Craig Dalton | Hofstra University (original) (raw)
Papers by Craig Dalton
The Professional Geographer, 2017
Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. S... more Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. Such maps, including Google Maps and Apple Maps, inform and shape users' geographic understandings. Existing research finds that those who navigate with mobile devices tend to recall landmarks rather than more comprehensive forms of geographic knowledge. However, most of that research gives minimal consideration to social context. Utilizing a qualitative approach and drawing on critical work on vision, maps, and digital data, we explore the contextual, economic circumstances that partially shape the production of users' geographic knowledge through their consumption of mobile device maps. In a focus group experiment, mobile device map users frequently referred to a particular business, a Starbucks location, in a location-finding task. This indicates that social, contextual considerations are important to informing geographic knowledges; the map application providers' business strategies, chiefly advertising, lead to an emphasis on business-type points of interest in mobile maps, which could shape users' subsequent geographic knowledges. This has implications not only for mobile device use, but how technology companies' maps potentially affect everyday understandings of the world around us.
Cartographic Perspectives, 2019
Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. S... more Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. Such maps, including Google Maps and Apple Maps, inform and shape users’ geographic understandings. Existing research finds that those who navigate with mobile devices tend to recall landmarks rather than more comprehensive forms of geographic knowledge. However, most of that research gives minimal consideration to social context. Utilizing a qualitative approach and drawing on critical work on vision, maps, and digital data, we explore the contextual, economic circumstances that partially shape the production of users’ geographic knowledge through their consumption of mobile device maps. In a focus group experiment, mobile device map users frequently referred to a particular business, a Starbucks location, in a location-finding task. This indicates that social, contextual considerations are important to informing geographic knowledges; the map application providers’ business strategies, ...
Click to zoom the map As a collective with diverse ties to the university factory-adjuncts, fello... more Click to zoom the map As a collective with diverse ties to the university factory-adjuncts, fellows, freelancers, indebted graduate students, assistant professors under review, unemployed PhDs and caregivers-how do we situate ourselves in relation to increasingly undemocratic and exploitative infrastructures of higher education? How can we confront everyday precarity 1 due to lack of access to housing, knowledge, healthcare, mobility, and employment? How can we organize to produce alternatives and reclaim life within and beyond the university? As the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), we map. Beginning with our own situations, we create a mapping of and for political change, combining militant research with counter-mapping to produce alternative ways of visualizing and inhabiting our university and world. Our mapping is grounded in the tradition of autonomous politics: emphasizing the power and creativity of labor over that of capital, realizing the need to go beyond statecentered activism and work for political change from below, and recognizing the centrality of struggles around knowledge production in the current political-economic context. As militant research, autonomous mapping simultaneously produces analyses and political interventions, helping us to understand and challenge the changing spaces of oppression where production/reproduction are geographically diffuse. We use autonomous cartography to analyze and intervene in processes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, through collaboration, at other institutions around the world. This mapping prompts critical and reflexive self-organizing cognizant of the many forms of labor at the university and the university's role in the
This Is Not an Atlas, 2018
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019
As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented thro... more As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that has been gathered by sensors, devices and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable and knowable spaces, facilitating ever-more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration and categorisation of difference, and structured through particular discourses of smartness, both of which shape the production of space and place on a local and general level. Valorization of data and its analysis naturalizes constructions of space, place, and individual that elide the political and surveillant forms of techno-cractic governance on which they are built. This article argues that it is through processes of measurement, calculation, and classification that "smart" emerges along distinct axes of power/knowledge. Using examples drawn from the British Home Office's repurposing of charity outreach maps for homeless population deportation and the more recent EU EXIT document checking application for European citizens and family members living in the UK, we demonstrate the significance of Gunnar Olsson's thought for understanding the ideological and material power of smartness via his work on the very limits of representation. The discussion further opens a bridge towards a more relational consideration of the construction of space, place, and individual through the thinking of Doreen Massey.
