Guest editorial: theorizing the geoweb

Abstract

The general convergence of location with digital information communication technologies (ICTs) has brought about profound shifts in the content, forms, and practices that surround spatial media. In geography, these phenomena have been variously and alternately referred to as ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI) (Elwood et al. 2011; Goodchild 2007), ‘neogeography’ (Graham 2010; Turner 2006; Warf and Sui 2010; Wilson and Graham 2013a, 2013b), ‘(new) spatial media’ (Crampton 2009; Elwood and Leszczynski 2012), and ‘the geoweb,’ (Elwood and Leszczynski 2011; Haklay et al. 2008; Scharl and Tochtermann 2007). Here, we prefigure ‘the geoweb’ as we consider it to account for both new materialities and new practices. Regardless of the neologism used to refer to these phenomena, they nevertheless present significant challenges to our disciplinary thinking about geographic information and technologies. Much of our early engagements of the geoweb have been informed by the GIScience and Critical GIS traditions, which are ontologically and epistemologically committed to data regimes, practices, and technics associated with geographic information systems (GIS) as a singular or unique technological assemblage (for examples see Farman 2010; Guptill 2007; Miller 2006; Sui and Goodchild 2011; Sui 2008; Wilson 2009). More recently, however, geographers have acknowledged that the rapid proliferation and diversification of spatial media, content forms, and praxes require new empirical, conceptual, and theoretical approaches to apprehend both the nature and implications of these transitions and materialities. This need for new approaches has been most saliently articulated in a 2008 special issue of GeoJournal devoted to VGI edited by Sarah Elwood (volume 72 issues 3–4) (Elwood 2008b). Contributors to this special issue highlighted the imperatives of reconceptualizing entrenched notions of ‘the user’ (Budhathoki et al. 2008); attending to the altered contexts of information curation (Flanagin and Metzger 2008); evaluating the effectiveness and appropriateness of existing frameworks—such as Feminist, Critical, and Participatory GIS—for ‘reading’ or engaging the geoweb (Elwood 2008a; Tulloch 2008); and, devising new metrics and/ or schemes for evaluating the validity and reliability of user-generated geographic information (Bishr and Mantelas 2008; Mummidi and Krumm 2008). In response to this agenda-setting work, for which this journal importantly served as a venue, geographers A. Leszczynski (&) Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada e-mail: agnieszka.leszczynski@queensu.ca