Placing Technologies

I successfully defended the dissertation on January 9, with some minor edits made at the request of my committee.

I have neglected this blog for the last couple of months because actually writing the dissertation became an all-consuming project through the fall.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 geospa…

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.

Success, or at least progress!

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…

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…

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.

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.

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 signifi…

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.

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 st…

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?”

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…

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.”

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.