Books by Peta Mitchell
In this book we demonstrate how teaming geocritical analysis with digital visualisation technique... more In this book we demonstrate how teaming geocritical analysis with digital visualisation techniques to map spatial narratives can advance scholarship in the spatial humanities and further understanding of geopolitical history and cultural tropes. Imagined Landscapes is a book that will critically engage with the use of digital cartography to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. The dataset on which the book draws is a digital cultural heritage site developed by the authors called the Cultural Atlas of Australia. The Cultural Atlas is a database-driven interactive digital map that explores Australian places and spaces as they are represented in and through films, novels, and plays. It enables students, scholars, and travellers with an interest in Australian geography and culture to plot literary tours, visit film sites, and map and identify patterns of representation in country’s cultural landscape.
Contents:
Introduction: Geocriticism’s Disciplinary Boundaries
1. Remediating Space: Adaptation and Narrative Geography
2. Cultural Topography and Mythic Space: Australia’s North as Gothic Space
3. Spatial history: Mapping Narrative Perceptions of Place over Time
4. Mobility and Travel Narratives: Geovisualizing the Cultural Politics of Belonging to the Land
5. Terra Incognita: Mapping the Uncertain and the Unknown
Reviews:
"It will likely be the indispensable touchstone for any future work in these areas with respect to Australian cultural studies." —Robert T. Tally, Texas State University
"Definitely original in its approach, since it combines a conceptual approach with a more applied one. The book is a serious contribution to the field of mapping spatial narratives and to a better understanding of the production and spatial structure of fictional places." —Sébastien Caquard, Concordia University
The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the humanities, the medical sciences... more The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the humanities, the medical sciences, and the social sciences. It appears in such terms as ‘social contagion’ in psychology, ‘financial contagion’ in economics, ‘viral marketing’ in business, and even ‘cultural contagion’ in anthropology. In the twenty-first century, contagion, or ‘thought contagion’ has become a byword for creativity and a fundamental process by which knowledge and ideas are communicated and taken up, and resonates with André Siegfried’s observation that ‘there is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas’.
Contagious Metaphor offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor as contagion, Contagious Metaphor suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.
Contents:
Chapter 1: Contagious metaphor
Chapter 2: Pestilence and poison winds: Literary contagions and the endurance of miasma theory
Chapter 3: The French fin de siècle and the birth of social contagion theory
Chapter 4: The contagion of example
Chapter 5: Infectious ideas: Dawkins, meme theory, and the politics of metaphor
Chapter 6: Networks of contagion
Reviews:
"Peta Mitchell's highly readable Contagious Metaphor explores medical and popular beliefs and practices about contagion--and the metaphors that shape them. Reaching back through the nineteenth century and then ranging widely through more recent decades, she shows how ambivalence about figurative language and misunderstanding of metaphor itself has shaped our responses to epidemics both imaginedand experienced. From miasma to Dionysian frenzy to memes on the internet, Mitchell challenges our assumptions about both language and contagion, providing engaging and provocative analyses of examples from film, philosophy, linguistics and literature." -- Pamela K. Gilbert, Department of English, University of Florida, USA
"The history of medicine and metaphor come together in Contagious Metaphor; Peta Mitchell perceptively chronicles the circulation of the metaphor of contagion and the contagion of metaphor in the current moment to show how ideas travel through language to shape lived experience. Contagious Metaphor anatomizes the transmission of thought itself as it brings together astudy of the social phenomenon of a veritable obsession with the concept of contagion and a profound understanding of the role of language in creating notjust individual, but a broadly cultural consciousness. This study will enrich contemporary understanding of the longstanding appeal of contagion as a conceptand of the power of metaphor as they circulate through, and register a widespread attempt to make sense of, the networks of contemporary social life." -- Priscilla Wald, Department of English, Duke University, USA
"This is a captivating book: interdisciplinary scholarship at its best. Moving deftly between meme theory and modern literature, nineteenth-century French social science and fifth-century theological debates, Peta Mitchell's genealogy of contagion metaphor reveals the intimacy, and indeed interdependency, of these two concepts. The subtlety, sophistication and scholarly rigour of Contagious Metaphor all but guarantee the spread of its ideas." -- Angela Woods, Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK
Pockets of Change collects fourteen essays that address issues of cultural adaptation and transit... more Pockets of Change collects fourteen essays that address issues of cultural adaptation and transition in the Arts. Based on insights into a range of primary texts and cultural practices—from visual art to film, from literature to theatre—these essays investigate the ways in which traditions, art-forms, cultures and ethics adapt to challenge established boundaries.
The last fifty years have witnessed the growing pervasiveness of the figure of the map in critica... more The last fifty years have witnessed the growing pervasiveness of the figure of the map in critical, theoretical, and fictional discourse. References to mapping and cartography are endemic in poststructuralist theory, and, similarly, geographically and culturally diverse authors of twentieth-century fiction seem fixated upon mapping. While the map metaphor has been employed for centuries to highlight issues of textual representation and epistemology, the map metaphor itself has undergone a transformation in the postmodern era. This metamorphosis draws together poststructuralist conceptualizations of epistemology, textuality, cartography, and metaphor, and signals a shift away from modernist preoccupations with temporality and objectivity to a postmodern pragmatics of spatiality and subjectivity. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity charts this metamorphosis of cartographic metaphor, and argues that the ongoing reworking of the map metaphor renders it a formative and performative metaphor of postmodernity.
