Martin Dodge

CASA & Department of Geography, University College London

Martin Dodge

CASA & Department of Geography, University College London

Background andResearch Interests

Background andResearch Interests

Who, where, what ?• researcher• lecturer in geography • social geography, computing, GIS• technology, space & society

• Current research:– geographies of cyberspace

– pervasive computing and code

• Future research: – urban geo-surveillance

– individual ‘data shadows’ and privacy

Current Research: Cybergeography

• Infrastructures, demographics, discourses– measurement, challenging the ‘death of distance’

• Mapping the wires, the information and the people– network maps, information spatialization, social visualisation – critical cartography - power of maps, semiotics, discourses– PhD : Mapping stories focused on the ‘workability’ and

‘imaginability’ of Internet’s technical geography

• networking knowledge about cybergeography – website, mailing lists, online publications & talks to diverse

audiences, books, editorial boards

Understanding the maps of cyberspace> map curator; map critique

> collecting, > classifying,

> interpreting, > evaluating,

> communicating • defining a field; fascinating diversity; almost all done outside

cartography / geography• form and function; workability of map; typology building• map biography, agenda of the map-makers• informing different groups about each other - library science, network

engineering, artists, information design, HCI, geography/cartography

‘Pictures’ ‘Words’

‘Links’

Key Cybergeography

outputs

• “More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear.” (Thrift and French, 2002)

• Seeking to ‘map’ the nature of code, account for its growth and understand the productive & creative power in the world

Current Research: ‘Code/spaces ’

• code and the work it does in the production of lived space in urban settings. its not parallel world of the Matrix

• increasing prevalence of code in things, often mundane• spaces are produced through code to varying degrees• code/space, coded space, background coded space• code/space, the code dominates the production of space, explicitly

mediating socio-spatial processes and experience. code explicitly programmed and deployed to produce spatiality

• code/space - dangers of technological determinism and universalism?

• but, the way code/spaces actually operate and are experienced is not fixed, as it is embodied through performance - coded practices

Code/space analysis so far...

• ‘Flying through code/space: the real virtuality of air travel’ Environment and Planning A, 2004

• ‘Code and the transduction of space’

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2005

• ‘Pervasive computing and the ethics of forgetting’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 2005

Future research: ‘Coding the City’

• Mapping ‘software spaces and software in space’• extending and deepening across city spaces and code

forms (e.g., ‘rogue’ code)• different domains of living; historical development;

regulatory & organisational structures; visualisation • leading to 2 books

• ‘Code, capture and the mundane management of everyday living’ AAG Denver (Kitchin)

• ‘The calculative city’ American Journal of Sociology, in preparation

Urban geo-surveillance and securitisation• tracking through space-time; tags and identification networks • interlocking techno-social assemblages (e.g. mobiles, ANPR, CCTV, id cards)• casual regimes of positional knowledge of people, objects and transactions• social implications, technical potentials, political discourses, resistance• ‘Codes of life: Identification codes and the machine-readable world’

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2005 in press

Mapping the personal ‘data shadow’• understanding individual ‘data shadows’ - how they

grow, where they performs and how they (mis)represent you

• productive (‘positive’) aspects; resistance• data gathered from subject access requests under Data

Protection Act• going further with Freedom of Information Act as a

methodological avenue for gathering data and challenging secrecy in growing public-private data trading

Potential teaching contributions

• convening– Technology and the City

[infrastructural /policy / politics; linking to planning / architecture?]

– Geographies of Cyberspace [social / culture]

– Practical Map-making

• elements in team-taught ‘Geog101’ and ‘research methods’ (census; ICTs / web; GI for human geography; practical visualisation)

• fieldwork– digital city auditing; ‘safe city?’