The Professional Geographer, 2017
Tacoma D ata, its sources, analytics, and potential effects are at the center of recent popular, ... more Tacoma D ata, its sources, analytics, and potential effects are at the center of recent popular, industry, and scholarly debates about knowledge, policy, identity, and everyday urban life. These debates have taken place across the academy, from geography to digital humanities, data science, media studies, and beyond. Researchers in these and other social science fields are increasingly engaging with new data infrastructures (Batty 2013; Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane 2016; Pickren 2016), representational technologies (Hochman 2014), and analytic practices (Poorthuis et al. 2016) as they emerge in private industry (Thatcher 2014), academic research (Crawford and Finn 2014), and government agencies (Taylor and Schroeder 2015). In politics and industry, these related phenomena go by a variety of buzzwords, such as big data and smart cities (Kitchin 2014c, 2016; Datta 2016), that offer tantalizing promises of future social and economic growth and stability (Lohr 2012). In more recent critical investigations, early hubristic claims of the power of these new systems of data extraction, visualization, and analysis, such as Anderson's (2008) now nearly decade-old, infamous claim of the "end of theory," serve as shibboleths by which scholars situate themselves to evaluate actual data practices and effects (Thatcher 2016). Both promises and critiques of this new paradigm of data involve algorithmic analysis of heterogeneous data sets within currently underexamined contexts and social relations (Kitchin 2014a). This focus issue engages with this new paradigm from a variety of geographical perspectives emphasizing radical politics and broadly critical approaches to data analytics. Engaging data in these ways opens new, promising avenues for thought about and practices that incorporate such data. In this way, the section speaks not only to work in critical data studies but also to larger conversations around the ways in which technology mediates, saturates, and sustains late capitalist modernity (Graham 2005).
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 2017
Counter-mapping offers a useful theoretical framework and practical methods for developing grassr... more Counter-mapping offers a useful theoretical framework and practical methods for developing grassroots data science not focused on profit. Counter-mapping is inherently a situated combination of ideas and practices for developing and realizing alternative social relations and worlds. Counter-mapping requires careful sensitivity to each situation and associated power relations, especially by the map-maker(s) themselves. Counter-mapping is a combination of critical ideas and practices for social change that offers a productive and promising approach for grassroots data science initiatives. Current information technologies collect, store, and analyze data with new degrees of size, speed, heterogeneity, and detail. While much work utilizing data science technologies is dedicated to generating profit or to national security, some data science projects explicitly attempt to facilitate new social relations, though with inconsistent results and consequences. This paper reviews counter-mapping's particular combination of theory and practice as a potential point of reference for such initiatives. Counter-mapping takes the tools of institutional map-making at government agencies and corporations and applies them in situated, bottom-up ways. Moreover, counter-mapping's multiple theoretical approaches and polyglot practices offer a variety of inspirations and avenues for future work in identifying and realizing alternative, ideally better, possibilities. This paper defines counter-mapping; outlines its multiple theorizations; briefly describes three relevant case studies, The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, Mapping Police Violence, and the Counter-Cartographies Collective; and concludes with a few hard-learned considerations from counter-mapping that are directly pertinent for data-oriented projects focused on change.
Big Data & Society, 2016
In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics... more In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments (boyd and Crawford 2012). In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.
ACME
We, the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), propose a specific form of counter-mapping, auton... more We, the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), propose a specific form of counter-mapping, autonomous cartography, to understand and intervene in the processes at our university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As autonomous, militant research, this mapping aims to foster cooperation among researchers and participants to practically intervene in real problems without attempting to marshal state or administrative power. Our experience shows that 1 Published under the Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Mapping as Militant Research 440 autonomous cartography helps produce new, alternative practices, knowledges and subjects at our university and others. Even as we draw on critical cartography and other cases of counter-mapping, autonomous cartography constitutes a distinct form of counter-mapping through our combination of autonomous theory, militant research and mapping. In this paper, we explore constitutive influences on 3Cs and our own militant countermapping experiences. We begin with a review of the theoretical basis of autonomous cartography as a form of critical cartography and counter-mapping. Next, we introduce the key concepts and practices of autonomous politics and militant research through the examples of Colectivo Situaciones, Precarias a la Deriva and Hackitectura. In the second half of the paper, we review 3Cs' founding conditions and two of our maps. Finally, we conclude by examining the methods and impacts of our mappings.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015
Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around ''Big Data'', tend to be presented as ne... more Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around ''Big Data'', tend to be presented as new and innovative, emerging ahistorically to revolutionize modern life. In this article, we situate one branch of Big Data analytics, spatial Big Data, through a historical predecessor, geodemographic analysis, to help develop a critical approach to current data analytics. Spatial Big Data promises an epistemic break in marketing, a leap from targeting geodemographic areas to targeting individuals. Yet it inherits characteristics and problems from geodemographics, including a justification through the market, and a process of commodification through the black-boxing of technology. As researchers develop sustained critiques of data analytics and its effects on everyday life, we must so with a grounding in the cultural and historical contexts from which data technologies emerged. This article and others (Barnes and Wilson, 2014) develop a historically situated, critical approach to spatial Big Data. This history illustrates connections to the critical issues of surveillance, redlining, and the production of consumer subjects and geographies. The shared histories and structural logics of spatial Big Data and geodemographics create the space for a continued critique of data analyses' role in society.
