Category Archives: publications

Book launch: The Data Revolution and others

Mark Boyle, Chris Brunsdon & Rob Kitchin invite you to a BOOK LAUNCH Thursday 26th, February 2015, 4.30pm, Maynooth University Bookshop, North Campus

Using the story of the “West and the world” as its backdrop, this book provides for beginning students a clear and concise introduction to Human Geography, including its key concepts, seminal thinkers and their theories, contemporary debates, and celebrated case studies.

“An excellent textbook for introductory courses in Human Geography.” Prof. Patricia Wood, York University, Toronto

“In this textbook, Mark Boyle combines his broad and deep understanding of the discipline of Human Geography with his great passion and enthusiasm for education and teaching.” Prof. Guy Baeten, Lund University

This is an excellent and student-friendly text from two of the world leaders in spatial analysis. It shows clearly why the open source software R is not just an alternative to commercial GIS, it may actually be the better choice for mapping, analysis and for replicable research. Prof. Richard Harris, Bristol University

This is a vital primer to what is ‘Big’ about geocomputation: new data, innovative methods of analysis, new geographic information technologies and, above all, an over-arching rethink of how we represent geography. Prof. Paul Longley, UCL

The Data Revolution provides a synoptic and critical analysis of big data, open data, and data infrastructures.

“Anyone who wants to obtain a critical, conceptually honed and analytically refined perspective on new forms of data should read this book.” David Beer, University of York

Funny, engaging, fast-paced and hugely enjoyable … a unique combination of comedy, both gentle and black, and Grand Guignol murder and mayhem.” Michael Russell, author of The City of Strangers

ALL WELCOME

New paper: Continuous geosurveillance in the smart city

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A new paper by Rob Kitchin has been published in DIS Magazine as part of its fascinating ‘Data issue‘. The paper explores the extent to which geosurveillance is becoming pervasive and routinised and the consequences of such geosurveillance with respect to civil rights and governance, and is accompanied by some original art by Mark Dorf (also used in the site banner above) It starts thus:

“For the past couple of decades there has been a steady stream of analysis that has documented the ways in which the rollout of new digital and networked technologies have enabled increasingly pervasive and extensive forms of state and corporate surveillance. Such technologies have the capability to capture and communicate data about their use; simultaneously a wealth of sophisticated software has been developed that processes and acts on such data in automated, autonomous, and automatic ways. Importantly, the use of embedded GPS, sensors, and digital cameras are enabling location and movement to be tracked, facilitating extensive geosurveillance of people and places.

Continuous geosurveillance relies on the production of spatial big data, and in particular the notion of the “smart city” takes center stage, that is, urban landscapes that can be monitored, managed and regulated in real-time using ICT infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. Such instrumented cities are promoted as providing enhanced and more efficient and effective city services, ensuring safety and security, and providing resilience to economic and environmental shocks, but they also seriously infringe upon citizen’s privacy and are being used to profile and socially sort people, enact forms of anticipatory governance, and enable control creep, that is re-appropriation for uses beyond their initial design.

What follows is a consideration of the unfettered rush to create “smart cities” that is sensitive to the risks involved in extensively monitored urban landscapes. Are too much data about people and places being generated by public and private institutions and used to profile, sort, and sift in pernicious ways? In the rush to create smart cities is the privacy and freedom we expect in liberal democracies being eroded? Perhaps most alarming, are we creating cities that represent the interests of a select group of corporations and technocrats, rather than producing ones that represent the best interests of all citizens? ….”

New paper: Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards

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A new open access paper – ‘Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards’ – based on research from the Programmable City project has just been published in the journal Regional Studies, Regional Science. Below is the abstract. Click here to download the full PDF. The paper forms an anchor to a small forum on the topic, with responses from Mike Batty, Matt Wilson, and Meg Holden & Sara Moreno Pires. Continue reading →

New paper: From a Single Line of Code to an Entire City

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A new paper by Rob Kitchin has been posted as open access on SSRN. From a Single Line of Code to an Entire City: Reframing Thinking on Code and the City is The Programmable City Working Paper 4.