Contents:
Introduction: Text–Map–Metaphor
- Postmodern Metaphor
- Postmodern Text
- Postmodern Cartography
- Text–Map–Metaphor
1. A Genealogy of Cartography, a Genealogy of Space
- Genealogy–Archaeology and the Spatializing of History
- Maps of Modernity: Cartography as a Science
- Medieval Mapping
- Renaissance Mapping
- Enlightenment Mapping
- Imperial Mapping and the Postcolonial
- "Postmodern" Cartographies
2. Subjectivity: The Cartographer as Nomad
- Subjective Accounts: Enlightenment Theories of
Subjectivity and the Critique of Cartesianism
- Nomadic Subjectivity
- Nomadic Cartography/Nomadic Art
- Nomadic Fictions
- The Desert: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
- The Steppe: Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars
- The Sea: Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry
3. Mapping the Labyrinth: Twentieth-Century Cartography and the City
- Cognitive Mapping and the City
- Walter Benjamin and the Flâneur: 1920–1940
- The International Situationists: 1952–1972
- Cognitive Mapping: Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson
- The City and the Map in Later-Twentieth-Century Literature
- De Certeau and Spatial Stories
- Michel Butor's Passing Time
- Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
- Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
4. Metamorphoses of the Map
- Dionysus, Metaphor, and Metamorphosis
- Metamorphosis, The Metamorphosis, and the Question
of Metaphor
- The Metamorphic Map
Reviews:
"Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity is one of the most impressive pieces of scholarly work I have read in years. It is strikingly innovative—and that is no mean trick given that the topic has been much discussed recently. What makes this study so important—that is, such a major contribution to the field—is its remarkable combination of meticulous research, wide philosophical scope (from Descartes through to Baudrillard), theoretical sophistication (regarding theorists ranging from Benjamin to Foucault), and what I can only call brilliant close readings of literary texts. I should add that, to my knowledge, this is the first full and serious study of the postmodern cartographic imagination and it is certainly the first to set it in its rich historical and theoretical context." --Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
"Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity counts among the most telling treatments of cartography, metaphor, and space available in English. It is complete in itself, of a totality that it might prefer not to own but for which every one of its readers will be grateful. . . . it is a guide, indeed a viaticum, for the reading of space in contemporary theory and fiction." --Tom Conley, Professor of Romance Languages and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University
"This is an exciting book addressing the changing spatiality of literature in current times. An innovative account of the ‘spatial turn’ and its significance in contemporary cultural studies, using cartographic metaphor and practice to illuminate current theorisation. It develops a leading account of the blending of cartographic and literary imaginaries in postmodern culture, offering an exciting journey in which the social theory of representation is reframed by locating its spatial performativity. It will be an asset to readers in fields from literary studies, to cultural studies to geography." --Mike Crang, Reader in Geography, Durham University
Articles, papers, chapters by Peta Mitchell
Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, 2017
JASIST, 2020
Authors: Monique Mann, Peta Mitchell, Marcus Foth, and Irina Anastasiu
Abstract: This article exp... more Authors: Monique Mann, Peta Mitchell, Marcus Foth, and Irina Anastasiu
Abstract: This article explores technological sovereignty as a way to respond to anxieties of control in digital urban contexts, and argues that this may promise a more meaningful social licence to operate smart cities. First, we present an overview of smart city developments with a critical focus on corporatisation and platform urbanism. We critique Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto, which faces public backlash from the #BlockSidewalk campaign in response to concerns over not just privacy, but also lack of community consultation, the prospect of the city losing its civic ability to self-govern, and its repossession of public land and infrastructure. Second, we explore what a more responsible smart city could look like, underpinned by technological sovereignty, which is a way to use technologies to promote individual and collective autonomy and empowerment via ownership, control and self-governance of data and technologies. To this end, we juxtapose the Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto with the Barcelona Digital City plan. We illustrate the merits (and limits) of technological sovereignty moving towards a fairer and more equitable digital society.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020
Over the last fifty years, and across a broad spectrum of humanities and social sciences discipli... more Over the last fifty years, and across a broad spectrum of humanities and social sciences disciplines, there has been an ongoing and critical reassessment of the role played by space, place, and geography in the formation and unfolding of human knowledge, subjectivity, and social relations. Starting with the identification of a distinctive “spatial turn” within critical and social theory in the second half of the twentieth century, it has become a commonplace to recognise space as being political and as having a particular affective and effective power. A distinctive constellation of socio-technological changes at the start of the twentieth century brought the question of space to the critical foreground, and, by the end of the twentieth century, a loosely defined and interdisciplinary “spatial theory” had emerged, while a number of fields across the humanities and social sciences had avowedly undergone their own “spatial turns.” More recently, new critical approaches have emerged that foreground the geo- as both a starting point and method for critical analysis as well as new inter-disciplines—namely the geohumanities and spatial humanities—that provide a focus for the range of work being done at the interstices of geography and the humanities. With the rise to ubiquity of geospatial and geolocative technologies over the last 15 years—and their almost wholesale penetration into everyday life in the global North in the form of the GPS-enabled smartphone—the question of the geo– and its role in locating and mediating human experience, knowledge, and social relations has become ever more salient. In an era where the geo- becomes geo-location, and is increasingly defined by networked relations among humans, digital media, and their locational data traces, new approaches and schools of thought that transect geography, digital media, and critical and cultural theory have once more emerged, constituting what might be thought of as a new, digital spatial turn. Charting the trajectory of the geo- as a key site and mode of critique across and through these often overlapping “spatial turns”—across time, space, and disciplinary boundaries—is itself a work of geo-location.
Routledge Companion to Smart Cities
In this chapter, we discuss the role of cultural institutions in the co-creation of narrative con... more In this chapter, we discuss the role of cultural institutions in the co-creation of narrative constructs that help citizens shaping the future of cities, and how the smart city rhetoric informs and influences the co-creation of such narratives in institutions such as museums. We examine the specific case of 100% Brisbane, an interactive exhibition in the Museum of Brisbane, Australia, that facilitates audiences to imagine the future city by engaging with smart-like features. We present the notion of urban imaginaries as a useful narrative construct that facilitates, on the one hand, citizen future visions of the city with the potential of enriching governance and planning practices, and, on the other hand, the identification of some shortcomings associated to the conventional smart cities discourses. The discussion examines the exhibition’s link with big data analytics, as well as the opportunities and limitations for citizens to imagine and co-create a more diverse and plural city.
This report contains an analysis of the data gathered from a survey on geodata sharing awareness ... more This report contains an analysis of the data gathered from a survey on geodata sharing awareness and practices of 287 Australian smartphone users. The survey was conducted as part of the ‘Digital media, location awareness, and the politics of geodata’ project, funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects scheme (DP180100174). This project critically examines the increasingly pervasive role of location metadata (or geodata) in Australian smartphone practices and cultures. With near-ubiquitous levels of smartphone use in Australia, digital media have become integrated within everyday lives. These services, however, rely on access to an individual’s location, raising privacy and cybersecurity concerns over this sensitive datapoint.