The Professional Geographer, 2017
Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. S... more Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. Such maps, including Google Maps and Apple Maps, inform and shape users' geographic understandings. Existing research finds that those who navigate with mobile devices tend to recall landmarks rather than more comprehensive forms of geographic knowledge. However, most of that research gives minimal consideration to social context. Utilizing a qualitative approach and drawing on critical work on vision, maps, and digital data, we explore the contextual, economic circumstances that partially shape the production of users' geographic knowledge through their consumption of mobile device maps. In a focus group experiment, mobile device map users frequently referred to a particular business, a Starbucks location, in a location-finding task. This indicates that social, contextual considerations are important to informing geographic knowledges; the map application providers' business strategies, chiefly advertising, lead to an emphasis on business-type points of interest in mobile maps, which could shape users' subsequent geographic knowledges. This has implications not only for mobile device use, but how technology companies' maps potentially affect everyday understandings of the world around us.
Cartographic Perspectives, 2019
Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. S... more Locating places using maps on mobile devices is an increasingly common practice in modern life. Such maps, including Google Maps and Apple Maps, inform and shape users’ geographic understandings. Existing research finds that those who navigate with mobile devices tend to recall landmarks rather than more comprehensive forms of geographic knowledge. However, most of that research gives minimal consideration to social context. Utilizing a qualitative approach and drawing on critical work on vision, maps, and digital data, we explore the contextual, economic circumstances that partially shape the production of users’ geographic knowledge through their consumption of mobile device maps. In a focus group experiment, mobile device map users frequently referred to a particular business, a Starbucks location, in a location-finding task. This indicates that social, contextual considerations are important to informing geographic knowledges; the map application providers’ business strategies, ...
Click to zoom the map As a collective with diverse ties to the university factory-adjuncts, fello... more Click to zoom the map As a collective with diverse ties to the university factory-adjuncts, fellows, freelancers, indebted graduate students, assistant professors under review, unemployed PhDs and caregivers-how do we situate ourselves in relation to increasingly undemocratic and exploitative infrastructures of higher education? How can we confront everyday precarity 1 due to lack of access to housing, knowledge, healthcare, mobility, and employment? How can we organize to produce alternatives and reclaim life within and beyond the university? As the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), we map. Beginning with our own situations, we create a mapping of and for political change, combining militant research with counter-mapping to produce alternative ways of visualizing and inhabiting our university and world. Our mapping is grounded in the tradition of autonomous politics: emphasizing the power and creativity of labor over that of capital, realizing the need to go beyond statecentered activism and work for political change from below, and recognizing the centrality of struggles around knowledge production in the current political-economic context. As militant research, autonomous mapping simultaneously produces analyses and political interventions, helping us to understand and challenge the changing spaces of oppression where production/reproduction are geographically diffuse. We use autonomous cartography to analyze and intervene in processes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, through collaboration, at other institutions around the world. This mapping prompts critical and reflexive self-organizing cognizant of the many forms of labor at the university and the university's role in the
This Is Not an Atlas, 2018
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019
As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented thro... more As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that has been gathered by sensors, devices and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable and knowable spaces, facilitating ever-more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration and categorisation of difference, and structured through particular discourses of smartness, both of which shape the production of space and place on a local and general level. Valorization of data and its analysis naturalizes constructions of space, place, and individual that elide the political and surveillant forms of techno-cractic governance on which they are built. This article argues that it is through processes of measurement, calculation, and classification that "smart" emerges along distinct axes of power/knowledge. Using examples drawn from the British Home Office's repurposing of charity outreach maps for homeless population deportation and the more recent EU EXIT document checking application for European citizens and family members living in the UK, we demonstrate the significance of Gunnar Olsson's thought for understanding the ideological and material power of smartness via his work on the very limits of representation. The discussion further opens a bridge towards a more relational consideration of the construction of space, place, and individual through the thinking of Doreen Massey.
