Digital Geographies

James Ash, Rob Kitchin, Agnieszka Leszczynski, James Ash, Rob Kitchin, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526447296, 9781526447289
• eBook ISBN: 9781526455383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Humangeographie

As digital technologies have become part of everyday life, mediating tasks such as work, travel, consumption, production, and leisure, they are having increasingly profound effects on phenomena that are of immediate concern to geographers. These include: the production of space, spatiality and mobilities; the processes, practices, and forms of mapping; the contours of spatial knowledge and imaginaries; and, the formation and enactment of spatial knowledge politics  Similarly, there are distinct geographies of digital media such as those of the internet, games, and social media that have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach. 

This textbook presents a fully up-to-date, synoptic and critical overview of how digital devices, logics, methods, etc are transforming geography. It is divided into six inter-related sections

• introduction to digital geographies 
• digital spaces
• digital methods
• digital cultures
• digital economies
• digital politics

With illustrious instructors and researchers contributing to every chapter, Digital Geographies is the ideal textbook for courses concerning digital geographies, digital and new media and Internet communications, and the spatial knowledge of politics.

1 Introducing Digital Geographies

James Ash

Rob Kitchin

Agnieszka Leszczynski

Digital Geographies

It is now somewhat obvious to state that digital phenomena have radically transformed almost every aspect of human life. From economies to cultures to politics, there is almost no area that remains untouched by digital techniques, logics, or devices. For instance, economies are now based upon the production of digital goods and services, and the global stock market is managed via high-speed algorithmic trading and digital networks that communicate at speeds faster than humans can directly perceive. Many aspects of cultural life, including how we identify and socialize with others, express ourselves, and consume popular content and entertainment, are now highly mediated through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Governments fear cyberattacks, develop digital strategies for international development, and utilize digital technologies to enable new logics of governance based on highly dynamic and individualized modes of spatial segregation and control. These shifts across political, economic, and cultural spheres of everyday life are tied to a whole range of objects, processes, practices, and materialities. From consumer PCs to commercial server farms, and from smartphones to apps, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of digital technologies and their effects are of immediate concern to geographers, underwriting transformations of the space economy and economic relations; modes of management and governance of cities and regions; the production of space, spatiality, and mobilities; the processes, practices, and forms of mapping; the contours of spatial knowledge and imaginaries; and the formation and enactment of spatial knowledge politics (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2011; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Rose et al., 2014; Wilson, 2012). Digital presences, practices, and effects are characterized by uneven geographies of underlying infrastructures, component resources, and sites of creation and disposal (Lepawsky, 2015; Pickren, 2018; Zook, 2005). Similarly, there are distinct geographies of digital media such as the internet, games, and social, locative, and spatial media (Ash, 2015; Leszczynski, 2015; Kitchin et al., 2017).

At the same time, digital technologies also alter how we, as geographers, go !about engaging with and researching the digital world. Digital devices (computers, satellites, GPS, digital cameras, audio and video recorders, smartphones) and software packages (statistics programs, spreadsheets, databases, geographic information systems (GIS), qualitative analysis packages, word processing) have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach. Current modes of generating, processing, storing, analysing and sharing data; creating and circulating texts, visualizations, maps, analytics, ideas, videos, podcasts, and presentation slides; and sharing information and engaging in public debate via mailing lists and social and mainstream media are thoroughly dependent on computational technologies (Kitchin, 2013). Digital platforms are changing what constitutes ‘the field’; the rise of digital content comprises new forms of evidence with which to approach long-standing geographical concerns; and digital presences and praxes are provoking new questions and opening up new lines of geographical inquiry (Leszczynski, 2017).

In the context of these profound shifts, this collection charts a diverse range of digital geographies, identifying the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical axes along which geographers are engaging with the digital, addressing how and why digitality matters to geography, and highlighting the insights that geography can offer to the study of digital phenomena. This short introductory chapter provides some important definitions and maxims that frame ‘digital geographies’ and situate the contributions which follow. We begin by discussing and defining the key term ‘digital’. We suggest that rather than a sub-discipline unto itself, digital geographies are best understood through the lenses of extant as well as emerging fields of geographic inquiry. It is along these axes of inquiry that we have organized this collection, and the contributions brought together herein trace how digital phenomena, practices, and presences inflect and reconfigure geographical thinking about and approaches to questions of epistemology and knowledge production, space and spatiality, methods and methodologies, culture, the economy, and politics.

