human geography and information studies

CHAPTER 15

Human Geography and Information Studies

Greg Downey University of Wisconsin-Madison

Introduction: The Foundations of LIS in an Environment of Change

At the small but well-respected library and information studies (LIS) program where I work as an assistant professor, I recently confronted an interesting contradiction in my doctoral education duties. I was slated to teach a required doctoral seminar on the “foundations of library and information studies,” which, as a philosophical and historical survey taught well by many senior faculty before me, should have involved rel- atively little work to prepare and present (always an attraction when one is on the tenure track). Yet as a young faculty member hired as much for my professional experience in “new media” as for my academic train- ing in historical scholarship, I knew that both my peers and my students expected me to teach “foundations” from an innovative, if not radical, new angle. And the timing of my turn at this task was fraught with tension-a quick review of the LIS literature through the 1990s revealed a clear sense among both practitioners and academics that in the post- Reagan (neoliberal governance), post-Cold War (economic globalization), post-World Wide Web (internetworked communication), and, now, post- 9/11 (security-conscious) world, all of the rules of the game had changed, both for librarianship as a profession and information studies as a domain of research. Where was I to look in the large and diverse literature of LIS for some way through these changes?

My first assessment was that certain strands of the “ I S side of LIS seemed to be doing the most creative work in analyzing and theorizing these changes, especially as they connected to social practice. Indeed, thanks to interdisciplinary scholars such as the late Rob Kling (see for example Kling, 19961, a whole new field of “social informatics” had grown in the short moment between the rudimentary information appliances and proprietary online networks of the 1980s and the explosion of information infrastructure and open standards of the 1990s (Sawyer & Eschenfelder, 2002). It was the “L” side of LIS, however, that seemed to

683

684 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology

be wrestling with the contradiction between foundations and change most urgently-where, in accord with the four (‘posts-” enumerated earlier, abstract proposals for government budget cuts, privatized technological services, equitable Internet access, and restrictions on information freedom became concrete problems. The oft-cited Benton Foundation (1997) report Buildings, Books, and Bytes, juxtaposing the views of library professionals with those of library publics, warned that (‘Americans continue to have a love affair with their libraries, but they have difficulty figuring out where libraries fit in the new digital world” (p. 184). Academics such as Molz and Dain (1999, pp. 2, 184) replied that, contrary to fears of the “disintermediation” of librarians in the relationship between information seekers and information sources, libraries would retain their place as “agencies offering to the public the means of acquiring information, knowledge, education, aesthetic experience, and entertainment.” And although, as Buschman (2003, pp. 3, 7) has suggested, “we have been declaring crises in the field [of librarianship] for more than thirty years,” even he recently argued that in order to secure both funding and legitimacy from states and publics, libraries need to reformulate “a meaningful, consistent, and sustainable intellectual basis’’ for their existence. The solution to the perils of change was, in each of these cases, a reassertion of foundations-that information remained a valuable public good and that funding the collective organization of, and access to, that information remained a legitimate public expenditure.

But simply reasserting these foundational LIS claims at this historical moment of rapid change was not a satisfying solution to my seminar dilemma. Repeated claims of the almost ahistorical importance of the “things” of LIS study-from individual information artifacts and information workers to larger-scale informatiodcommunication technologies (ICTs), such as networks, and informatiodcommunication agencies (ICAs), such as libraries-suggested that something might be missing from these foundations. Consider, for a moment, that each of the “posts” involved shifts not only in the meaning of such things, but also in the space and time relations in which they are situated: In the post-Reagan era, the locus of state funding for information agencies has shifted away from long-term policies of national governments to crisis funding by local communities; in the post-Cold War economy, the circulation of economic information through transnational corporations now penetrates every corner of the globe in real time; post-Web, the old models of physical publishing and mass broadcasting have been augmented by virtual online networking; and post-9/11, the risks to human capital and human life from crime, corruption, and terror are managed more and more through increased surveillance and control over the flows of global communication. Could part of our contradictory moment be that the foundations of LIS simply do not provide us with all the tools to conceptualize such rapid change in the spatial and temporal aspects of information production, organization, distribution, and consumption? Where might

Human Geography and information Studies 685

LIS researchers and professionals find the tools to shift their focus away from “things” in abstract isolation toward “processes” and “relations” unfolding across space and time?

For me, the answer to the contradiction of teaching a foundations seminar in a time of endemic change was to introduce my students to the relevance of human geography in library and information research. After all, ICTs and ICAs are, by definition, sets of tools and systems, practices and organizations that allow informational objects (like ideas) to transcend the time and space of human activity. And human geography is, by definition, the study of the interlinked temporality and spatiality of human activity:

Geographical knowledge records, analyzes and stores information about the spatial distribution and organization of those conditions (both naturally occurring and humanly created) that provide the material basis for the reproduction of social life. At the same time it promotes conscious aware- ness of how such conditions are subject to continuous transformation through human action. (Harvey, 1984, p. 1)

A newcomer to both fields might assume it would be easy to find direct connections between LIS and human geography in the literature of each discipline. However, even though the LIS literature is suffused with arguments for treating libraries as “places” and considering information in “networks,” such appeals are often made without any but the most superficial connection to the human geography literature (for example, Martell, 1999). And for its part, although human geography has been quick to acknowledge the importance of ICTs and ICAs to the new landscape of globalized social action being constructed in the 21st century, it has not engaged very deeply with the long history of conceptual and theoretical work in LIS. As Brown and O’Hara (2003, p. 1566) recently argued in the geography journal Environment and Planning A,

technology in geography has been a topic which has been explored ... mainly in terms of politics, social theory, and mea- surable changes to geographic organization. What has been much less researched is how technology impacts on the way individuals manage places and their activities in space.