The survey investigates the perceived impact that this technology has on Australian smartphone users and how they balance convenience and privacy in their everyday choices over granting apps access to their location. The primary aim of the survey was to gather findings that can ultimately help inform the development of online and open resources to enhance public understanding of geodata and geoprivacy. The survey findings also aim to contribute to industry and public policy recommendations that address the crucial issue of ‘location awareness’ in everyday digital media use.
in C. Borch (Ed.) Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society. London: Routledge (CRESC Culture, Economy and the Social series)., 2019
This chapter addresses the disconnect between emergent empirical and theoretical approaches to co... more This chapter addresses the disconnect between emergent empirical and theoretical approaches to contagion in/and the network with the aim of positing an approach to ‘big’ social data that brings computational methods for social media analysis into closer dialogue with social and digital contagion theory. It aims to suggest the ways in which a theoretically informed digital-methods approach may assist in understanding the networked, viral politics of the hashtag. The advent and growth of large-scale, online social networking has brought with it not only a near-ubiquitous rhetoric of virality, but also a new wave of social contagion research focused on mathematically modeling and visualizing the spread of ‘contagious behavior’ on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The hashtags may enable something akin to a microsociological/actor-network approach to understanding how publics form around these issues at the same time as they present themselves as a trackable and mappable artifact of mimetic activity.
In Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.) A Networked Self: Birth, Life, Death, 2019
Preprint available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112212/
Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta, & Münch... more Preprint available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112212/
Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta, & Münch, Felix (2019) Social media rituals: The uses of celebrity death in digital culture. In Papacharissi, Zizi (Ed.) A Networked Self: Birth, Life, Death. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, New York.
In 2016, the world mourned the loss of a number of famous people who had been of cultural significance across national and generational boundaries. Each of these deaths not only heralded intense affective and discursive activity on social media of the kind associated with public mourning, but they also enfolded ordinary users’ biographies into public expressions of memory, or provoked adjunctive conversations about other topics. To make sense of the patterns of mourning and memorialisation around these deaths, in this chapter we first establish a position on the uses of celebrity in popular culture. We revisit the literature on the cultural uses of celebrity, especially in everyday life. We trace the transformations of celebrity in digital culture, before focusing on celebrity deaths understood as media events, and proposing the idea of the social media ritual as a way to describe the communicative activity that surrounds these events. We focus particularly on the Twitter activity surrounding Bowie’s death, treating it as a paradigmatic example.
Preprint available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112212/
Social Media + Society, 2018
With the rise of geo-social media, location is emerging as a particularly sensitive data point fo... more With the rise of geo-social media, location is emerging as a particularly sensitive data point for big data and digital media research. To explore this area, we reflect on our ethics for a study in which we analyze data generated via an app that facilitates public sex among men who have sex with men. The ethical sensitivities around location are further heightened in the context of research into such digital sexual cultures. Public sexual cultures involving men who have sex with men operate both in spaces “meant” for public sex (e.g., gay saunas and dark rooms) and spaces “not meant” for public sex (e.g., shopping centers and public toilets). The app in question facilitates this activity. We developed a web scraper that carefully collected selected data from the app and that data were then analyzed to help identify ethical issues. We used a mixture of content analysis using Python scripts, geovisualisation software and manual qualitative coding techniques. Our findings, which are methodological rather than theoretical in nature, center on the ethics associated with generating, processing, presenting, archiving and deleting big data in a context where harassment, imprisonment, physical harm and even death occur. We find a tension in normal standards of ethical conduct where humans are involved in research. We found that location came to the fore as a key—though not the only—actor requiring attention when considering ethics in a big data context.
Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta, & Highfield, Tim (2018) Automating the digital everyday: An introd... more Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta, & Highfield, Tim (2018) Automating the digital everyday: An introduction. Media International Australia. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17739020
This Special Issue emerges out of a 2016 symposium – also entitled ‘Automating the Everyday’ – hosted by the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. The symposium sought to bring together a range of social science and humanities perspectives on the relationships among automation, digital media, and everyday life. Along the way, we aimed to get beyond the current hype and anxieties around self - driving cars, algorithms and robotics, and to achieve a more precise and grounded understanding of exactly what might be meant by automation, how and with what effects it is becoming entangled with everyday life, and how investigating these relationships also helps us understanding processes of media change in society more broadly...
Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, 2017
Mitchell, Peta & Highfield, Tim (2017) Mediated geographies of everyday life—navigating the ambie... more Mitchell, Peta & Highfield, Tim (2017) Mediated geographies of everyday life—navigating the ambient, augmented and algorithmic geographies of geomedia. Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, 7. http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/journal/?slug=mitchell-highfield-mediated-geographies-of-everyday-life
Over the past two decades, geospatial technologies have increasingly and profoundly influenced how everyday users conceive the space around them and how they navigate their ever-converging physical and virtual environments. These geospatial technologies have become both ubiquitous and mundane, and can be seen embodied in the GPS-enabled smartphone with its fully integrated location-based services. What we have witnessed, since around the year 2000, is, in effect, a digital spatial turn to rival if not eclipse the spatial turn identified by Fredric Jameson and Ed Soja in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This digital spatial turn is the result of the convergence or entwined emergence of a number of technologies or technological affordances. At its centre is the advent of ubiquitous locative media, locative devices, and location-based services, but also critical are the related development of the geospatial web in the mid-2000s. Going hand-in-hand with and underpinning this new spatial turn is an exponential growth of spatial information—information that users of digital media are increasingly producing or volunteering, whether actively (e.g., through geotagging social media content or participating in geographic-information based crowdsourcing) or passively or unconsciously (e.g., location information gathered via urban wireless sensor networks or public transport smartcards).
As both users and producers of this burgeoning geocultural or socio-spatial form of data, citizens are also, as never before, engaged in complex ways with the geospatial. The entangled relationships between everyday users of mobile, locative media, and these large, often live, geodata sets pose new questions such as how and why everyday users use and produce spatial information; how their engagement with geomedia and geodata might change their perceptions of the space around them; and, increasingly, how those perceptions are being shaped and determined by, through, and with digital media. In this paper, we provide an overview of the near pre-history of what we are referring to as the digital spatial turn before turning our focus to the increasingly ambient, augmented, and algorithmic nature of our engagement with geomedia.
Threaded through Derrida’s body of work is a rhetoric of contamination, one that is intimately bo... more Threaded through Derrida’s body of work is a rhetoric of contamination, one that is intimately bound to the question of metaphor—that is, to the question of language and communication in general. In his reading of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double in Writing and Difference (1967), Derrida notes that it is ‘metaphor that Artaud wants to destroy’. Metaphor, the manifestation of the schism between words and their referents, and an inescapable reminder of human alienation from the divine, is at the same time a force of contamination. Metaphor is a mark Derrida writes, quoting Artaud, of an ‘infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine’. The publication of Dissemination a few years later in 1972 saw Derrida concretising the links between contamination and metaphor. There is, as Derrida points out in Dissemination, a complex feedback loop between metaphor—the ultimate figure of figurality—and contamination: ‘metaphoricity is’, he says, ‘the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic’. In this paper, I map the development and evolution of Derrida’s rhetoric of contamination from his increasing deployment of epidemiological tropes (contagion, virology) from the late 1980s to his shift to immunological tropes in a number of his later works in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, I read Derrida’s ‘logic of autoimmunity’—a concept that has been considered emblematic of his ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ turn—as an extension of rather than a point of rupture from his rhetorical concerns, and one that is undergirded by the principle of contamination.