The Professional Geographer, 2017
Tacoma D ata, its sources, analytics, and potential effects are at the center of recent popular, ... more Tacoma D ata, its sources, analytics, and potential effects are at the center of recent popular, industry, and scholarly debates about knowledge, policy, identity, and everyday urban life. These debates have taken place across the academy, from geography to digital humanities, data science, media studies, and beyond. Researchers in these and other social science fields are increasingly engaging with new data infrastructures (Batty 2013; Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane 2016; Pickren 2016), representational technologies (Hochman 2014), and analytic practices (Poorthuis et al. 2016) as they emerge in private industry (Thatcher 2014), academic research (Crawford and Finn 2014), and government agencies (Taylor and Schroeder 2015). In politics and industry, these related phenomena go by a variety of buzzwords, such as big data and smart cities (Kitchin 2014c, 2016; Datta 2016), that offer tantalizing promises of future social and economic growth and stability (Lohr 2012). In more recent critical investigations, early hubristic claims of the power of these new systems of data extraction, visualization, and analysis, such as Anderson's (2008) now nearly decade-old, infamous claim of the "end of theory," serve as shibboleths by which scholars situate themselves to evaluate actual data practices and effects (Thatcher 2016). Both promises and critiques of this new paradigm of data involve algorithmic analysis of heterogeneous data sets within currently underexamined contexts and social relations (Kitchin 2014a). This focus issue engages with this new paradigm from a variety of geographical perspectives emphasizing radical politics and broadly critical approaches to data analytics. Engaging data in these ways opens new, promising avenues for thought about and practices that incorporate such data. In this way, the section speaks not only to work in critical data studies but also to larger conversations around the ways in which technology mediates, saturates, and sustains late capitalist modernity (Graham 2005).
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 2017
Counter-mapping offers a useful theoretical framework and practical methods for developing grassr... more Counter-mapping offers a useful theoretical framework and practical methods for developing grassroots data science not focused on profit. Counter-mapping is inherently a situated combination of ideas and practices for developing and realizing alternative social relations and worlds. Counter-mapping requires careful sensitivity to each situation and associated power relations, especially by the map-maker(s) themselves. Counter-mapping is a combination of critical ideas and practices for social change that offers a productive and promising approach for grassroots data science initiatives. Current information technologies collect, store, and analyze data with new degrees of size, speed, heterogeneity, and detail. While much work utilizing data science technologies is dedicated to generating profit or to national security, some data science projects explicitly attempt to facilitate new social relations, though with inconsistent results and consequences. This paper reviews counter-mapping's particular combination of theory and practice as a potential point of reference for such initiatives. Counter-mapping takes the tools of institutional map-making at government agencies and corporations and applies them in situated, bottom-up ways. Moreover, counter-mapping's multiple theoretical approaches and polyglot practices offer a variety of inspirations and avenues for future work in identifying and realizing alternative, ideally better, possibilities. This paper defines counter-mapping; outlines its multiple theorizations; briefly describes three relevant case studies, The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, Mapping Police Violence, and the Counter-Cartographies Collective; and concludes with a few hard-learned considerations from counter-mapping that are directly pertinent for data-oriented projects focused on change.
Big Data & Society, 2016
In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics... more In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments (boyd and Crawford 2012). In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.
ACME
We, the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), propose a specific form of counter-mapping, auton... more We, the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), propose a specific form of counter-mapping, autonomous cartography, to understand and intervene in the processes at our university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As autonomous, militant research, this mapping aims to foster cooperation among researchers and participants to practically intervene in real problems without attempting to marshal state or administrative power. Our experience shows that 1 Published under the Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Mapping as Militant Research 440 autonomous cartography helps produce new, alternative practices, knowledges and subjects at our university and others. Even as we draw on critical cartography and other cases of counter-mapping, autonomous cartography constitutes a distinct form of counter-mapping through our combination of autonomous theory, militant research and mapping. In this paper, we explore constitutive influences on 3Cs and our own militant countermapping experiences. We begin with a review of the theoretical basis of autonomous cartography as a form of critical cartography and counter-mapping. Next, we introduce the key concepts and practices of autonomous politics and militant research through the examples of Colectivo Situaciones, Precarias a la Deriva and Hackitectura. In the second half of the paper, we review 3Cs' founding conditions and two of our maps. Finally, we conclude by examining the methods and impacts of our mappings.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015
Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around ''Big Data'', tend to be presented as ne... more Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around ''Big Data'', tend to be presented as new and innovative, emerging ahistorically to revolutionize modern life. In this article, we situate one branch of Big Data analytics, spatial Big Data, through a historical predecessor, geodemographic analysis, to help develop a critical approach to current data analytics. Spatial Big Data promises an epistemic break in marketing, a leap from targeting geodemographic areas to targeting individuals. Yet it inherits characteristics and problems from geodemographics, including a justification through the market, and a process of commodification through the black-boxing of technology. As researchers develop sustained critiques of data analytics and its effects on everyday life, we must so with a grounding in the cultural and historical contexts from which data technologies emerged. This article and others (Barnes and Wilson, 2014) develop a historically situated, critical approach to spatial Big Data. This history illustrates connections to the critical issues of surveillance, redlining, and the production of consumer subjects and geographies. The shared histories and structural logics of spatial Big Data and geodemographics create the space for a continued critique of data analyses' role in society.