My work is at the intersection of cultural geography and the history of geographic ideas, of space and place and nature.  Over the course of my career I have attempted to answer questions like the following:  How do people construct a world composed of places that are very different one from another?  How do they think about those differences?  As  people develop and mobilize new technologies, how do those places change, and how   does their ability effectively to think about those places change?  

Over the last ten years I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the nature and implications of the development of geographic information technologies, including geographic information systems, but also remote surveillance systems, global positioning systems, and computer-assisted cartography.  This research has been closely connected to the concepts  mentioned here--space and place and representation--but also to broader social and cultural issues, such as privacy, property, and identity.  

I cover many of those issues in my 1998 book, Digital places: Living with geographic information technologies London: Routledge; for an extended list of my publications and lectures on geographic information technologies, click here .

ISSUES

The concepts of space and place 

 

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Most people imagine places to be simply locations within some larger spatial container, where places, perhaps, can be thought of as having meaning or significance for the people who inhabit those places.  But in a series of works, I have argued that this way of thinking about these two key concepts--space and place--is deeply flawed.  In fact, it makes more sense to see the concept of place as more basic, and to see the concept of space as having been invented  later, and only within the context of newly developed technologies for the storage of information.  

 “On space and spatial practice in contemporary geography," in Carville Earle, Kent Mathewson, and Martin Kenzer, eds. Concepts in human geography. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996;

"New technologies and the ontology of places ," Presented at the Department of Information Studies, UCLA, March, 1999;  

“Discursive displacement and the seminal ambiguity of space and place ,” in Handbook on New Media, Leah Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, eds. Beverly Hills: Sage; and

“On Wittgenstein and the fabric of everyday life,” in Nigel Thrift and Mike Crang, eds., Thinking space, London: Routledge (2000), pp. 89-113.

 

The development of technologies of representation  

 

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It is conventional to imagine that in at least an imperfect way, the written and printed text are appropriate vehicles for the representation of scientific research. But intrinsic to these works, in fact,  are ways of conceptualizing space and place that may be quite at odds with those that their authors wish to promote.  Indeed, one major source of the difficulty that people have in thinking about places as being real and important, rather than simply locations imbued with emotion, has been the written and the printed work.  

The work in the world: Geographical practice and the written word . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; and

 

 

The concept of 'privacy'

 

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Many people today believe that the development of new communications technologies, and especially the Internet, has led to a diminution in the possibility of maintaining a right to privacy.  And there can be no doubt that more and more of what people say and do is subject to public scrutiny.  But in order to understand the nature of the changes that are occurring, it is important here to look to the ways in which geography is being employed.  New computer technologies, such as geographic information systems, have made it increasingly easy to gather and summarize information about places at many scales, and to connect that information with other information, about individuals and households.  The result has been the creation of digital personas, profiles that characterize people in terms not only of what they do, but also of where they live.  

These digital profiles--and each of us is now represented by a great many of them--raise difficult problems for the traditional ways of protecting individual privacy.  They at once are redefining the right to privacy and demanding new means for protecting that right.  

"The digital individual and the private realm," Annals, Association of American Geographers 87 (4) (1997): 681-99;

"On geographic information systems and the problem of privacy," in Paul Longley, David J. Maguire, Michael F. Goodchild, and David W.    Rhind, eds. Geographical information systems: Principles and applications. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley, 1999;

“ Privacy and the phenetic urge: geodemographics and the changing spatiality of local practice ,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Automated Discrimination, David Lyon, ed., London: Routledge (with David Phillips);

“The power to be silent: Testimony, identity, and the place of place,” Historical Geography 28 (2000): 5-16; and

“The fragmented individual and the future of academic life,” in Karen Till, Steven Hoelscher, and Paul Adams, eds., Place, meaning, and self: Essays in honor of Yi-Fu Tuan. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press (2001), pp. 207-20.