Abstract:
Cities are rapidly becoming composed of digitally-mediated components and infrastructures, their systems augmented and mediated by software, with widespread consequences for how they are managed, governed and experienced. This transformation has been accompanied by critical scholarship that has sought to understand the relationship between code and the city. Whilst this work has produced many useful insights, in this paper I argue that it also has a number of shortcomings. Principal amongst these is that the literatures concerning code and the city have remained quite divided. Studies that focus on code are often narrow in remit, fading out the city, and tend to fetishize and potentially decontextualises code at the expense of the wider socio-technical assemblage within which it is embedded. Studies that focus on the city tend to examine the effects of code, but rarely unpack the constitution and mechanics of the code producing those effects. To provide a more holistic account of the relationship between code and the city I forward two interlinked conceptual frameworks. The first places code within a wider socio-technical assemblage. The second conceives the city as being composed of millions of such assemblages. In so doing, the latter seeks to provide a means of productively building a conceptual and empirical understanding of programmable urbanism that scales from individual lines of code to the complexity of an entire urban system.

Keywords: code, city, software, programmable urbanism, software studies, smart city, urban studies, assemblages

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Working Paper 6: Crowdsourcing: A Geographic Approach to Public Engagement

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We are happy to share Working Paper 6 of the Programmable City Project. This paper is related to a paper presented at the Internet Politics & Policy Conference,University of Oxford in September. Our objective was to pool grounded knowledge from our respective disciplines of geography and computer science, our public service experience at the EPA in Ireland and Natural Resources Canada, our mutual recognition that part of open data and open access is the production of data outside of the public service and that users can contribute excellent information, and more so that public engagement in evidence based decision making makes us all smarter. We hope this working paper will be useful to the public sector in Ireland and Canada, as we think this could be a mechanism by which citizens can contribute to public policy in collaboration with government while also enabling government to continue to be accountable and the purveyor of reliable, accurate and authentic knowledge.

The full paper can be downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Tracey P. Lauriault, Programmable City Project, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Peter Mooney, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Computer Science National University of Ireland Maynooth

Abstract:
In this paper we examine three geographic crowdsourcing models, namely: volunteered geographic information (VGI), citizen science (CS) and participatory mapping (PM) (Goodchild, 2007; Audubon Society, 1900; and Peluso, 1995). We argue that these geographic knowledge producing practices can be adopted by governments to keep databases up to date (Budhathoki et al., 2008), to gain insight about natural resources (Conrad and Hilchey, 2011), to better understand the socio-economy of the people it governs (Johnston and Sieber, 2013) and as a form of data-based public engagement. The paper will be useful to governments and public agencies considering using geographic crowdsourcing in the future. We begin by defining VGI, CS, PM and crowdsourcing. Two typologies are then offered as methods to conceptualize these practices and the Kitchin (2014) data assemblage framework is proposed as a method by which state actors can critically examine their data infrastructures. A selection of exemplary VGI, CS and PM from Canada and the Republic of Ireland are discussed and the paper concludes with some high level recommendations for administrations considering a geographic approach to crowdsourcing.

Keywords: Volunteered Geographic Information, VGI, Citizen Science, Participatory Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Open Data, Public Engagement, Government Administration

New paper: Thinking critically about and researching algorithms

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A new paper by Rob Kitchin has been posted as open access on SSRN. Thinking critically about and researching algorithms is The Programmable City Working Paper 5.

Abstract
The era of ubiquitous computing and big data is now firmly established, with more and more aspects of our everyday lives being mediated, augmented, produced and regulated by digital devices and networked systems powered by software. Software is fundamentally composed of algorithms — sets of defined steps structured to process instructions/data to produce an output. And yet, to date, there has been little critical reflection on algorithms, nor empirical research into their nature and work. This paper synthesises and extends initial critical thinking about algorithms and considers how best to research them in practice. It makes a case for thinking about algorithms in ways that extend far beyond a technical understanding and approach. It then details four key challenges in conducting research on the specificities of algorithms — they are often: ‘black boxed’; heterogeneous, contingent on hundreds of other algorithms, and are embedded in complex socio-technical assemblages; ontogenetic and performative; and ‘out of control’ in their work. Finally, it considers six approaches to empirically research algorithms: examining source code (both deconstructing code and producing genealogies of production); reflexively producing code; reverse engineering; interviewing designers and conducting ethnographies of coding teams; unpacking the wider socio-technical assemblages framing algorithms; and examining how algorithms do work in the world.

Key words: algorithm, code, epistemology, research

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