdf)
  
• Preliminaries (2.3 MB pdf)
• Chapter 1 : Mapping Cyberspace (1.5 MB pdf)
• Chapter 2: Mapping Infrastructure and Traffic (82 MB pdf)
  
• Chapter 3: Mapping the Web (29 MB pdf)
  
• Chapter 4: Mapping Conversation and Community (58 MB pdf)
  
• Chapter 5: Imagining Cyberspace (63 MB pdf)
  
• Chapter 6: Final Thoughts (1.4 MB pdf)
  
• Further Reading (1.5 MB pdf)
  
• Index (1.5 MB pdf)
  

Many thanks to Pearson for willingly granting the copyright back to us and to their staff for handling this process so efficiently.

If you're still interested in getting a hard copy of the Atlas of Cyberspace there are a good number of second hand copies available to buy (e.g. see AbeBooks listing).

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Atlas of Cyberspace by Martin Dodge & Rob Kitchin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Managed to get OSM into the RGS!

Graham Bowden, in the Cartographic Unit at the university used data for central London from OpenStreetMap to produce a nice custom location map for the back of the programme of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society conference this summer. This is a bit of wiki-map coup as the RGS is, in some senses, the home of 'old school' cartography and last year they used a rather nasty looking Google map on their programme.

Graham's OSM-derived location is available as a nicer pdf from here.

Walking this afternoon in the sunshine on the hill above Hayfield. Above is a view towards Lantern Pike. Below is a view down a lane towards Knder Scout.