Selected Papers of Internet Research (AoIR 2016)
AI & Society
Authors: Sebastian Rehm, Marcus Foth, and Peta Mitchell
The mobile internet provides new and e... more Authors: Sebastian Rehm, Marcus Foth, and Peta Mitchell
The mobile internet provides new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action, and interact with their city. However, lack of information or motivation often prevents citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. In this paper, we present DoGood, a mobile app that aims at motivating citizens to join civic activities in their local community. Our study asks to what extent gamification can motivate users to participate in civic activities. The term civic activity is not yet well defined, so we collect activities citizens consider to be civic to work towards a broadly accepted definition of the term. The DoGood app uses gamified elements that we studied to gauge their role in encouraging citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. DoGood was implemented and deployed to citizens in a five-week-long user study. The app succeeded in motivating most of its users to do more civic activities, and its gamified elements were well received.
This report evaluates a pilot analysis of how social media was used during two significant region... more This report evaluates a pilot analysis of how social media was used during two significant regional cultural events: the large ‘Dark Mofo’ festival held at the Museum of Old and New Art (MoNA) in Hobart, Tasmania in June 2016, and the smaller Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival held in Winton, Queensland in June-July 2016. The study provides a snapshot of the scope for concentrated analysis of ‘big’ social media data to promote and support better understanding of how social media analytics can meet event organisers and other stakeholders’ targets for successful planning and execution of tourism events. While this study focuses primarily on Twitter, it also identifies trends across Facebook and Instagram, as enabled by the TriSMA infrastructure.
Using the TriSMA infrastructure for tracking social media that is hosted at the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, the evaluation draws out the significance of event organisers, media, and event participants in shaping meaning surrounding the event, and the significance of geo-tagging of posts to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to digital creative place making in the increasingly important regional cultural tourism economy.
Social and Cultural Geography
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Books by Peta Mitchell
Contents:
Introduction: Geocriticism’s Disciplinary Boundaries
1. Remediating Space: Adaptation and Narrative Geography
2. Cultural Topography and Mythic Space: Australia’s North as Gothic Space
3. Spatial history: Mapping Narrative Perceptions of Place over Time
4. Mobility and Travel Narratives: Geovisualizing the Cultural Politics of Belonging to the Land
5. Terra Incognita: Mapping the Uncertain and the Unknown
Reviews:
"It will likely be the indispensable touchstone for any future work in these areas with respect to Australian cultural studies." —Robert T. Tally, Texas State University
"Definitely original in its approach, since it combines a conceptual approach with a more applied one. The book is a serious contribution to the field of mapping spatial narratives and to a better understanding of the production and spatial structure of fictional places." —Sébastien Caquard, Concordia University
Contagious Metaphor offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor as contagion, Contagious Metaphor suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.
Contents:
Chapter 1: Contagious metaphor
Chapter 2: Pestilence and poison winds: Literary contagions and the endurance of miasma theory
Chapter 3: The French fin de siècle and the birth of social contagion theory
Chapter 4: The contagion of example
Chapter 5: Infectious ideas: Dawkins, meme theory, and the politics of metaphor
Chapter 6: Networks of contagion
Reviews:
"Peta Mitchell's highly readable Contagious Metaphor explores medical and popular beliefs and practices about contagion--and the metaphors that shape them. Reaching back through the nineteenth century and then ranging widely through more recent decades, she shows how ambivalence about figurative language and misunderstanding of metaphor itself has shaped our responses to epidemics both imaginedand experienced. From miasma to Dionysian frenzy to memes on the internet, Mitchell challenges our assumptions about both language and contagion, providing engaging and provocative analyses of examples from film, philosophy, linguistics and literature." -- Pamela K. Gilbert, Department of English, University of Florida, USA
"The history of medicine and metaphor come together in Contagious Metaphor; Peta Mitchell perceptively chronicles the circulation of the metaphor of contagion and the contagion of metaphor in the current moment to show how ideas travel through language to shape lived experience. Contagious Metaphor anatomizes the transmission of thought itself as it brings together astudy of the social phenomenon of a veritable obsession with the concept of contagion and a profound understanding of the role of language in creating notjust individual, but a broadly cultural consciousness. This study will enrich contemporary understanding of the longstanding appeal of contagion as a conceptand of the power of metaphor as they circulate through, and register a widespread attempt to make sense of, the networks of contemporary social life." -- Priscilla Wald, Department of English, Duke University, USA
"This is a captivating book: interdisciplinary scholarship at its best. Moving deftly between meme theory and modern literature, nineteenth-century French social science and fifth-century theological debates, Peta Mitchell's genealogy of contagion metaphor reveals the intimacy, and indeed interdependency, of these two concepts. The subtlety, sophistication and scholarly rigour of Contagious Metaphor all but guarantee the spread of its ideas." -- Angela Woods, Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK
Contents:
Introduction: Text–Map–Metaphor
- Postmodern Metaphor
- Postmodern Text
- Postmodern Cartography
- Text–Map–Metaphor
1. A Genealogy of Cartography, a Genealogy of Space
- Genealogy–Archaeology and the Spatializing of History
- Maps of Modernity: Cartography as a Science
- Medieval Mapping
- Renaissance Mapping
- Enlightenment Mapping
- Imperial Mapping and the Postcolonial
- "Postmodern" Cartographies
2. Subjectivity: The Cartographer as Nomad
- Subjective Accounts: Enlightenment Theories of
Subjectivity and the Critique of Cartesianism
- Nomadic Subjectivity
- Nomadic Cartography/Nomadic Art
- Nomadic Fictions
- The Desert: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
- The Steppe: Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars
- The Sea: Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry
3. Mapping the Labyrinth: Twentieth-Century Cartography and the City
- Cognitive Mapping and the City
- Walter Benjamin and the Flâneur: 1920–1940
- The International Situationists: 1952–1972
- Cognitive Mapping: Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson
- The City and the Map in Later-Twentieth-Century Literature
- De Certeau and Spatial Stories
- Michel Butor's Passing Time
- Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
- Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
4. Metamorphoses of the Map
- Dionysus, Metaphor, and Metamorphosis
- Metamorphosis, The Metamorphosis, and the Question
of Metaphor
- The Metamorphic Map
Reviews:
"Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity is one of the most impressive pieces of scholarly work I have read in years. It is strikingly innovative—and that is no mean trick given that the topic has been much discussed recently. What makes this study so important—that is, such a major contribution to the field—is its remarkable combination of meticulous research, wide philosophical scope (from Descartes through to Baudrillard), theoretical sophistication (regarding theorists ranging from Benjamin to Foucault), and what I can only call brilliant close readings of literary texts. I should add that, to my knowledge, this is the first full and serious study of the postmodern cartographic imagination and it is certainly the first to set it in its rich historical and theoretical context." --Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
"Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity counts among the most telling treatments of cartography, metaphor, and space available in English. It is complete in itself, of a totality that it might prefer not to own but for which every one of its readers will be grateful. . . . it is a guide, indeed a viaticum, for the reading of space in contemporary theory and fiction." --Tom Conley, Professor of Romance Languages and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University
"This is an exciting book addressing the changing spatiality of literature in current times. An innovative account of the ‘spatial turn’ and its significance in contemporary cultural studies, using cartographic metaphor and practice to illuminate current theorisation. It develops a leading account of the blending of cartographic and literary imaginaries in postmodern culture, offering an exciting journey in which the social theory of representation is reframed by locating its spatial performativity. It will be an asset to readers in fields from literary studies, to cultural studies to geography." --Mike Crang, Reader in Geography, Durham University
Articles, papers, chapters by Peta Mitchell
Abstract: This article explores technological sovereignty as a way to respond to anxieties of control in digital urban contexts, and argues that this may promise a more meaningful social licence to operate smart cities. First, we present an overview of smart city developments with a critical focus on corporatisation and platform urbanism. We critique Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto, which faces public backlash from the #BlockSidewalk campaign in response to concerns over not just privacy, but also lack of community consultation, the prospect of the city losing its civic ability to self-govern, and its repossession of public land and infrastructure. Second, we explore what a more responsible smart city could look like, underpinned by technological sovereignty, which is a way to use technologies to promote individual and collective autonomy and empowerment via ownership, control and self-governance of data and technologies. To this end, we juxtapose the Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto with the Barcelona Digital City plan. We illustrate the merits (and limits) of technological sovereignty moving towards a fairer and more equitable digital society.
The survey investigates the perceived impact that this technology has on Australian smartphone users and how they balance convenience and privacy in their everyday choices over granting apps access to their location. The primary aim of the survey was to gather findings that can ultimately help inform the development of online and open resources to enhance public understanding of geodata and geoprivacy. The survey findings also aim to contribute to industry and public policy recommendations that address the crucial issue of ‘location awareness’ in everyday digital media use.
Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta, & Münch, Felix (2019) Social media rituals: The uses of celebrity death in digital culture. In Papacharissi, Zizi (Ed.) A Networked Self: Birth, Life, Death. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, New York.
In 2016, the world mourned the loss of a number of famous people who had been of cultural significance across national and generational boundaries. Each of these deaths not only heralded intense affective and discursive activity on social media of the kind associated with public mourning, but they also enfolded ordinary users’ biographies into public expressions of memory, or provoked adjunctive conversations about other topics. To make sense of the patterns of mourning and memorialisation around these deaths, in this chapter we first establish a position on the uses of celebrity in popular culture. We revisit the literature on the cultural uses of celebrity, especially in everyday life. We trace the transformations of celebrity in digital culture, before focusing on celebrity deaths understood as media events, and proposing the idea of the social media ritual as a way to describe the communicative activity that surrounds these events. We focus particularly on the Twitter activity surrounding Bowie’s death, treating it as a paradigmatic example.
Preprint available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112212/
This Special Issue emerges out of a 2016 symposium – also entitled ‘Automating the Everyday’ – hosted by the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. The symposium sought to bring together a range of social science and humanities perspectives on the relationships among automation, digital media, and everyday life. Along the way, we aimed to get beyond the current hype and anxieties around self - driving cars, algorithms and robotics, and to achieve a more precise and grounded understanding of exactly what might be meant by automation, how and with what effects it is becoming entangled with everyday life, and how investigating these relationships also helps us understanding processes of media change in society more broadly...
Over the past two decades, geospatial technologies have increasingly and profoundly influenced how everyday users conceive the space around them and how they navigate their ever-converging physical and virtual environments. These geospatial technologies have become both ubiquitous and mundane, and can be seen embodied in the GPS-enabled smartphone with its fully integrated location-based services. What we have witnessed, since around the year 2000, is, in effect, a digital spatial turn to rival if not eclipse the spatial turn identified by Fredric Jameson and Ed Soja in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This digital spatial turn is the result of the convergence or entwined emergence of a number of technologies or technological affordances. At its centre is the advent of ubiquitous locative media, locative devices, and location-based services, but also critical are the related development of the geospatial web in the mid-2000s. Going hand-in-hand with and underpinning this new spatial turn is an exponential growth of spatial information—information that users of digital media are increasingly producing or volunteering, whether actively (e.g., through geotagging social media content or participating in geographic-information based crowdsourcing) or passively or unconsciously (e.g., location information gathered via urban wireless sensor networks or public transport smartcards).
As both users and producers of this burgeoning geocultural or socio-spatial form of data, citizens are also, as never before, engaged in complex ways with the geospatial. The entangled relationships between everyday users of mobile, locative media, and these large, often live, geodata sets pose new questions such as how and why everyday users use and produce spatial information; how their engagement with geomedia and geodata might change their perceptions of the space around them; and, increasingly, how those perceptions are being shaped and determined by, through, and with digital media. In this paper, we provide an overview of the near pre-history of what we are referring to as the digital spatial turn before turning our focus to the increasingly ambient, augmented, and algorithmic nature of our engagement with geomedia.
The mobile internet provides new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action, and interact with their city. However, lack of information or motivation often prevents citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. In this paper, we present DoGood, a mobile app that aims at motivating citizens to join civic activities in their local community. Our study asks to what extent gamification can motivate users to participate in civic activities. The term civic activity is not yet well defined, so we collect activities citizens consider to be civic to work towards a broadly accepted definition of the term. The DoGood app uses gamified elements that we studied to gauge their role in encouraging citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. DoGood was implemented and deployed to citizens in a five-week-long user study. The app succeeded in motivating most of its users to do more civic activities, and its gamified elements were well received.
Using the TriSMA infrastructure for tracking social media that is hosted at the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, the evaluation draws out the significance of event organisers, media, and event participants in shaping meaning surrounding the event, and the significance of geo-tagging of posts to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to digital creative place making in the increasingly important regional cultural tourism economy.