This disconnect between LIS and geography is all the more surprising because, over the last few decades, certain strands within geography-especially qualitative research in human geography-have increasingly intersected with other academic areas of research. Some have termed this the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities, a shift in direction bringing with it both familiar interpretive methods, such as ethnographic interviewing and theory-building, and new


analytical concepts, such as ”place,” “space,” and “scale,” on par with the so-called “linguistic turn” that reinforced methods of textual analysis and introduced the concepts of “metaphor,” “text,” and “audience” to social science and humanities scholars decades before (Day, 2005; Pickles, 1999; Rorty, 1967; Winchester, 2000). Of course, such connections also meant that human geography was caught up in the same debate over postmodernity (as a social condition) and postmodernism (as an academic and political response to that social condition) as the rest of the humanities and the social sciences-an encounter which is still play- ing out today (Dear & Flusty, 2002; Harvey, 1989). Crucially important to the spatial turn, however, was that it incorporated not only ideas about space, but notions of time as well-thus allowing geographers to engage both with historians in talking about spatial change over time and with sociologists in talking about temporal changes with regard to place (Hornbeck, Earle, & Rodrigue, 1996). Yet dialogue with those who study the technologies and practices of overcoming space and time- especially ICTs-has been minimal.

In this chapter, I will introduce the discipline of human geography as a way of asking questions, conceptualizing answers, and seeing “things” such as information objects and information actors, information technologies, and information agencies both relationally and dialectically- that is, as operating in, on, and through material, social, and virtual landscapes. I argue that, especially a t this historical moment, such ways of seeing can be productive for scholars in LIS-above all, those scholars who focus on human interactions with information in all its technological and social forms. Three powerful connections between LIS and human geography-the geography of the Internet (Zook, 2006), the exploration of “virtual community” (Ellis, Oldridge, & Vasconcelos, 20041, and the question of “information and equity” (Lievrouw & Farb, 2003khave already been explored by recent M I S T writers; I will not duplicate their work here. Instead, in the first part of this chapter, I consider the discipline of human geography in terms of “what it produces,” for, as geographer Erica Schoenberger (2001, p. 371) has pointed out, “Disciplines do not merely name a particular combination of object and method. They generate abstractions-such as ‘economy’ or ‘society’ or ‘nature’-that become the focus of our work and they define appropriate ways of studying these entities.” In other words, they produce “episte- mological and ontological commitments” (p. 371). The most basic abstractions that human geography has generated, such as place, space, and scale, must be understood through particular commitments within human geography to studying processes rather than things-meaning that human geography attempts to move beyond reductionist conceptions and explanations and instead embrace messier but more productive relational, dialectical, and critical representations of change (Harvey, 1996, pp. 49-56). Given this disciplinary groundwork, in the second part of the chapter, I consider two key terrains where geographers have attempted to engage ICTs and ICAs relationally, dialectically, and critically: (1) the

Human Geography and Information Studies 687

production of meaningful virtual geographies for social action as a result of material investment (and disinvestment) choices in wired and wire- less infrastructure and (2) the reimagining of the importance of material sites of knowledge production, consumption, and labor (especially in urban areas) and the connections between these physical places and the virtual spaces swirling around them. Because this work in geography has been focused heavily on “e-commerce” topics, in the last part of the chapter I return to the question of the “place” of the library (and of LIS) in the new hybrid geography and suggest some ways that researchers in both fields might engage with each other’s work. My readings and representations of both geography and LIS in this chapter are inevitably partial. I hope the intersection of these two fields that I describe will provide a useful starting point for researchers on both sides wishing to travel into new territory.

Defining the Discipline of Human Geography On the surface, human geography and LIS already share many char-

acteristics. Each discipline appreciates both idiographic (descriptive) and nomothetic (explanatory) forms of research; each discipline demands both the novel pursuit of basic research and the regular production of professional knowledge (often with a different set of journals for each); each discipline has its opposing wings of administrative versus critical theory (each pointing out the normative and political-economic grounding of the other); and each discipline embraces both positivist quantitative methods and interpretive qualitative methods (with only a few practitioners able to integrate the two effectively) (Kitchin & Tate, 2000). For example, within LIS, Benoit (2002, p. 452) has warned of “an uncritical emphasis on philosophies of science [i.e., logical positivism] employed in LIS [that] favor data and diminish the role of the individual’s interest” and argued that LIS should also embrace “the philosophies of interpretation, as articulated in communicative, pragmatic, and hermeneutic thought.” Similarly, human geographers have heard Sheppard (2001, p. 536) explain how “progressive human geography can take advantage of quantitative practices,” especially when these practices are disentangled from the assumptions of neoclassical economic theory.

Another point of connection is that for both fields, over the last few decades, the social worlds they analyze have been radically transformed by both technological innovation and political-economic restructuring. Recent “postmodern” innovations in geography especially have been driven by the need to find new concepts, theories, and methods for repre- senting and understanding a world in which “postindustrial” computer-based ICTs and ICAs have enabled new possibilities for economic expansion, geopolitical tension, and knowledge production. Within LIS, journals such as The Information Society have arisen to address explicitly these new realities, which are often centered around a


threefold definition of globalization, such as that offered by Stolfi and Sussman (2001, pp. 51-53): (1) a neoliberal ideological shift in the course of which “the dominant discourse on collectively held values shifted from an emphasis on equity (e.g., participatory values, affirmative action, welfare) to efficiency (e.g., raising productivity, increasing competition, deregulation)”; (2) digital convergence, which “accelerated throughout the Cold War era with the generous support of government-sponsored technological R&D”; and (3) the rise of transnational corporations, “actors which were positioned to derive the greatest advantage from a global information and communications infrastructure.” At least two out of these three characteristics of globalization are well-worn territory for human geography.

The two fields also share similar problems. Both human geography and LIS have been accused of “borrowing” methods and theories from other disciplines rather than growing their own, resulting in regular and public identity crises for each field. LIS scholars have heard Wiegand’s (1999, p. 24) warning that LIS is “a profession trapped in its own dis- cursive formations, where members speak mostly to each other and where connections between power and knowledge that affect issues of race, class, age, and gender, among others, are either invisible or ignored.” In a similar vein, Andrew P. Carlin (2003, p. 3) recently argued that, historically, LIS has “imported” research techniques and standards of evidence from other disciplines and it might thus be time for LIS to develop its own interdisciplinary research ethics. These sentiments echo Schoenberger’s (1998, p. 1) call to human geographers for “analyzing ourselves as social and historical actors and assessing the way we work and the way we use language in order to strengthen our research and improve the standing of the discipline.”

