Can we extend geographic computing so it can matter to more people?
Digital geographic data conventionally represent the world in terms of self-sufficient, bounded entities. These are defined by their properties and by their location in the coordinates of an external, ‘absolute’ space, such as latitude and longitude. As a constructive alternative, our work emphasizes representing, analyzing, and visualizing connections (or ‘relations’) through geographical computation. These are connections over distance. They are connections between phenomena within place. They are also connections between the interpreter and the interpreted. These ideas lie at the heart of what geographers call relational geographies.
The space of the city is not the same when driven in a car as when walked, or when flown over in a helicopter. It is not the same for the police as for a child. We are generalizing spatial coordinates and map projections beyond their present commitments to absolute space, so that we can compute with many geographic spaces. Each is grounded in the contexts of particular processes, or in the perspectives of particular people. With David O’Sullivan, this includes work on discrete generalized projections, and on extending core projection libraries such as proj.
Technological path dependency tends to lock in the concerns and capabilities of GIS. So we also explore alternative ideals for geographical computation, such as geographical imagination systems (gis). The prototype enfolding, made with Nick Lally, is one such experiment. Related work engages physical prototypes and experiential media, from 3D printing to augmented and virtual reality, to build intuition for complex spatialities.
We develop ways of mapping that do not focus on one or two types of data, such as population density or elevation. Instead, they show how many types of data (and the phenomena they represent) vary over the landscape, often interrelated with each other. Tiled and woven maps, made with David O’Sullivan, are one example.
How might geographical computation engage a world of deeply entangled nature-society relationships? We work to foster more creative and productive relationships between geographical computation, the humanities, and the environmental sciences. This thread runs from earlier work on speculative cartographies, GIS after encounters with the environmental humanities, to the Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities, co-edited with Charles Travis, Deborah Dixon, Rob Legg, and Arlene Crampsie. Its inspirations include feminist new materialisms, posthumanist thought, and process-relational thought, broadly writ.
Places are formed not only through what exists locally, but at the intersection of many global connections. Tracing ecological footprints relationally through the webs of the economy challenges the belief that certain commodities are substantially ‘greener’ than others. It suggests there may be serious limits to individual and household strategies for ecologically responsible behavior. It underscores the need for more social, collective, and governmental strategies.
With collaborators including Luis Fernando Chaves and Rob Wallace, we study how landscapes, through their socionatural entanglements across scales, become more or less susceptible to the emergence and spread of disease. This work has examined influenza, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19, and malaria. It extends to agricultural landscapes, industrial and alternative.
Our computing is shaped by particular histories. With Trevor Barnes and others, we co-curate the William Bunge Archive, which has supported several of our published papers on Bunge, theoretical geography, and radical geography.
Much of this work takes the form of code: prototypes that demonstrate new ideas, software libraries that make research accessible and useful, and analyses in interactive notebooks. Where we can, we share it openly on GitHub.