For me the specific influences were; 1) For me personally John Quimet. He was involved with the Green Party of Quebec and was visiting a poet/philosopher neighbor-across-the-hall when I was a kid ( David Cottingham ). He was interested in video games and in particular the idea that a video game that could be used as a predictive tool. ( I hadn't read Buckminster yet... ) He suggested Clem Bezold's book 'Anticipatory Democracy'. I tried writing a small bbs to articulate these ideas but it was hard; it was before the web... it was a hopeless endeavor at the time :-(. Even now it still feels hard.
2) Ben Russell; headmap - I met Ben the first night I arrived after an intercontinental flight to interview for MathEngine in Oxford and he basically kept me up the entire night talking about his vision for the future. He saw best I think where the future of this stuff is going. And I still got hired even without sleep :-). Incidentally Ben also conceived MathEngine itself ( a commodity physics company that although expired spawned an industry ). He also sparked Marc Tuters, Karlis and friends - our use of the term 'Locative' was Karlis'es. 3) Jo Walsh, Dan Brickley and the RDF gang. Jo like Ben has often played a theorist role; although more technical in nature. Defining standards, suggesting approaches and making things possible. One of the problems with projects in the geo-domain; and in particular the social + geo domain is 'scope'. It is hard to even conceive of how to manage the disparate kinds of data - in my mind she articulated technical arguments for how these kinds of projects could even be possible. 3.5) Also, in a more purely philosophical theory vein, I personally was much impressed by George Lakoff and Eleanor Rosch who showed how one could more easily organize knowledge into voluntary categories - this resonated with RDF in my mind too. Every year or two I feel a need to post this essay to the list which rocked my world the first time I read it (having come from a classically OOPS trained programming background): http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/4646/http:zSzzSzwww.iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.dezSz~kehrzSzbibzSzbasic-proglangzSzPhilPrototypes.pdf/taivalsaari96classes.pdf 4) Planetwork 2000 - This was a 'geeks with conscience' conference created by Jim Fournier and Elizabeth Thompson. Jim doesn't get a lot of credit for how many projects were sparked by Planetwork. Ben Discoe showed off VTerrain at one of these; the whole audience gasped with amazement since it came so close to their vision, folly or not, of seeing and understanding the whole world. 5) Joshua had his geourl project and then his del.icio.us project - both of which were significant influences. Both demonstrated two traits 1) minimal labour on his part - they were actually doable within human time frames - and 2) bottom-fed by the community. The second trait was fairly novel at the time. 6) I think Mikel Maron's work was quite pointed in this regard to; he put pieces together to show what could be done with WorldKit; a whole vision from bottom fed collection to visualization. Chris Goad and Jason Harlan also had something that swept very close - BlogMapper - which in fact may actually be the right way to do bottom up social location knowledge systems - although it postulates an georss aggregator service ( such as Mikel has done recently and I have been also doing ). There's a whole generation of previous attempts to do this; Mike Liebhold can go on at length in fact. it would be interesting to make a timeline of the efforts. Some of them were quite interesting; inventing heavy software machinery that had to reshape the Internet in certain ways to accomplish what it wanted to do. In this specific community, which I think differs from previous attempts - I feel Ben probably did the best job of being early enough to attempt to capture what was then a nebulous vision; and in many respects is still incomplete. I see this as totally different from Buckminister; who was still a product of his times - a 'top-down-management' theorist; and substantially different from other communities and other attempts. The real insight, or perhaps practical realization, in my mind was bottom-up systems; the promise was that we would all have power; not just subscribe to a wonderful service that told us some pasturized information about the world... It has certainly been fun so far; and it still waits to truly be done right. One point; there is a weirdly curious intersection with Amsterdam and Geo projects. I have no idea why; the Waag society, even influences on Platial, there definately seems to be some locus there. - a On 7/15/06, Jo Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 05:36:48PM -0700, Annalee Newitz wrote: > >Buckminster Fuller's patented Dymaxion Map of the Earth comes to mind as > >does his promotion of Spaceship Earth. This article by Brian Holmes joined some of the dots for me years ago, in terms of the more critical theory wanking / locative media "wrong trousers" version of geowanking: "Cartography of excess" http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=24&NrSection=5&NrArticle=830&ST_max=0 Lots of people point to de Certeau - "place is a practised space" (or is it the other way round? ;) ) - and make knowing allusions to Habermas on the public sphere, localising and re-spatialising a place of civic engagement. The work of David Harvey has affected a lot of people working on collective mapping / social purpose threads. Personally i was massively influenced in what i made or tried to make with geospatial tech by the works and thoughts of Wilfried Hou Je Bek - http://www.socialfiction.org/gettags.php?tagski=psychogeography - who inherits from the Situationist International, Guy Debord's hand-drawn psychogeographic maps of derives, etc... http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?intro;russell <- the "trans cultural mapping reader" is worth chasing up a copy of, if this line of thinking is at all fun for you; it gets into depth on some of this. http://cholmes.wordpress.com/2006/01/04/location-matters/ is a nice writeup of the head-opening effect of the 'headmap manifesto' and a sense of where geowanking 'wants to be'... hth, hand, wank wank :) jo _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
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