Defining the Digital

The term ‘digital’ has a variety of meanings across a range of literatures, from geography (Ash et al., 2018) to media and cultural studies (Manovich, 2013) and software studies (Fuller, 2008). As such, we espouse a broad definitional position that incorporates a range of engagements with the digital, which we suggest may be understood variously as ontics, aesthetics, logics, and/or discourses (Ash et al., 2018). Digital in the sense of ontics designates the ways that digital systems ‘translate all inputs and outputs into binary structures of 0s and 1s, which can be stored, transferred, or manipulated at the level of numbers, or “digits”’ (Lunenfeld, 2000: xv). Thought of as the universe of physical literals (Coyne, 1994), ontics simultaneously emphasizes an understanding of digitality as comprised of material digital objects: the hardware, software, devices, content, code, and algorithms that underwrite access to digital phenomena and mediations, which comprise the artefacts of our digital praxes, and which structure our experience of digitality. These digital technologies have recoded – or remediated (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) – multiple other technologies, media, art forms, and spatialities in ways coincident with the binary nature of computing architectures. Digitality, then, is also an aesthetics, capturing the pervasiveness of digital technologies and shaping how we understand and experience space and spatiality as always-already ‘marked by circuits of digitality’ that are themselves irreducible to digital systems (Murray, 2008: 40). As we adopt and seamlessly embed networked digital technologies throughout the fabrics of our landscapes, they come to enact progressively routine orderings of quotidian rhythms, interactions, opportunities, spatial configurations, and flows (Franklin, 2015). Alongside these ontics, aesthetics, and logics, a whole set of digital discourses have arisen which actively promote, enable, secure, and materially sustain the increasing reach of digital technologies in the spaces and practices of our daily lives.

This multi-faceted definition is not, however, intended as an overarching rubric under which anything may be characterized or engaged with in terms of the ‘digital’. We seek to avoid this key pitfall of academic discussions of digital technology, which is related to generality. The term ‘digital’ can easily be deployed vaguely, as a kind of discursive label or blanket that is thrown over a series of quite different things. In doing so, this label can obfuscate more than it reveals about what are highly heterogeneous sets of objects, practices, and processes. Avoiding this generality requires that the term ‘digital’ always be qualified in relation to specific objects, techniques, logics, processes, practices, and affects. These qualifications are important because they force us to focus on the empirical specificities of the phenomena of study. The first of these specificities is that while ‘digital’ designates a genre of social, cultural, technological, and economic productions historically associated with the advent of digital computing, digital computing technologies are necessary to, yet insufficient for, ‘the digital’. Following Horst and Miller (2013), ‘digital’ designates objects and artefacts that are ultimately compatible with or which arise from binary code and architectures, yet which produce further ‘proliferations’ that exceed the binary logics and materialities of digital systems. For instance, digital maps on smartphones encourage new forms of navigational practice and spatial movement, but these practices exceed the software itself, creating new cultures of movement that cannot be anticipated in advance (Verhoeff, 2012).

Second, these proliferations arise from the empirical ability of digital systems to differentiate and mark at speed, which produces new capacities to act. For instance, a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensor on an autonomous vehicle shines light and measures the time it takes the light to return, in order to differentiate between objects and empty space. This information is then differentiated according to machine learning algorithms to determine whether an object is moving or still, human or non-human. In this case, such differentiations allow the machine learning algorithms to navigate around obstacles and so enable the vehicle to travel safely without a human driver. From this position, the emphasis becomes examining how digital code, algorithms, and binary architectures construct the thresholds between these differentiations through a whole variety of factors. In the case of autonomous vehicles, these could include the industrial design and manufacture of LIDAR sensors, the broader market forces and governmental rationales and techniques that dictate where and how autonomous vehicles can be tested, and public fears around whether such vehicles can mark and differentiate between human and non-humans quickly and accurately enough (Ash, 2017). In turn, one might understand how the differentiations digital technologies enact feed into and alter human sensory capacities (Ash, 2015), cognition (Hayles, 2017), and decision-making more broadly.

This begets a third empirical specificity, which is that there is no monolithic ‘the digital’, only a variety of differently materia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributor Biographies
• 1 Introducing Digital Geographies
• Part I Digital Spaces
• 2 Spatialities
• 3 Urban
• 4 Rural
• 5 Mapping
• 6 Mobilities
• Part II Digital Methods
• 7 Epistemologies
• 8 Data and Data Infrastructures
• 9 Qualitative Methods and Geohumanities
• 10 Participatory Methods and Citizen Science
• 11 Cartography and Geographic Information Systems
• 12 Statistics, Modelling, and Data Science
• Part III Digital Cultures
• 13 Media and Popular Culture
• 14 Subject/Ivities
• 15 Representation and Mediation
• Part IV Digital Economies
• 16 Labour
• 17 Industries
• 18 Sharing Economy
• 19 Traditional Industries
• Part V Digital Politics
• 20 Development
• 21 Governance
• 22 Civics
• 23 Ethics
• 24 Knowledge Politics
• 25 Geopolitics
• Index