Name
Canadian Geographies Lecture: Dreaming Digital Landscapes
Date & Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Description

Waldo Tobler ends his 1976 article 'Analytical Cartography' by musing about the possibility of a graphic solution to the puzzle of finding the nearest gas station while on the go. He imagines a pocket calculator programed with a minimal path algorithm that stores the entire street system and the location of gas stations that accept credit cards. Fifty years later the pocket calculator of Tobler's dreams is so commonplace that it would be difficult for some of us navigate, or even imagine, the landscape without it. 

So where might our dreams take us next? 

In this talk I think with a confluence of landscape and digital geographies to better understand our current digital lives, and from there imagine what our digital methods and methodologies could do and be like to meet the moment. My starting point is that we have moved from using our pocket calculators to address graphic puzzles to political ones, so we need tools and methods developed through more than just math. Drawing on collaborative digital research ranging from data visualization experiments, to youth mapping projects, visiting with waterfalls to listening to parklands in augments ways, I dream of digital practices that augment rather than automate, enriching our abilities to know and relate to lands though talk, interpretation, dissensus, movement and exchange. 

Location Name
Minto Hall 2000
Session Type
Plenary Session
Speaker Name
Sheryl-Ann Simpson
Speaker Organization
Carleton University
Session Name
Canadian Geographies Lecture