Of course, comparing the units of analysis in the two fields provides the greatest contrast. LIS research focuses on the concept of information, techniques and technologies for manipulating information, and human organizations for managing it; human geography focuses on the concepts of place, space, and scale (each one wrapped up with “time” as well). The most basic way of dealing with these concepts in geography has been the rather reductionist investigation into “areal differentiation”-how, why, and when patterns of difference in natural, built, and social environments emerge across places, spaces, and scales-such as the international comparative studies of “natural resources” for which geography was known in the 19th century (the question “resources for whom?” was rarely asked). Human geography, however, rooted as it is in the complexities of human societies, must by definition move beyond such reductionist inquiry into more relational, dialectical, and critical investigations. Let us consider each one of these in turn.

Reductionism within geography-especially the tendency to see place, space, and scale simply as containers for human activity-reached its pinnacle during the “positivist turn” in the field starting in 1960, which assumed (incorrectly) that “human activity does not restructure


space, it simply rearranges objects in space” (Smith, 1990, p. xi). In contrast to this reductionist stance, human geography must study not only the areal differentiation of human practices and human productions across the map, but also the material relationships between these different practices and productions on one hand and the normative meanings of these practices and productions on the other.

Relational concepts and theories are necessary to human geography because humans are not reductionist monads but relational creatures who communicate with each other, organize themselves into groups, and imagine meaningful identities based on both individual and group contexts. Smith (1990, p. 66) provided a useful way of thinking about relational geographies when he defined “geographical space” in particular as “the space of human activity, from architectural space at a lower scale up to the scale of the entire surface of the earth” and argued that such a conception of space must simultaneously embrace both the “absolute” space of Cartesian, geometric landscapes (where, for example, a kilometer is always a kilometer) and the “relative” space of social landscapes (where, for example, both technology and context alter the meaning of a kilometer as either a small or large distance).

Dialectical concepts and theories allow geographers to deal with the often confounding ability of humans not only to act as active agents of change over the environment, but also to be enabled and constrained in those very actions by environmental factors-including environmental factors of their own earlier creation. A common strategy in historical human geography is to trace the ways in which humans in a particular time and place are able to (and choose whether to) produce new environments, reproduce those environments, and finally destroy them. In an industrial, capitalist political economy, such a process might be called “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1942). The best examples of this through the 20th century have been urban built environments, which, according to Sheppard (2004, p. 474) were “shaped to meet the requirements of capital accumulation, only later to become a barrier once technological change alters those requirements.” Thus, we might think of cities as the prime example of how the material aspects of place, space, and scale are “socially produced again and again over time.

The dialectic of change in human geography does not apply only to material landscapes, however, precisely because humans are not automatons but conscious creatures who create and experience meaning as they create and experience places and spaces. For example, Schoenberger (1997, p. 6) illustrated in The Cultural Crisis of the Firm that, during the beginnings of globalization in the automobile and technology industries, when the spatial and temporal geographies of competition were changing rapidly, “corporate cultures and managerial identities and commitments exerted a powerful force that structured the possibilities for change in ways that proved unavailing given the actual circumstances in which firms found themselves.” Thus, spatial and temporal relations and environments are not only “socially produced”


through labor and technology, but also “socially constructed” through communication about shared understandings and contested claims. These meanings and claims then scale up into what we might call culture. Thus, another meaning of “geographical space” might be “short- hand for the socially constructed spaces produced on the earth’s suFface” (Aoyama & Sheppard, 2003, p. 1151).

Finally, human geography tends to adopt a critical stance-its advo- cates tend to question power relations, are suspicious of utopian claims, and do not fear to engage in rational, normative arguments-precisely because such social productions and social constructions, rarely uncon- tested as they come into being, have important consequences for all of society. Much as LIS research tends to embody a normative agenda, “to bring together information in all its cultural forms and the people who need or want it, thereby contributing to individual and collective knowledge, productivity, and well-being“ (to quote from the mission statement of my own particular LIS program), geographers tend to strive for a world of “territorial social justice” (Harvey, 1973, p. ll7)-although they may differ markedly in their claims of what that means. Either way, a critical research stance does not mean that the knowledge one produces is “biased” or “flawed.” As Harvey (1984, p. 11) has argued,

Geographers cannot remain neutral. But they can strive toward scientific rigor, integrity and honesty. The difference between the two commitments must be understood. There are many different windows from which to view the same world, but scientific integrity demands that we faithfully record and analyze what we see from any one of them.

Thus, human geography works with the same concepts of space, place, and scale as other flavors of geographic inquiry and is one of the few pursuits forced to recognize that all three are, paradoxically, both universal (as realities experienced by all human cultures regardless of technology or practice) and contingent (as “concrete abstractions” given form and meaning depending on particular human cultures and particular technological practices). Human geography theorizes that place, space, and scale are not only socially produced out of particular political economies and divisions of labor, but socially constructed out of particular cultural milieux and leaps of imagination. As a result, instead of thinking in terms of things set upon the landscape in a reductionist sense, human geographers tend to think about more relational and dialectical processes that constantly challenge current notions of place, space, and scale.

Contested Tools of Geographical Inquiry All concepts and theories aside, one of the things most commonly

thought to distinguish geography as a discipline-correctly or incorrectly-


has been the production and consumption of a specific form of knowledge-bearing artifact: the map. Many human geographers claim that they can function perfectly well without creating maps (let alone com- puterizing them), but fluency in the language of maps is something of a prerequisite both to participating in the debates of the field and in pop- ularizing the knowledge accumulated by the field. And as not only an informational commodity, but increasingly a technological commodity- with the recent rise of geographic information systems (GIS) on personal computers, analytical maps and the spatial data behind them are often seen as the most direct and natural link between geography and LIS.

