Introduction: Spatial Big Data and Everyday Life

Spatial Big Data—be this natively geocoded content, geographical metadata, or data that itself refers to spaces and places—has become a pervasive presence in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Beyond preoccupations with “the geotag” and with mapping geocoded social media content, this special theme explores what it means to encounter and experience spatial Big Data as a quotidian phenomenon that is both spatial, characterized by and enacting of material spatialities, and spatializing, configuring relations between subjects, objects, and spaces in new and unprecedented ways

Viral Data

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals and communities. This collection of papers explores how data (and their absences) is figuring in the making of the discourses, lived realities, and systemic inequalities of the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic

Ontologies for Bioinformatics

The past twenty years have witnessed an explosion of biological data in diverse database formats governed by heterogeneous infrastructures. Not only are semantics (attribute terms) different in meaning across databases, but their organization varies widely. Ontologies are a concept imported from computing science to describe different conceptual frameworks that guide the collection, organization and publication of biological data. An ontology is similar to a paradigm but has very strict implications for formatting and meaning in a computational context. The use of ontologies is a means of communicating and resolving semantic and organizational differences between biological databases in order to enhance their integration. The purpose of interoperability (or sharing between divergent storage and semantic protocols) is to allow scientists from around the world to share and communicate with each other. This paper describes the rapid accumulation of biological data, its various organizational structures, and the role that ontologies play in interoperability

Dockless micromobility sharing in Calgary: A spatial equity comparison of e-bikes and e-scooters

This paper reports on a comparison of the spatial equity dimensions of dockless bike and e-scooter sharing in Calgary, Alberta. Using trip data from the City of Calgary’s Shared Mobility Pilot (between July-September 2019), this study investigates differences in micromobility utilization by dockless mode between areas characterized by different levels of deprivation. ANOVA and linear regression results show that utilization of both dockless modes was spatially inequitable, with e-scooter and dockless bike trips concentrated in the least deprived areas. Dockless bike and e-scooter sharing utilization declined with each increase in deprivation level by 0.138 trips per 1,000 persons per vehicle for dockless e-scooters, and 0.015 trips per 1,000 persons per vehicle for dockless bikes, suggesting that more equity considerations are required to ensure that the benefits of dockless micromobility sharing are available to all areas regardless of the relative advantage or disadvantage.Cet article rend compte d’une comparaison des dimensions d’équité spatiale du partage de vélos et de scooters électriques sans quai à Calgary, en Alberta. À l’aide des données sur les déplacements du projet pilote de ‘mobilité partagée’ de la ville de Calgary (entre juillet et septembre 2019), cette étude examine les différences d’utilisation de la micromobilité en mode sans quai entre les zones caractérisées par différents niveaux de privation. Les résultats de l’ANOVA et de la régression linéaire montrent que l’utilisation des deux modes sans quai était spatialement inéquitable, et de même que spatialement inéquitable, tant les déplacements en scooter électrique et en vélo sans quai étant concentrés dans les zones les moins défavorisées. L’utilisation du partage de vélos et de scooters électriques sans quai diminue à chaque augmentation du niveau de privation de 0,138 trajets pour 1 000 personnes par véhicule pour les scooters électriques sans quai et de 0,015 trajets pour 1 000 personnes par véhicule pour les vélos sans quai. Ce qui suggère que davantage de considérations d’équité sont nécessaires pour garantir que les avantages du partage de la micromobilité sans quai sont disponibles dans toutes les régions, quel que soit l’avantage ou le désavantage relatif

Platform methods : studying platform urbanism outside the black box

This intervention reflects on critical perspectives on algorithms and geographical work on the urban-digital interface to highlight a set of approaches for studying the politics of platform urbanism. In several ways, platforms may be understood as black boxes due to the proprietary nature of algorithms, the secrecy of corporate ownership structures, and the emphasis on confidentiality and privacy in the venture capital industry. While thus raising concerns about scrutiny and accountability, inclinations to “open the black box” of platforms reflect a limited and limiting horizon of political possibility. In a different vein, geographers concerned with the digital-urban interface are working to think about the potential for a counter-politics that is not rooted exclusively in resistance or antagonism. Drawing on these insights, this intervention complements recent work on digital methods by emphasizing tracing, counter-mapping, and proxying as approaches that do not privilege the revelation of visibility so much as potentiality, slipperiness, and movement

Critique and its discontents: GIS and its critics in postmillennial geographies

In 2000, Schuurman argued that despite a decade of critique of GIS, human geographers had little impact on the technology due to their inability to articulate critiques in a language relevant to its architectures. An assessment of what has changed in postmillennial geographies remains outstanding. This thesis argues that although critiques have moved beyond emphases on positivism, they remain epistemological in substance. This continued epistemological thrust is associated with an internal metaphysics consonant with poststructuralism that is incommensurable with ontological and epistemological commitments expressed by the discourse of GIScience. GIScience and critical/cultural geography are separated by a philosophical divide. Assessments of GIS tendered under a poststructuralist metaphysics represent a profound disconnect from the technology. This disconnect is identified as a series of logical inconsistencies - notably implication of the epistemic fallacy, and an ‘undoing’ of the metaphysics of presence - that incorrectly locate GIS outside of the material ontological

Thinking the Geoweb: Political economies, `neo'geographies, and spatial media

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2012Critical GIS and GIScience face tremendous methodological and conceptual challenges at present as they grapple with the emergence and proliferation of a diverse range of new, Web-based geographical information technologies that cannot be defined or engaged in terms of conventional GIS. Together, these new hardware/software objects, the new content forms that spatial data are assuming, and practices around these technologies and information artifacts are referred to by geographers as `the geoweb.' The emergence of the geoweb is fundamentally transforming the ways in which society, space, and technology intersect and are co-articulated. Against this backdrop, this research takes the material and digital presences of geoweb phenomena as primary evidence of a transformative moment in the production, distribution, commercialization, circulation, and public awareness of geographic information technologies. On the basis of a content and discourse analysis of textual material thematically about the geoweb that I archived and coded over a period of three years (June 2009 - June 2012), I advance propositions that address the intellectual challenge of thinking - apprehending, conceptualizing, and engaging - the geoweb as a multi-faceted socio-spatio-technical phenomenon. These propositions constitute three threads of an empirically-grounded framework for theorizing the societal transformations wrought through the geoweb on multiple, intersecting levels: i) the political economic relations from which these transformations emerge; ii) the discursive practices that have been used to ensure the sustained consumption and proliferation of geoweb technologies; and iii) the epistemological frames that help us as scholars fully interrogate the diverse material practices/objects that co-constitute the geoweb and the forms of communication and social, spatial, and technological relations it is used to foster