Contents:
Introduction: Geocriticism’s Disciplinary Boundaries
1. Remediating Space: Adaptation and Narrative Geography
2. Cultural Topography and Mythic Space: Australia’s North as Gothic Space
3. Spatial history: Mapping Narrative Perceptions of Place over Time
4. Mobility and Travel Narratives: Geovisualizing the Cultural Politics of Belonging to the Land
5. Terra Incognita: Mapping the Uncertain and the Unknown
Reviews:
"It will likely be the indispensable touchstone for any future work in these areas with respect to Australian cultural studies." —Robert T. Tally, Texas State University
"Definitely original in its approach, since it combines a conceptual approach with a more applied one. The book is a serious contribution to the field of mapping spatial narratives and to a better understanding of the production and spatial structure of fictional places." —Sébastien Caquard, Concordia University
Contagious Metaphor offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor as contagion, Contagious Metaphor suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.
Contents:
Chapter 1: Contagious metaphor
Chapter 2: Pestilence and poison winds: Literary contagions and the endurance of miasma theory
Chapter 3: The French fin de siècle and the birth of social contagion theory
Chapter 4: The contagion of example
Chapter 5: Infectious ideas: Dawkins, meme theory, and the politics of metaphor
Chapter 6: Networks of contagion
Reviews:
"Peta Mitchell's highly readable Contagious Metaphor explores medical and popular beliefs and practices about contagion--and the metaphors that shape them. Reaching back through the nineteenth century and then ranging widely through more recent decades, she shows how ambivalence about figurative language and misunderstanding of metaphor itself has shaped our responses to epidemics both imaginedand experienced. From miasma to Dionysian frenzy to memes on the internet, Mitchell challenges our assumptions about both language and contagion, providing engaging and provocative analyses of examples from film, philosophy, linguistics and literature." -- Pamela K. Gilbert, Department of English, University of Florida, USA
"The history of medicine and metaphor come together in Contagious Metaphor; Peta Mitchell perceptively chronicles the circulation of the metaphor of contagion and the contagion of metaphor in the current moment to show how ideas travel through language to shape lived experience. Contagious Metaphor anatomizes the transmission of thought itself as it brings together astudy of the social phenomenon of a veritable obsession with the concept of contagion and a profound understanding of the role of language in creating notjust individual, but a broadly cultural consciousness. This study will enrich contemporary understanding of the longstanding appeal of contagion as a conceptand of the power of metaphor as they circulate through, and register a widespread attempt to make sense of, the networks of contemporary social life." -- Priscilla Wald, Department of English, Duke University, USA
"This is a captivating book: interdisciplinary scholarship at its best. Moving deftly between meme theory and modern literature, nineteenth-century French social science and fifth-century theological debates, Peta Mitchell's genealogy of contagion metaphor reveals the intimacy, and indeed interdependency, of these two concepts. The subtlety, sophistication and scholarly rigour of Contagious Metaphor all but guarantee the spread of its ideas." -- Angela Woods, Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK
Contents:
Introduction: Text–Map–Metaphor
- Postmodern Metaphor
- Postmodern Text
- Postmodern Cartography
- Text–Map–Metaphor
1. A Genealogy of Cartography, a Genealogy of Space
- Genealogy–Archaeology and the Spatializing of History
- Maps of Modernity: Cartography as a Science
- Medieval Mapping
- Renaissance Mapping
- Enlightenment Mapping
- Imperial Mapping and the Postcolonial
- "Postmodern" Cartographies
2. Subjectivity: The Cartographer as Nomad
- Subjective Accounts: Enlightenment Theories of
Subjectivity and the Critique of Cartesianism
- Nomadic Subjectivity
- Nomadic Cartography/Nomadic Art
- Nomadic Fictions
- The Desert: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
- The Steppe: Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars
- The Sea: Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry
3. Mapping the Labyrinth: Twentieth-Century Cartography and the City
- Cognitive Mapping and the City
- Walter Benjamin and the Flâneur: 1920–1940
- The International Situationists: 1952–1972
- Cognitive Mapping: Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson
- The City and the Map in Later-Twentieth-Century Literature
- De Certeau and Spatial Stories
- Michel Butor's Passing Time
- Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
- Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
4. Metamorphoses of the Map
- Dionysus, Metaphor, and Metamorphosis
- Metamorphosis, The Metamorphosis, and the Question
of Metaphor
- The Metamorphic Map
Reviews:
"Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity is one of the most impressive pieces of scholarly work I have read in years. It is strikingly innovative—and that is no mean trick given that the topic has been much discussed recently. What makes this study so important—that is, such a major contribution to the field—is its remarkable combination of meticulous research, wide philosophical scope (from Descartes through to Baudrillard), theoretical sophistication (regarding theorists ranging from Benjamin to Foucault), and what I can only call brilliant close readings of literary texts. I should add that, to my knowledge, this is the first full and serious study of the postmodern cartographic imagination and it is certainly the first to set it in its rich historical and theoretical context." --Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
"Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity counts among the most telling treatments of cartography, metaphor, and space available in English. It is complete in itself, of a totality that it might prefer not to own but for which every one of its readers will be grateful. . . . it is a guide, indeed a viaticum, for the reading of space in contemporary theory and fiction." --Tom Conley, Professor of Romance Languages and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University
"This is an exciting book addressing the changing spatiality of literature in current times. An innovative account of the ‘spatial turn’ and its significance in contemporary cultural studies, using cartographic metaphor and practice to illuminate current theorisation. It develops a leading account of the blending of cartographic and literary imaginaries in postmodern culture, offering an exciting journey in which the social theory of representation is reframed by locating its spatial performativity. It will be an asset to readers in fields from literary studies, to cultural studies to geography." --Mike Crang, Reader in Geography, Durham University
Abstract: This article explores technological sovereignty as a way to respond to anxieties of control in digital urban contexts, and argues that this may promise a more meaningful social licence to operate smart cities. First, we present an overview of smart city developments with a critical focus on corporatisation and platform urbanism. We critique Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto, which faces public backlash from the #BlockSidewalk campaign in response to concerns over not just privacy, but also lack of community consultation, the prospect of the city losing its civic ability to self-govern, and its repossession of public land and infrastructure. Second, we explore what a more responsible smart city could look like, underpinned by technological sovereignty, which is a way to use technologies to promote individual and collective autonomy and empowerment via ownership, control and self-governance of data and technologies. To this end, we juxtapose the Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto with the Barcelona Digital City plan. We illustrate the merits (and limits) of technological sovereignty moving towards a fairer and more equitable digital society.