The question over GIS within LIS research and practice is often painted in terms of professional survival rather than academic inquiry (Smith & Gluck, 1996). Special and academic librarians increasingly need to be able to understand, if not use, GIS software in order to help patrons with reference and research questions relating to geocoded government data-especially census data (Abbott & Argentati, 1995). Public librarians, too, are increasingly fielding spatial questions from individual users (Gluck, Danley, & Lahmon, 1996; Lim, Liu, Yin, Goh, Theng, & Ng, 2005) as community action groups become more familiar with these tools, both for making claims about neighborhood development options and for recruiting new stakeholders (Craig & Ellwood, 1998). They are also discovering the potential of GIS as tools for internal tracking of patron locations and branch statistics, for formulating arguments and preparing presentations against further reductions in library budgets (Adkins & Sturges, 2004), and for reaching out to under- served and oppressed populations (Jue, Koontz, Magpantay, Lance, & Seidl, 1999). Some centers of LIS instruction, especially Florida State University, are assisting in this process by constructing Web-accessible “front e n d systems to deliver spatial maps and data on U.S. libraries to those without a GIS themselves (Koontz, Jue, McClure, & Bertot, 2004). Digital library projects must increasingly deal with digital spatial data (Boxall, 2003), helping to define evolving standards of both metadata and security in concert with the federal government (Zellmer, 2004). Human-computer interface researchers have contributed to our knowledge of the various ways in which GIS users interact with spatial data presentations-even using tactile interfaces (Jeong & Gluck, 2003). And information professionals of all sorts working on digital knowledge management are increasingly attempting to “spatialize” everything from Web-page searches (Watters & Amoudi, 2003) to shelf-browsing behav- iors (Xia, 2004) using GIS tools.

LIS, however, has a deeper contribution to make here. The long tradition within LIS of understanding how power is embedded in the production, distribution, and consumption of both knowledge-bearing artifacts (e.g., books) and the very methods of identifying and organizing those artifacts (catalogs, indexes, citations, and the like) can help GIS users avoid one of the most common misconceptions about maps and mapmaking: “the premise that mappers engage in an unquestionably


‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ form of knowledge creation” (Harley, 1989, p. 423). Once again drawing together the “linguistic turn” with the “spatial turn,” the late geographer J. B. Harley (1989, p. 3) was one of the most vocal proponents for “deconstructing” cartographic artifacts:

Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the map--‘in the margins of the text’-and through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image. We begin to learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific cultural perspective.

Harley (1989, p. 11) understood that maps, like both individual texts and channels of mass media, were, in the end, tools of strategic communication:

All maps strive to frame their message in the context of an audience. All maps state an argument about the world and they are propositional in nature. All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority (especially in ‘scientific maps’) and appeals to a potential readership through the use of colors, decoration, typography, dedications, or written justifications of their method.

Thus, in his view, “the steps in making a map-selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and ‘symboliza- tion’-are all inherently rhetorical” (p. 11). Just as the philosopher Langdon Winner (1986) famously argued that “artifacts can have political qualities,’’ so did Harley hold that maps have politics: Power is exerted both on cartography (by governments, corporations, advertisers, and activists) and with cartography (through the production of state, corporate, marketing, or activist maps supporting one argument over another).

Nowhere is such an understanding of maps both as tools forged out of social relations and as tools used to influence social relations more crucial than in considering the maps we produce using new information technologies. For example, when digital GIS first moved from the expensive workstation to the individual desktop personal computer in the early 199Os, a crisis quickly emerged within geography. In one camp were boosters like Openshaw (1991, p. 622) who praised GIS as finally providing a common toolset to all of geography, even if that meant excluding the “soft and the so-called intensive and squelchy-soft qualitative research paradigms [that] could fade into insignificance if they cannot be adequately linked into the new data and computer age that is all around US.” LIS researchers will recognize Openshaw’s argument as both technologically determinist and technologically triumphalist. Unfortunately this argument ignores a stubborn reality that the


“squelchy-soft” qualitative geographers would likely be quick to point out: data is not “found” waiting in rich veins to be tapped by heroic geographers at their GIS stations but is instead created-tediously produced through human labor, technological sensing, and patron funding-and therefore subject to the same questions of political-economic power as any other form of produced knowledge.

The diverse field of geography spent the next decade coming to terms with GIs, a process that would make a fascinating historical case study. One of the most useful contributions came from the human geographer Eric Sheppard (1995, p. 5) who argued that “an understanding of both the social nature and implications of GIS as a technology and the technical characteristics and possibilities of GIS are necessary for successful research to take place.” Sheppard’s view of GIS was, like that of many LIS social informatics researchers, a dialectical one: “Society affects the development of GIS at the same time that GIS affects the development of society” (p. 5). For example, he pointed out five main factors that influenced the trajectory of GIS development in the US.: (1) “the prior- ities of U.S. society, such as demands for military surveillance, given both its internal structure and its position within the global system”; (2) “the degree to which the private sector has dominated the development of G I s ; (3) “the types of problems that principal potential customers for GIS wish to solve and the price they are prepared to pay”; (4) “factors affecting data availability and cost”; and (5) “the weakness of geography as an intellectual discipline in the United States, which affects the degree to which geographic expertise is utilized to evaluate the development and application of GIS” (p. 8). This particular history meant that GIS privileged reductionist views of individuals, places, and regions in the landscape over relational views of the flows, processes, and connections in which they might be embedded. Sheppard (p. 11) offered a recent and relevant political-economic example to illustrate this point:

the major theoretical split in theories of spatial economic development is arguably between those who believe that it is the attributes of places which determine their evolution (such as in modernization theory, rigid historical materialism, and neo-liberal economic policy), and those who believe that differences in situation create asymmetrical dependencies between places that lead to very different development opportunities (as in dependency theory and world systems theory).

