The feed of updates to Placing Technologies
I successfully defended the dissertation on January 9, with some minor edits made at the request of my committee. In the adrenaline of actually doing the presentation I forgot to record the zoom, which is a pity in that I made an effort to do a nice setup for it and my slides were very fun to design. Huge thanks to Miriam Nielsen for helping me with A/V—I would have been totally lost without her.…
I have neglected this blog for the last couple of months because actually writing the dissertation became an all-consuming project through the fall. I turned in the full manuscript on December 5 and was supposed to hear back last week as to whether it is “ defensible” (thankfully a lower bar than “ good”) and therefore I can get the oral defense scheduled. The fact I haven’t heard back on this is…
A piece of feedback I’ve gotten on my dissertation chapters that has been really bothering me this week is that I don’t describe what alternatives beyond the capitalist teleologies outline might look like. This annoys me for a few reasons: Does an audience of literally five people who are reading this document and work in geography really truly need me to tell them “ hey what if it wasn’t…
So a few weeks ago I complained about trying to write about the knotty dynamics of open source and the open source/free software schism in the dissertation, and how I wasn’t sure how important it was. My advisor apparently thought it was very important and her feedback made me kind of go back to the drawing board to think through the chapter and what exactly I’m trying to say—because, as another…
There’s a version of this dissertation that could just be about things that were happening in geospatial software over the last 25 years, focused almost exclusively on the web context. I ended up splitting what was supposed to be one chapter into two when I realized I had 20,000 words and wasn’t even close to done explaining the timeline. And that’s with leaving a lot of stuff out . Leaving out…
Or, probably going to end up getting some unhinged emails about this one LOL So I’m in the shift from writing-as-braindump notes to actual dissertation manuscript. I’m writing basically in reverse chronological order, because some of the web-era stuff is going to be in a journal article I need to submit in a couple of months and I’d like to get the first pass done early, which meant starting with…
This week started with a fun last-minute research trip with a lot of material I am still working through, but the rest of it has mostly been about trying to revise the dissertation outline into something coherent. MapInfo archives and meeting a founder On Tuesday I was in Saratoga Springs, New York, meeting with John Haller, a co-founder of MapInfo. John was gracious enough to let me go through…
TLDR : maybe venture funding data isn’t the ideal proxy but still useful to look at I wanted to see if I could find some insight on my whole “ open source geospatial web tech is a zero interest rate phenomenon” hypothesis through financial data about geospatial software companies’ funding rounds. The assumption here would be that if the hypothesis holds out then when interest rates are low,…
So I’ve written a bit on here about the business models of geospatial software but I haven’t written as much about the labor of creating and maintaining geospatial software and data. I’m circling the point of “ OK I really gotta buckle down and write this fucking thing” with the dissertation, and I know labor is an important framing to bring into it but I’m not totally sure how to situate it in…
Success, or at least progress! Fun things learned in the last couple of days: M1 Macs can’t run Windows emulators in VirtualBox, but Linux remains super easy (once again, ran this on Ramsey’s device)—something here about the race for advancing chips and losing pathways to understand computing’s past, don’t love it! M1 Macs can mount and run Windows in DOSBox-x, but I couldn’t mount CD-ROMs within…
This wasn’t really meant to be a post so much as a scratch document kept to get petty annoyances with an article out of my system, but it became a framing for talking about something that doesn’t seem like a wild take to me but has surprised most non-geo people when I’ve talked about this dissertation: Google Maps probably isn’t profitable. At best, I would believe it’s been marginally profitable…
But first, a preface of me complaining at the premise A problem of being a grimy materialist researcher in academia is that for various reasons, academics will generally not find that work legible or credible if it doesn’t rely or build upon some existing theoretical framework, usually one made up by a dead white guy. Maybe you’re a Marxist, or a Foucault-dian, or a Deleuzian—you’re aligning…
I found a full set of the 1996 version of MapInfo Professional on eBay recently and shelled out a somewhat stupid amount of money for it on the gamble I could get it running. Turns out bleeding-edge Windows 95 isn’t as backwards-compatible with contemporary Microsoft products so I’ll have to go down the emulator rabbit hole, but even if I don’t get the software to run I already think this was a…
I didn’t initially plan to go to the Prelinger Library for this California research trip—I’m mainly here to do interviews—but Jesse asked if I had any plans to be in San Francisco. Most of my interviewees are in the east bay and because I thought Aaron Straup Cope wasn’t going to be in town, I had sort of written off The City (when in California, San Francisco will always be The City in the same…
Web map tiles—the storing of geospatial data at different zoom levels in x/y/z indexed squares of raster (and later, vector) data for efficient storage and transmission of digital maps—are, despite their seeming simplicity, I think one of the most significant developments in geospatial software history. Tiling transformed the user experience of digital maps from one of tedious clicks-and-reloads…
I suspect that everyone who has ever written a dissertation has felt a deep discombobulation at the seeming irrelevance of their research relative to the state of things in the world, even—honestly, especially—if it does have some topical urgency. Because what exactly does a long-ass document likely to be only half-read by five academics (or five academics and someday Chris Rufo if you’re unlucky)…
One of the threads I’m trying to work into this dissertation has been the specific role of geospatial softwares in the “ logistics revolution”—the period in the 1960s and into the 1970s where logistics as a practice and field of study is popularized and standardized through new quantitative methods, the standardization of the shipping container, and deregulation of industries core to logistics. It…
A question that one of my non-geographer committee members immediately had upon reviewing my dissertation proposal was “ where is the Cold War in all this?” He’s a computer historian, and history of computing has a very well-defined military-industrial complex lineage. Maps and geospatial analysis have a military lineage too (and an even longer lineage than computers) so it would stand to reason…
Bill Kilday’s memoir Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Inudstries and Augmented Our Reality is an inside account of Kilday’s time first at Keyhole and then at Google as the company dramatically transformed public experience and consumption of geospatial data and maps. Google isn’t a primary focus of my dissertation research mainly because the people I’d need to…
I keep coming back to something Tom said to me offhandedly when I was working on the original grant proposal for this dissertation a couple of years ago, which was that “ maps are a loss leader.” Consider the following: Outside of satellite imagery companies, big incumbent navigation tech firms (Garmin, TomTom) and monolith tech companies with mapping divisions (Apple, Google, Microsoft), there…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the conditions that set the stage for the period in which geospatial technologies for web and native apps blossomed in the 2010s. It’s hard to imagine an open source software based/open source tech producing geospatial startup receiving significant VC funding in the current economy, let alone multiple startups competing with each other receiving that kind of funding.…