Next Week a the AAG Annual Meeting

Next week, I will attend the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Boston where I will present my work The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems at the session Situating Sat Nav 2 (from 4:20 PM – 6:00 PM). Description of the session:

Sat Nav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. The session will present a range of theoretically informed analyses questioning the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation.

Other sessions I plan (or wish) to attend are:

Tuesday
“New” Geographies of Mobility and Accessibility: Theory, Modelling, and Policy Implications (from 12:00 PM – 1:40 PM)
During the 1950s, Ullman and Mayer prepared an initial sketch of the areas of knowledge specialization emerging from the intersection of geography and transportation. Their work provided a framework for the development of Transportation Geography. Among the various themes they identified, there was an emphasis on the study of systems, flows, and interactions. Mobility, flows, and the production of capital were physical processes involving place-based production of goods and services, and the physical movement of commodities and people through time and space. Accessibility was a product of location among origins and destinations of those commodities and people. Today our conceptualization continues to evolve in the face of wireless and wired technologies. We are at times both the producers and consumers of our own wares (Toffler, 1980), and increasingly engage in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to perform obligatory and discretionary activities, and to consolidate and extend our social networks. In the face of the sort of spatial deconstruction offered by what Sheller and Urry (2006) and others have called, “the new mobility”, Transportation Geographers and those in many other disciplines face new challenges and research opportunities as they attempt to come to grips with the relationship between mobility, accessibility, space, and place in the information age. This session will explore recent theoretical, qualitative, empirical, and policy-based discourse and practice surrounding emerging geographical perspectives regarding relationships between technology, mobility, accessibility and daily life.

Wednesday
Urban Geography: Urban Processes and Models (from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM)

Spatial Data Analysis, Visualization, and Modeling (from 1:00 PM – 2:40 PM)

Time Geography: Emerging Theoretical Developments, Implementations, and Applications (from 1:00 PM – 2:40 PM)
Originally designed to investigate various constraints of human activities in time and space, the time-geographic framework provides an integrated space-time environment to effectively and efficiently investigate the spatio-temporal characteristics of human activities and their interactions. There have been revived research interests in time geography in recent years. These research efforts include extending the time-geographic framework to accommodate the emerging hybrid environment of physical and virtual spaces, providing computational models and representations of the framework, developing GIS designs to implement the framework, and applying the framework to facilitate studies such as travel behaviors, activity patterns, accessibility assessment, urban structure, animal ecology, etc. This session will provide researchers a forum to share experiences and exchange ideas on recent theoretical developments, implementations, and applications of time geography.

Geographies of Play III: Embodied, emotional, sensory geographies of play (from 1:00 PM – 2:40 PM)
Christopher Harker (2005: 59) reminds us “Playing is not (just) kids stuff. Playing is something we all do, albeit to different extents and degrees, and this is something that needs a great deal more investigation”. These sessions respond to Harker’s appeal for more critical attention to be given to the study of the geographies of play. The sessions include papers from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, to encompass child, adult and intergenerational experiences of play. The papers explore innovative ways of studying the geographies of play and embrace a wide range of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.

Visualization (from 3:10 PM – 4:50 PM)

Urban Tourism (from 3:10 PM – 4:50 PM)

Thursday
Urbanism and Urban Planning (from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM)

Agent Based Modeling, Simulation (from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM)

Spatial Analysis and Modeling: Transport and Spatial Analysis (from 10:10 AM – 11:50 AM)

Cyberinfrastructure-Data and Knowledge Representation (from 10:10 AM – 11:50 AM)
The flourishing developments of shared geographic data, information, knowledge and computing resources have produced many products to facilitate the easy use of geographic resources. For example: 1) Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth have changed how we explore geographic extent; 2) OGC developed multiple web services to facilitate communication among GIS components that are widely used in assembling services, such as spatial web portals; 3) Geographically distributed sensor webs have opened up the possibilities for real-time control of complex systems such as urban traffic; 4) Knowledge representation systems enable the enterprise to accumulate knowledge and make smart decisions. These evolutions adopt cyberinfrastructure to facilitate geographic research, development, and education.

Applied geostatistics (from 1:00 PM – 2:40 PM)
This session will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in the application of geostatistics to a wide variety of disciplines.

Subversive cartographies (from 1:00 PM – 2:40 PM)
Subversive cartographies is a series of sessions jointly organised with the Maps in Society Commission of the International Cartographic Association. This first session brings together papers emphasizing the role of the aesthetic in the construction of alternative and artistic mappings. Common themes are the relations between artistic practice and mapping, narrative and (e)motional cartographies, and the politics of design.

Friday
Internet Mapping and Mash Ups (from 10:10 AM – 11:50 AM)

A Conversation with Noam Chomsky (from 2:30 PM – 4:10 PM)
Saturday
Visualization, Cartography, and Cognition (from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM)
Build it, Mapt it, Web it (10:10 AM – 11:50 AM)

Visualization: Viewing Data in New Ways (from 10:10 AM – 11:50 AM)