Yet “data describing flows are much more expensive to collect and store than attribute data because they increase geometrically rather than arithmetically” (p. 11) and, furthermore, the GIS may itself be constructed to privilege one source of data over another.

Another example (of which all LIS professionals should be aware) can be found in the currently widespread practice of “geodemographic analysis”-i.e., using a GIS to combine publicly available geographic and


demographic data, especially from the U.S. Census and U.S. Postal Service, with privately produced marketing profiles and purchase histo- ries-in the service of ever more targeted marketing schemes. Goss (1995, p. 172) has pointed out that geodemographics is based on “reductionist models of consumer identity” (you are what you buy) and “the inference of unobserved behavior from residential location” (you are where you live). Thus this “science” falls prey to the “ecological fallacy”: “the erroneous assumption that patterns or relationships between data observed at an aggregate level of analysis also apply to data at the level of the individual (or to any lower level of aggregation)” (p. 181). Yet, at the same time, the practice “works” in that it seems to sell not only products to consumers, but also consulting services and GIS systems to marketers. Thus, in this case, GIS is wrapped up in a dialectical (and somewhat self- fulfilling) practice of producinglconstructing ideal geographies of consumers, deepening the market for capitalism as a whole by fragmenting it into precise-and presumably less risky-spatial segments: “The mar- keter purchases detailed psychodemographic data about consumer identity in digital form and sells these identities back to consumers in material form as consumer goods and services’’ (p. 1911, but “the goal of marketing, of course, is to preemptively determine the meanings that consumers would make for themselves from commodities in order to sell these meanings to them in the form of commodities” (p. 193). What all this means for human geography-and for LIS-is that, although GIS may be a useful tool, it does not represent a new paradigm of knowledge production apart from human geography’s traditional focus on relational, dialectical, and critical examination of spatial and temporal social change. If anything, it represents a new case to be studied.

Theories of Spatial Fixes and Uneven Geog ra p hica I Development

The use of GIS for geodemographic marketing might best be understood as an example of one of the most generative concepts to come out of human geography: Harvey’s (1982) idea of the “spatial fix,” first articulated in his classic The Limits to Capital. The title was a play on words that represented both the analytical limits to Karl Marx’s 19th-century analysis and critique of capitalism, Capital-bereft as it was of a consistent theoretical foundation in geography-and the political-economic limits to capitalism itself, prone to crisis through numerous internal contradictions but incredibly resilient in pushing the “limits” of its own influence to ward off those crises. Harvey’s (2004, p. 544) aim in this book was “to take fragmentary comments about spatiality, territoriality and geography and try to weld them into a more systematic theory of the production of space, urbanization, and of uneven geographical development.” In a recent retrospective assessment of Harvey’s ideas,


Schoenberger (2004, p. 428) explained the spatial fix as “a way to pro- ductively soak up capital by transforming the geography of capitalism”:

Although there is no permanent solution to the crisis ten- dencies of capitalism, the system does generate some important ways of delaying them or diverting them into reasonably productive pathways. Harvey’s great insight in Limits was that restructuring the geography of capital-altering its very earthly foundations-was a particularly effective way of pro- ductively absorbing these excesses. This is the spatial fur. It is a very general notion that can have different expressions historically and geographically.

Three well-known historical forms of the spatial fix include: (1) the commodification of land, where land is, over time, continually and dif- ferentially valued and revalued according to new technological opportunities for accumulation; (2) the global expansion of capitalism, both in mustering wider and wider regions for production and in selling commodities and services to wider and wider consumer markets; and (3) investment into the built environment-either in place, in the form of cities, or across space, in the form of transportation and communication infrastructure-especially when such investment is orchestrated by the state but works to benefit the competitive risks of accumulation for capital by decreasing the “friction of distance” and thus the cost of doing business (Sheppard, 2004). Other examples of spatial fixes might include reorganizing territorial systems of governance, privatizing spatial realms and assets that were previously collectively held, or even investing in those ephemeral and virtual spaces of electronic action known as “mediaspaces” or “cyberspaces.” It is important, however, to realize that all of these examples of spatial fur strategies share four key elements: (1) they each involve temporal, as well as spatial, parameters; (2) they each involve opportunities for action by the state as well as by capital; (3) they each confer to the public use values (andor “use risks”) other than those values allowing for further capital accumulation; and (4) they each contain built-in contradictions, which do not solve, but merely defer or displace, the problem of crisis.

One of the most important of these contradictions comes from the fact that spatial fixes must themselves be produced out of the current spatial arrangements of a society-historical barriers that, in their own day, were often considered great leaps forward. In other words, it takes new time-and-space innovation and investment to overcome time-and-space frictions and legacies left over from previous rounds of innovation and investment. As Harvey (1989, p. 258) put it, ‘(space can be conquered only through the production of space.” For example, consider the para- dox of the “last mile” in broadband ICT networks. As Graham (2001, p. 405) has observed,


These days, telecommunications and digital media industries endlessly proclaim the ‘death of distance’ and the ‘ubiq- uity of bandwidth’. Paradoxically, however, they actually remain driven by the old-fashioned geographic imperatives of putting physical networks (optic fibers, mobile antennas and the like) in trenches, conduits and emplacements to drive market access. . . . [in such a way that1 fully 80 percent of the costs of a network are associated with this traditional, ‘messy’ business of getting it into the ground in highly con- gested, and contested, urban areas.

Optical fiber is laid following buried sewer conduits, disrupting vehi- cle travel on city streets; new cell phone towers enabling mobile telework appear first on skyscrapers meant to congregate laborers in one place throughout the working day; and all manner of communication systems meant to build a cost-free virtual space nevertheless need substations for switches, offices for managers, and fleets of vehicles for maintenance workers placed strategically throughout costly physical space.