The survey investigates the perceived impact that this technology has on Australian smartphone users and how they balance convenience and privacy in their everyday choices over granting apps access to their location. The primary aim of the survey was to gather findings that can ultimately help inform the development of online and open resources to enhance public understanding of geodata and geoprivacy. The survey findings also aim to contribute to industry and public policy recommendations that address the crucial issue of ‘location awareness’ in everyday digital media use.
Burgess, Jean, Mitchell, Peta, & Münch, Felix (2019) Social media rituals: The uses of celebrity death in digital culture. In Papacharissi, Zizi (Ed.) A Networked Self: Birth, Life, Death. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, New York.
In 2016, the world mourned the loss of a number of famous people who had been of cultural significance across national and generational boundaries. Each of these deaths not only heralded intense affective and discursive activity on social media of the kind associated with public mourning, but they also enfolded ordinary users’ biographies into public expressions of memory, or provoked adjunctive conversations about other topics. To make sense of the patterns of mourning and memorialisation around these deaths, in this chapter we first establish a position on the uses of celebrity in popular culture. We revisit the literature on the cultural uses of celebrity, especially in everyday life. We trace the transformations of celebrity in digital culture, before focusing on celebrity deaths understood as media events, and proposing the idea of the social media ritual as a way to describe the communicative activity that surrounds these events. We focus particularly on the Twitter activity surrounding Bowie’s death, treating it as a paradigmatic example.
Preprint available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112212/
This Special Issue emerges out of a 2016 symposium – also entitled ‘Automating the Everyday’ – hosted by the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. The symposium sought to bring together a range of social science and humanities perspectives on the relationships among automation, digital media, and everyday life. Along the way, we aimed to get beyond the current hype and anxieties around self - driving cars, algorithms and robotics, and to achieve a more precise and grounded understanding of exactly what might be meant by automation, how and with what effects it is becoming entangled with everyday life, and how investigating these relationships also helps us understanding processes of media change in society more broadly...
Over the past two decades, geospatial technologies have increasingly and profoundly influenced how everyday users conceive the space around them and how they navigate their ever-converging physical and virtual environments. These geospatial technologies have become both ubiquitous and mundane, and can be seen embodied in the GPS-enabled smartphone with its fully integrated location-based services. What we have witnessed, since around the year 2000, is, in effect, a digital spatial turn to rival if not eclipse the spatial turn identified by Fredric Jameson and Ed Soja in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This digital spatial turn is the result of the convergence or entwined emergence of a number of technologies or technological affordances. At its centre is the advent of ubiquitous locative media, locative devices, and location-based services, but also critical are the related development of the geospatial web in the mid-2000s. Going hand-in-hand with and underpinning this new spatial turn is an exponential growth of spatial information—information that users of digital media are increasingly producing or volunteering, whether actively (e.g., through geotagging social media content or participating in geographic-information based crowdsourcing) or passively or unconsciously (e.g., location information gathered via urban wireless sensor networks or public transport smartcards).
As both users and producers of this burgeoning geocultural or socio-spatial form of data, citizens are also, as never before, engaged in complex ways with the geospatial. The entangled relationships between everyday users of mobile, locative media, and these large, often live, geodata sets pose new questions such as how and why everyday users use and produce spatial information; how their engagement with geomedia and geodata might change their perceptions of the space around them; and, increasingly, how those perceptions are being shaped and determined by, through, and with digital media. In this paper, we provide an overview of the near pre-history of what we are referring to as the digital spatial turn before turning our focus to the increasingly ambient, augmented, and algorithmic nature of our engagement with geomedia.
The mobile internet provides new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action, and interact with their city. However, lack of information or motivation often prevents citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. In this paper, we present DoGood, a mobile app that aims at motivating citizens to join civic activities in their local community. Our study asks to what extent gamification can motivate users to participate in civic activities. The term civic activity is not yet well defined, so we collect activities citizens consider to be civic to work towards a broadly accepted definition of the term. The DoGood app uses gamified elements that we studied to gauge their role in encouraging citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. DoGood was implemented and deployed to citizens in a five-week-long user study. The app succeeded in motivating most of its users to do more civic activities, and its gamified elements were well received.
Using the TriSMA infrastructure for tracking social media that is hosted at the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, the evaluation draws out the significance of event organisers, media, and event participants in shaping meaning surrounding the event, and the significance of geo-tagging of posts to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to digital creative place making in the increasingly important regional cultural tourism economy.
In this paper, we investigate the Colour Me Brisbane festival and the broader G20 Cultural Celebrations as a form of strategic placemaking—designed, on the one hand, to promote Brisbane as a safe, open, and accessible city in line with the City Council’s plan to position Brisbane as a ‘New World City’ (‘Brisbane Vision’). On the other hand, it was deployed to counteract growing local concerns and tensions over the disruptive and politicised nature of the G20 summit by engaging the public with the city prior to the heightened security and mobility restrictions of the summit weekend. Harnessing perspectives from media architecture (Brysnkov et al. 2013), urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender 2007), and social media analysis, we take a critical approach to analysing the government-sponsored projections, which literally projected the city onto itself, and public responses to them via the official, and heavily promoted, social media hashtags (#colourmebrisbane and #g20cultural). We argue that the Colour Me Brisbane festival can be understood as a carefully constructed form of urban phantasmagoria that attempts to call Brisbane into being as a ‘new world’ digital city.
We analyse the ways in which the Colour Me Brisbane festival employed imagery and light displays to project a phantasmagoric vision of the city’s past, present, and idealised future. Acknowledging that cities are more than amalgamations of physical features, this research employs qualitative methodologies to explore the social experiences of Colour Me Brisbane participants and makes of use of a hybrid dataset that incorporates social media (Twitter and Instagram) activity and ethnographic observations. Our critical framework extends the concepts of urban phantasmagoria and urban imaginaries into the emerging field of media architecture to scrutinise its potential for increased political and civic engagement. Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria (Cohen 1989, Duarte, Firmino, & Crestani 2014) provides an understanding of urban space as spectacular projection, implicated in commodity and techno-culture. The concept of urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender, 2007; Kelley, 2013)—that is, the ways in which citizens’ experiences of urban environments are transformed into symbolic representations through the use of imagination—similarly provides a useful framing device in thinking about the Colour Me Brisbane projections and their relation to the construction of social memory.
