Will Payne on Critical GIS at AAG

Will Payne on Critical GIS at AAG

Will Payne received a Spring 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover his costs attending the American Association of Geographers conference in Washington DC. Will presented "Crawling the City: Mobilizing Free Labor in the Spatial Data Economy." Read more about his experience in his own words below!

With my conference travel support from BCNM, I was able to attend the "Doing Critical GIS" (Geographic Information Systems/Science) workshop in Baltimore and the annual American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference in Washington, D.C. In Baltimore, I was part of a small group of scholars and activists working to democratize access to geospatial analysis and visualization tools and better understand and deploy them for community-engaged research and intervention.

At the AAG conference, I presented one single-authored paper ("Crawling the City: Mobilizing Free Labor in the Spatial Data Economy") and two co-authored papers, on the social impacts of bikesharing systems and novel forms of spatial data visualization that fall between relational network diagrams and strictly Cartesian maps. I also co-organized two session series, on "Political Economies of Geolocation" and "Messy Infrastructure, Digital Labor, and the Everyday City," and the morning networking session, business meeting, and keynote panel (centered on the topic of "Digital Geographies of Difference") of the Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG. I really appreciate the support from BCNM to take part in these vital conversations and share my research with a broader community of scholars and practitioners.