The inevitable result of repeated rounds of spatial fxes of all sorts, especially in an increasingly global, capitalist political economy, is a landscape of uneven geographic development. Rather than conceptualizing such patterns of wired and unwired, affluent and poor, well-serviced and under-provisioned, as merely statistical-generated through ran- dom variation and contingency-human geographers theorize such patterns as structural and, often, as the logical expression of the contradictions inherent in a society’s mode of development (Smith, 1990). The twist is that certain powers within any society actually stand to benefit from an uneven social and technological landscape-especially if such a landscape helps to maintain monopoly power in terms of political influence, market dominance, or social importance. Thus, “uneven development is a social inequality blazoned into the geographic landscape, and it is simultaneously the exploitation of that geographic unevenness for certain socially determined ends” (p. 155). Reductionist geographical research would simply identify, map, and perhaps try to explain differences based on individual characteristics of sites and social groupings. But a relational, dialectical, and critical human geography sees each area of uneven development as tied to the other, being produced and reproduced over time as a result of contradictory social processes, and often working in support of particular power relations and normative goals.

As LIS researchers might expect, the place of ICTs and ICAs in the production and reproduction of uneven geographies is of key interest to human geographers-so much so that a series of concepts has emerged in support of defining the crucial ability of information and communication technologies and agencies to help humans reorganize time and space to new ends. Janelle (1991, pp. 49-52) has long spoken of “time- space convergence” as a measure of “the rates at which places move


closer together or further away in travel or communication time.” For example, from 1800 to 1965, the time needed to traverse the 210-mile distance between Boston and New York using various kinds of contemporary transport technology shrank from several full days by stagecoach to a mere few hours by car. Similarly, Janelle’s “cost-space convergence” could be used to compare the declining cost over time of a coast-to-coast telephone call in 1920 to the price of the same call today. Harvey (1989, p. 240) theorized similarly with his notion of “time-space compression,” according to which humans use the technologies of transport and communications both to broaden the space of social action and to accelerate the pace of that social action. For Harvey (1989, p. 2401, time-space compression occurs precisely when material changes in infrastructure connect to mental changes in perception: “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” in such a way that “the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us.” And Giddens (1990, p. 14) contributed a related concept with his idea of “time-space distanciation,” that is, “the conditions under which time and space are organized so as to connect presence and absence.” Here not only technologies, but also social structures and practices come into play. For example, transnational corporations (and their transportatiodcommunication technologies) “are able to connect the local and the global in ways which would have been unthinkable in more traditional societies and in so doing routinely affect the lives of many millions of people” (p. 20). Commodification itself is a time-space distanciation: “Money provides for the enactment of transactions between agents widely separated in time and space” (p. 24) and “writing expands the level of time-space distanciation and creates a perspective of past, present, and future in which the reflexive appropriation of knowledge can be set off from designated tradition” (p. 37). Although these three conceptualizations of time-space reorganization come from different research programs, they share the common notion that “the reorganization of space is always a reorganization of the framework through which social power is expressed” (Harvey, 1989, p. 255).

Thinking about these infrastructures of social power, then, we might identify four categories of ICTs and ICAs that have merited attention from both LIS and human geography: (1) print publishing as information technology with geographies of infrastructure (publishers, libraries, bookstores, schools), use (reading, education), and ownershipflabor (private, public); (2) electronic point-to-point communication systems as information technologies with geographies of infrastructure, use, and ownershipflabor (telegraph, telephone); (3) electronic mass media systems as information technologies with geographies of infrastructure, use, and ownershipflabor (radio, television); and (4) the Internet as a virtual and physical geography of infrastructure and use. All four of these topics of research can be thought of as socio-technical systems or networks, a commonality that has brought them into the realm of both


social informatics (Sawyer & Eschenfelder, 2002) and science and technology studies (Van House, 2004). Moreover, all four are implicated in the same kinds of relational, dialectical, and normative processes of social production and social construction because

communications technologies are not only designed to overcome barriers posed by geographic space, thus transforming it, but at the same time always have their own distinct geographical attributes that shape the degree to which such transformation is possible [in such a way that] the new spaces they create shape, but do not substitute for, geographical space. (Aoyama & Sheppard, 2003, p. 1153)

Graham (2000, p. 115) makes three analytical points about these kinds of networks: (1) “As capital that is literally ‘sunk’ and embedded within and between the fabric of cities, they represent long-term accu- mulations of finance, technology, and organizational and geopolitical power”; (2) “infrastructure networks, and the complex socio-technical apparatus that surrounds them, are strongly involved in structuring and delineating the experiences of urban culture”; and (3) infrastructure networks “link systems and practices of production with systems and practices of consumption and social reproduction across space and time,” but do so “in sustaining sociotechnical geometries of power and social or geographical biases in very real-but often complex-ways.” Thinking through these networks of ICTs and ICAs with the geographical concepts of spaces and places, spatial fixes, and time-space reorganization, then, points especially to two different realms of research: understanding cyberspaces constituted out of information networks and understanding urban places caught within information networks.

Constructing Cyberspaces and Situating Urban Places The term “cyberspacen itself is a spatial metaphor drawn out of the

literary imagination-bringing together an uneasy combination of the electronic and the geographical-and like all metaphors, it has the power to both generate productive ideas and obscure important realities (Graham, 1998; Kitchin & Kneale, 2001; Mihalache, 2002). Initial for- mulations of cyberspace were often focused on the bodily experience of interfacing with computer networks (Benedikt, 1991) and the presence of networked information technology in cities (Graham & Marvin, 1996). Geographical theorists have continued their attempts to integrate body and city through cyberspace: Gandy’s (2005) provocative ideas on “cyborg urbanization” are a recent example of this line of thought. However, social informatics researchers had been debating the concept of the place of the citizen in the “wired city”-pinning the term to cable television in the 1970s and “videotex” systems in the 1980s-long before the World Wide Web burst on the scene in the early 1990s (Dutton,


Blumler, & Kraemer, 1987). Even urban planning and architecture have explored the idea that urban built environments are converging with networked digital systems in new ways. For example, Massachusetts Institute of Technology planning and architecture professor William Mitchell (1995, p. 5) developed an evocative “city of bits” hypothesis, arguing that:

The most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and associated electronic appliances . . . nor even of producing electronically deliverable ‘content,’ but rather one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have.