Employing these two critical frames enables us to examine the ways in which the urban projections open up the potential for multiple urban imaginaries—in the sense that they encourage civic engagement via a tangible and imaginative experience of urban space—while, at the same time, legitimating a particular vision and way of experiencing the city, promoting a commodified, sanctioned form of urban imaginary. This paper aims to dissect the urban imaginaries intrinsic to the Colour Me Brisbane projections and to examine how those imaginaries were strategically deployed as place-making schemes that choreograph reflections about and engagement with the city.
Ethical clearance for human research understandably focuses on risks to the human individual, and the anonymous and public nature of the data on the public sexual culture app analysed here poses few problems in terms of gaining institutional clearance. And yet in contexts such as this, we argue, the locations (which must be geolocatable for the purposes of the site) call for increased ethical attention.
Leszczynski, A. (2015). Spatial big data and anxieties of control. Environment and Planning D, 33(6), 965–984.
Resnyansky, Lucia Falzon
This paper outlines a set of techniques for modelling information contagion in social media, drawing on comprehensive data on the network structure of and communicative activities in the Australian Twittersphere as the basis for the development of contagion simulation approaches.
In doing so, we take into account two distinct aspects of information contagion on Twitter:
• the formation of ad hoc publics that transcend existing follower structures (Bruns & Burgess, 2015), around topical hashtags such as #auspol (for Australian politics) or #sydneysiege (for the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis);
• the existence of longer-term follower structures that determine the everyday flow of information between participating accounts, independent of hashtags.
The paper draws on a comprehensive dataset describing the follower network structure between the 2.8 million accounts in the entire Australian Twittersphere, first established in 2013 (Bruns et al., 2014) and updated again in 2016; and on the continuous tracking of public tweeting activity by these 2.8 million accounts through the TrISMA infrastructure (Bruns et al., 2016). We use these data to simulate the effects of a range of possible communication strategies on a network structure that accurately replicates the real-world Twitter follower network in Australia, with a focus especially on the area of crisis communication.
This enables a range of modelling experiments that address two central questions: 1) the impact that targetting accounts with certain characteristics during the early phases of the crisis communication process has on the overall dissemination of emergency messages; and 2) the impact that using Twitter-specific communicative features – e.g. a topical hashtag – has on the dissemination of emergency messages. We compare results from these simulations with datasets collected from Twitter around a number of critical events, including the Brisbane floods and the Sydney siege. Although both these events may be described as “crises”, they are qualitatively different: the first event impacted on a large geographical area and on a large number of people, either as an actual or a potential threat; the second was located at a single point, and directly impacted only on a small number of people, but was the focus of attention for many who were located at a significant distance from the actual event location.
The outcomes from this work provide both important new methodological impulses for the modelling of realistic information contagion processes in social media, and directly actionable insights into the specific processes of information contagion in crisis contexts within the Australian Twittersphere.
In this paper, I focus on a particular disruptive event: the G20 Leaders Summit, held in Brisbane, Australia, in November 2014. Geosocial media mapping has tended to focus on unplanned or unforeseen disruptive events, such as riots or natural disasters (see, for instance, Crampton et al., 2013, and Shelton et al., 2014). In the case of the G20, however, the temporal and spatial boundaries of potential disruption (e.g., disruption to citizen mobility in the "declared area" that covered the Brisbane CBD) were set well in advance, with risk mitigation strategies put in place to contain unsanctioned disruption (e.g., riots). Here, I look at what Brisbane-based, G20-related Twitter activity and its geovisualisation can tell us about perceptions of the city during this disruptive event and how and where social media debates over mobility, security, and surveillance played out.
Wake in Fright is also a rare and fascinating case study for Australian narrative cartography in that it exists in multiple adaptations: Cook’s novel was adapted as a cult classic (and only recently re-discovered) Australian New Wave film by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff in 1971, and in 2010, it was adapted as a stage play by Bob Pavlich. Moving beyond established traditions in adaptation studies, in this paper, I investigate the ways in which representations of place and space are adapted, translated, and reimagined across media forms, and whether geovisualisation can aid in analysing, understanding, and visualising these remediated geographies.
In this paper, we contextualise mobility in the Australian West in relation to the travels of Red Dog, a beloved 'Red Cloud' Kelpie-cross who was adopted by the mining community of Australia's Pilbara region in the early 1970s. Red Dog's peripatetic life has inspired a commemorative bronze statue, three books, and a highly successful Australian film whose production relied upon funding from the multinational mining giant Rio Tinto Group. We track Red Dog through the stories that map his movements, interpreting these narratives in terms of Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon's theories of mobility and identity. Drawing also on perspectives from cultural economic geography, we examine how economic power works its way through the production of cultural texts and we seek to understand the relationship between geographical knowledge and socioeconomic development. Representations of Red Dog's travels, we argue, reveal patterns of movement in and throughout Western Australia, highlighting the complex network of economic, geographical, and cultural factors that shape mobility in Australia's largest, richest, and least densely populated state.
In this paper, I examine the status of the meme as metaphor, and particularly the ways in which the meme increasingly began to be figured in terms of contagion—as thought contagion—rather than in terms of evolutionary biology. This, I argue, places the meme within a long tradition of troping human thought as a kind of virus or a form of contagion, and I will consider the meme as developing out of the 17th and 18th century concept of the “contagion of example.” Finally, I wish to suggest that, despite Stephen Jay Gould’s denigration of the meme as a “meaningless metaphor,” the meme’s reflexive potential means that it may offer itself as a singularly useful tool for considering the very workings of metaphor.
Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer (RAISE) Toolkit is a collaboration between the University of New South Wales City Futures Research Centre, New South Wales Land and Property Information, and Queensland University of Technology.
Launched April 2016 the focus of the research is the development of a toolkit for interactive, scenario-based exploration of land valuation and value uplift.
When completed, the toolkit will allow land valuers to more rapidly explore and test hypotheses connected with the likely causes of land valuation changes. For example, current and future land values are influenced by a property’s amenity. This includes its views and proximity to other features such as water, public transport, health and educational facilities. These factors are inherently geospatial and as such can be quantified and included in the land valuation models to be developed in this project.
Developing this toolkit requires innovation in three key areas:
1. New spatial visualisation techniques capable of supporting rapid feedback, collaborative exploration and hypothesis formulation. This will be initially tested on different land valuation models
2. New capabilities for linking diverse geospatial and crowdsourced data sets
3. A new open and cloud-based architecture for drawing together data, models, and visualisation in an efficient platform that is intuitive and easy to use by actors in a group based decision-making environment. The approach will be validated through a case study approach, which will incorporate a suite of hedonic pricing models ranging from automated land valuation models through to more complex land value uplift models.