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Hi Annalee, and friends, Sorry for the late reply, I've been away offline. There have been several important waves of innovation in spatial hacking. The first started in the late 1970s at MIT in a group called the Architecture Machine, the predecessor to the MIT Media Lab. The ArchMach, as it was called, was formed and lead by Nicholas Negroponte and his associate Andy Lippman, and a cadre of grads and under grads to explore applications of computing and new digital media for rendering and utlilizing physical spaces. One of their earliest projects was called SDMS ( Spatial Data Management System) a 3D visualization platform. The first and most well known SDMS demo hack was called the Aspen Movie Map, a dramatic steerable video and cartographic experience. Leading hackers, besides Nicholas and Andy included Richard Bolt, Bob Mohl, Michael Naimark, Scott Fisher, Chris Schmandt, Eric Hulteen and quite a few others I can detail. 1980 many of the original ArchMach moved to west to join Alan Kay's new Systems Research Lab in Sunnyvale for Atari div. of Warner Communications. Nicholas and Andy, stayed in Cambridge and launched the Media Lab. I was hired by Alan as the admin director of the lab on the basis of a design for a hypermedia atlas of California, i wrote, inspired in part by work at the ArchMach. When Atari folded by 1982 or 1983 almost all of us migrated to Apple's Advanced Technology Labs, where we continued to work on many different kinds of spatial hacks and digital map hacks. I lead a project for years called Terraform focusing on digital mapping and spatial hypermedia, and helped launch a joint development project with Lucasfilm, National Geographic Society, and Apple Computer's San Francisco multimedia lab, ( populated and lead by a number of ArchMach veterans) There's a long list of early interesting mapping and spatial projects at MIT, Atari, Apple and related academic labs and unaffiliated hackers. I'd be glad to share details, names and places of the critical project. Since the 1980s I've continued work on spatial hypermedia, and was lucky enough to come into contact and become friends with the early pioneers of the second wave of spatial hacking. Among the centrally influential people are Joshua Schacter, Jo Walsh, Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Anselm Hook, Dan Brickley, Chris Goad, Mikel Maron, Dav [Coleman] Yaginuma, as well as the whole UK and European Locative gangs, including Ben Russell, Esther Pollak in Amsterdam, Kate Pugh, Libby Miller and the Open Guides teams , and Open Street map team, most notably Stephen Coast and more... ( sorry if I missed some important names.) In a separate, and converging track there are a number of early pioneers, in open source mapping, some working for agencies like NASA, many still usual suspects here on Geowanking, too numerous to list. I guess the google maps and map mashups are the third or fourth wave. There's yet another wave of innovation ahead, not here yet, based on a true geospatial web of interoperable open standard geodata and spatial hypermedia. All of us, of course, were deeply inspired by Bucky Fuller's Geoscope visions! Please let me know if you'd like the deep details! Cheers- Mike Liebhold Senior Researcher Institute for the Future Your host of the Starhill Delicious Blend of geospatial links and pointers, updated continuously, several hundred times daily at http://del.icio.us/inbox/starhill_blend Annalee Newitz wrote: I'm in the early stages of researching an article about map hackers for Wired magazine -- I know the term "map hackers" is vague, but that will change. What I'm wondering is whether folks here have been inspired by any particular philosophies or theories of geography in their work? Is there a Norbert Wiener or Lawrence Lessig of the geowank world? Somebody who is geeky but also policy-minded or philosophical, whose ideas have inspired you to make map tools or build geolocation tech? |
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