If we define cyberspace not as some sort of “digital city’) but as a virtual realm for social processes (such as production and consumption, education and play) that is enabled through increasingly convergent, digital networked information, communication, and media systems (represented most spectacularly a t this moment by the World Wide Web), then we might imagine that the dialectical relationship between cyberspace and physical space could evolve in several different ways. Graham (1998, p. 167) articulated three options: (1) “substitution and transcen- dence,” or “the idea that human territoriality, and the spaces and place- based dynamics of human life, can somehow be replaced using new technologies”; (2) “co-evolution,” or the idea that “both the electronic ‘spaces’ and territorial spaces are necessarily produced together, as part of the ongoing restructuring of the capitalist political-economic system”; and (3) “recombination,” the idea that “a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life is necessary.” Rejecting simple substitution, Graham (p. 174) eschewed (1) in favor of (2) and (31, arguing that “materially constructed urban places and telecommunications networks stand in a state of recursive interaction, shaping each other in complex ways that have a history running back to the days of the origin of the telegraph and telephone.”

Most theory and research on cyberspace in both LIS and geography now takes a similar point of view. But considerable room for variation remains. Many studies proceed using the language that the urban theo- rist Manuel Castells (1989, p. 348) originally developed in The Informational City, where he famously declared the new importance of networks of real places connected through the structures of cyberspaces:

The new international economy creates a variable geometry of production and consumption, labor and capital, management and information-a geometry that denies the specific productive meaning of any place outside its position


in a network whose shape changes relentlessly in response to the messages of unseen signals and unknown codes.

Castells called this relational geometry the “space of flows” and understood it to comprise “asymmetrical networks of exchanges which do not depend on the characteristics of any specific locale for the fulfillment of their fundamental goals” (p. 348). For Castells, action in cyberspace (a pre-World Wide Web version made up of more proprietary corporate communication tools) did not substitute for action in physical space but worked to rearrange the hierarchy of power within the “space of places”-meaning that firms, cities, and regions would succeed in the new global economy not if they possessed unique characteristics in physical space but only if they could build sufficient presence in (and connections to) the new space of flows. This assessment points, then, not only to the agency of the firm, but also to the structure of the firm’s competitive environment.

As a result of Castells’s influential work through the 199Os, a cottage industry has developed within geography, measuring the areal differentiation in both urban accessibility to space flows and urban concentrations of firms taking advantage of the space of flows. For example, commercial “points of presence” (POPS) on the Internet are still distributed in an uneven geography in such a way that “many midsized metropolitan areas in the United States do not have a single network POP”-a condition that does not shut them out from Internet access but does call into question “the ability to access significant amounts of bandwidth from these cities’’ (Grubesic & O’Kelly, 2002, pp. 273-274). And if one ranks urban areas by the number of “.corn" domain-name holders registered within their borders, a clearly uneven geography emerges. According to Zook (2000, p. 4151, “the San Francisco Bay region has almost three times the number of domain names per firm as either the Chicago, Philadelphia, or Houston metropolitan regions”; moreover, “together, the New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles regions have more corn domain names than the next eleven largest metropolitan regions combined.”

Such studies provide an essential baseline of empirical data for the understanding of dialectical change between urban, national, and global economies, but many geographers have begun to question this idea of networks between places as the most important, or most useful, new social arrangement to emerge from the combination of cyberspace and urban space-above all, the all-too-easy analogy that what works for competitive business practice should also work for local, state, and national governments and nongovernmental organizations. Leitner and Sheppard (2002, p. 495) critiqued

[the] emergent trend in both public policy and academic discourse that construes networks as a preferable mode of coor- dination and governance for coping with the vagaries of


globalization and internationalization, facilitating a more efficient use of public resources, increasing competitiveness, generating economic growth, and resolving social problems.

Policymakers often have too easily assumed that networks are naturally self-organizing, collaborative, nonhierarchical, and flexible; however, Leitner and Sheppard (p. 514) pointed out that more often real political-economic projects organized as networks-especially networks between disparate cities, places, or regions forged in order to bring some measure of order to unpredictable globalization processes-actually “evolve under pre-existing conditions where territorial state regulation, unequal power relations, and uneven development are pervasive.” Castells (2000) himself has since expanded his analysis of the networks of political-economic action enabled by his space of flows to consider how his new geography might be “grassrooted” through the efforts of social justice activists. Thus, although technology-enabled networks of social action might offer a new set of tools for attempting meaningful political- economic action, such social networks should be seen as a means to a more just society, not as an instantiation of that just society itself. Cities, among other noncorporate actors, still matter.

Web-Based Industries, Careers, and Economies The recent work in the geography literature on the topic of the “new

economy” illustrates the diversity and utility of relational, dialectical, and critical studies of cyberspaces and urban spaces-and the individuals who inhabit them. Early pronouncements about “e-business” were both reductionist and utopian in their conceptions of geography and technology. As Murphy (2003, p. 1174) has pointed out, such conceptions often involved: (1) the assumption of perfect “spaceless” consumer markets leading to a virtual landscape of deregulated competition accessible to anyone anywhere anytime across the globe; (2) the valorization of “pure-play” Internet retailers who “eschewed store networks for cav- ernous warehouses”; and (3) the simple glorification of “first-mover advantage,”-the assumption that in e-commerce, “the first and fleetest attains an unassailable competitive advantage.”

