Special session 6:
Methods, Tools and Skills to Open the Black Box: Exploring Knowledge Transfers in Digital Geographies
Organisers: Leah Aaron (University College London) and Myriam Boualami (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne)
​Contact: leah.aaron.16@ucl.ac.uk; myriam.boualami@parisgeo.cnrs.fr
This Special Session calls for papers which engage with forming effective pedagogical approaches to the transfer of digital-geographic skills and knowledge.
Geography has often been at the forefront of epistemological and methodological shifts in the Social Sciences, from the 1950s’ quantitative turn (Burton, 1963; Longley, 2000) to the more recent Big Data debates (Kitchin, 2014). Digital Geography, as an ever-evolving field, reinvigorates this tradition, constantly forging new critical engagements, such as with ‘the new algorithmic turn’ (Kwan, 2018). Scholars are making rich contributions to our knowledge of digital life, from the platform economy to web-generated data. And yet, digital-geographic inquiry continues to be hindered by methodological silos, barriers to collaboration, and the continuous need for up-skilling in a fast-moving field.
We invite contributions which engage with the question of the solidification and transmission of digital methods. We welcome explorations of ‘natively digital’ methods (e.g., web-scraping, programmatic data processing) (Rogers, 2024) as well as the ‘digital-ethnographic’ (e.g., digital walkthroughs, augmented interviews), and reflections on horizontal (between researchers), vertical (from researchers to students) and circular (self-learning) transfers of knowledge. We encourage reflections on the critical and analytical toolkits necessary for digital-geographical enquiry which can best equip us to think ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ the black box (Christin, 2020; Fields et. al 2020). Our interest is in reflecting on epistemological approaches which can critically interrogate the unequal accumulation of ‘digital capital’ (Ragnedda et.al, 2018) within the field and beyond.
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References
Burton, I. (1963) The quantitative revolution and theoretical geography. The Canadian Geographer 7: 151–162.
Christin, A., 2020. The ethnographer and the algorithm: beyond the black box. Theory and Society, 49(5), pp.897-918.
Fields et al: Fields, D., Bissell, D., Macrorie, R., 2020. Platform methods: studying platform urbanism outside the black box. Urban Geography 41, 462–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2020.1730642
Kitchin, R. (2014). Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data & Society, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714528481 (Original work published 2014)
Kwan, M.-P., 2018. Algorithmic Geographies: Big Data, Algorithmic Uncertainty, and the Production of Geographic Knowledge, in: Kwan, M.-P., Schwanen, T. (Eds.), Geographies of Mobility. Routledge, pp. 32–40. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266336-4
Longley, P. A. (2000). The academic success of GIS in geography: Problems and prospects. Journal of geographical systems, 2, 37-42.
Ragnedda, M., Ruiu, M.L. and Addeo, F., 2020. Measuring digital capital: An empirical investigation. New media & society, 22(5), pp.793-816.
Rogers, R., 2024. Doing digital methods.