Session Description: The Geoweb has revolutionized digital cartography and GIScience. The revolutionaries are neogeographers. According to Turner (2006), "Neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset". Toolsets involve user-generated geospatial content (aka volunteered geographic information): geotagged Flickr photographs, Google Maps Mashups, Open Street maps, and loopt. It's more than software or Internet apps, "The geoaware Web isn't a product we buy; it's an environment we colonize" (Udall 2005).
Neogeography is posited as antithetical to traditional geography. To neos, GIScience appears fixated on data accuracy, vetting and documentation. Critical GIS makes dire pronouncements for geospatial gadgetry. Neogeographers call for flexible and playful artistic engagement with place (a "dissident cartographic aesthetic", {Holmes 2006}). Birthed in wikipedia ideologies of egalitarianism and disdain for expertise, they believe in "radical openness" (Udall 2005). GIScience is seen as a closed (and, coincidentally, insufficiently computational) enterprise, relying on clubbiness and on proprietary software. With this characterization, can neo and paleo ever be reconciled?
Panelists come from both camps, and will consider four questions. 1. What is the landscape of neo and UGGC and what do they reveal about the Geoweb's deeper socio-political implications? 2. What can each camp offer the other and what barriers impede communication? 3. What role does expertise hold in colonizing the Geoweb? 4. If neo is the current thing then what is post-neo? Panelists will seek linkages among paleo, neo, and geo.
