Situating Neogeography

Abstract

Guest editorial first paragraph; Enormous amounts of online and networked data are becoming part of the layers, experiences, and landscapes of place. Geographers and other social scientists have only relatively recently begun to understand this rapid expansion of user-centered, locational media. Movements in the academy in response to these phenomena have offered a series of organising labels, with different levels of specifi city and layers of connotation: the geoweb, spatial/social media, user-generated content, ‘big data’, as well as volunteered geographic information (VGI) and neogeography. Within geography a number of events mark these developments, including a VGI specialist meeting in Santa Barbara, USA in 2007 and an accompanying special issue of GeoJournal (Elwood, 2008), a World University Network seminar on neogeography in 2008, an interview with Michael Goodchild conducted by Nadine Schuurman and published by Environment and Planning D: Society and Space in 2009, Progress in Human Geography reports authored by Jeremy Crampton (2009) and Sarah Elwood (2010), a specialist meeting on space–time geographies of social networks in Santa Barbara in 2010, a preconference gathering on VGI in Seattle in 2011 reported in an edited collection (Sui et al, 2013), and [...]