Such assumptions fail on two counts. First, rather than being created wholly anew within cyberspace, e-commerce ventures are intimately wrapped up in physical, cultural, and legal geographies on the ground. For example, “rather than fleeing the more regulated territories of their major markets, E-commerce firms develop strategies that enable them to operate partially within such spaces” (Aoyama & Sheppard, 2003, p. 1154). Cyberspace, when grounded in physical space, cannot be perfectly deregulated nor can it be perfectly “frictionless” or instantaneous in its own workings:


The geographical patterns of the telecommunications infrastructure and its bandwidth, the costs, and various rules and regulations governing its use, as well as many other factors, can all significantly affect the features of the electronic space and the way it is used. (Li, Whalley, & Williams, 2001, p. 702)

Second, rather than relying on an undifferentiated space of perfect competition, e-commerce ventures are born precisely to exploit uneven geographies on the ground:

Information systems allow organizations to exploit minute differences between places in terms of, for example, local labour-market conditions, the nature of cultural facilities and of institutional structures, in a complex yet cost-effective manner. This capacity of information systems to redefine relations between people in different places, and to resolve the conflict between the fixity of capital location and the geographical flexibility of its use, has been, and will continue to be, a main source of organisational innovations. (p. 699)

For these reasons, a 2003 issue of Environment and Planning A devoted to e-commerce served to “challenge the claim that virtual space is coming to dominate geographic space, and the claims about the unal- loyed benefits of globalization that often accompany it” (Aoyama & Sheppard, 2003, p. 1153).

Because LIS researchers, as well as geographers, study the links between technology and globalization, this topic is an obvious point of connection between the two fields. After all, a key premise in the concept of globalization is that the “new economy” enabled by (‘new technology” produces a “new geography.” 0 Riain, Parthasarathy, & Zook (2004, p. 617) contend that, “in spatial terms, the hew’ economy is new to the extent that it has witnessed the emergence of certain regions, hitherto considered a part of the global ‘periphery’, as key nodes of production.” Gibbs, Kraemer, and Dedrick (2003, p. 5) have drawn on the work of Giddens to suggest that researchers tend to hold three different theories of how this new geography of globalization might unfold: (1) “convergence,” where globalization is ua universal process of homogenization in which countries tend toward a common way of producing and organizing economic life with resulting common social outcomes”; (2) “divergence” in globalization, where ‘(national diversity in the pursuit of differing social and economic outcomes will prevail and prevent convergence from taking place”; and (3) (‘transformation”’ according to which globalization is to be understood as “an uneven process involving elements of both convergence and divergence, in which countries around the world are experiencing a process of profound change as they try to adapt to a more interconnected but uncertain world.”


The work of both geography and LIS researchers so far demonstrates that convergence and homogenization are clearly not occurring. Aoyama (2003, p. 1205) studied the different methods of Internet access common to consumers in two different “sociospatial systems,” the U.S. and Japan, and argued that “societies vary in the manner and the speed of technological adoption even when income and educational levels are similar,” because cultural, institutional, and spatial differences persist and matter. Similarly, Gibbs et al.’s (2003, p. 6) systematic comparison of case studies in 10 countries dealing with the globalization of e-commerce found that “country responses to these global forces are varied and uneven due to national characteristics such as information infrastructure, business innovatiodentrepreneurship and consumer preferences, and national policies that create different market and telecommunications regimes.” In other words, both “national environment” and “national policy” matter. These researchers found that e-commerce globalization differed depending on whether one considered “B2B” (business to business) or “B2C” (business to consumer) e-commerce: “For B2B e-commerce, competitive forces are the greatest driver of adoption” and “countries that are more open to such forces, whether through international trade, trade liberalization, or foreign investment, tend toward higher e-commerce diffusion”: This results in a convergence pattern (p. 16). However, “B2C diffusion seems to be less affected by global forces and more affected by variables specific to the national and local environment, such as consumer preferences, retail structure, and local language and cultural factors,” thus leading to a divergence pattern (p. 16). Both Aoyama’s and Gibbs et al.’s studies, then, support, at a minimum, a “divergence” view of the processes and outcomes of technology-driven globalization.

To think through “transformation” processes, however, requires more than the rather reductionist counting up of e-commerce indicators for “containing” nations. Qualitative case studies of particular industries, locations, or technologies are one productive approach. For example, Wilson’s (2003, p. 1246) fascinating study on the “Economic Geography of Internet Gambling” highlights “the contrast between the seamless and global appearance of the World Wide Web and the place-based realities of the law.” Wilson (p. 1246) describes the typical fragmented and contradictory legal, technical, and cultural geography of one online gambling venture: “VegasLand Casino” (which of course is named after the U.S. gambling center, Las Vegas, NV) “has its domain name registered in London in the United Kingdom, its technical contact at Yahoo in the United States, its financial base inh t igua , and its Website in the United Kingdom.” Although this fragmentation offers financial, legal, and technical advantages, it also holds costs: “It is much harder for online sites to build brand loyalty, especially if they do not have the physical presence of a hotel or casino to anchor their identity” (p. 1249). The basic contradiction Wilson (p. 1246) identifies is that online gambling must appear to be

704 Annual Review of information Science and Technology

part of one place even as it physically andor legally locates in another place:

Online-gambling Websites are made to appear to be part of the mainstream businesses in their markets, yet frequently are located offshore to avoid legal restrictions. For example, many Caribbean-based Internet-gambling Websites are oriented to the United States. These sites are made to appear as if they are based in the United States in several ways, such as by avoiding reference to currency exchange and by pre- senting transactions only in U.S. dollars, and by using toll- free telephone numbers with 800 and 866 area codes common to U.S.-based toll-free systems.

In this case, e-commerce issues cannot easily be divorced from the social and political regulation of vice and the cultural meaning of place.

Another content-specific example comes from Leyshon’s (2001) work on ICT and the music industry. He conceptualized the music industry geographically as “four distinctive musical networks which possess distinctive but overlapping functions, temporalities, and geographies”:

first, a network of creativity, formed from the fusion of networks of composition and representation, wherein music is created through multiple acts of performance; second, a network of reproduction, which is a narrower definition of the original network of repetition, and which includes the manu- facture of multiple copies of audio recordings; third, a network of distribution; ... and, fourth, a network of consumption, incorporating retail organizations. (p. 60)

Leyshon then argued that the MP3 technological revolution would have different but related effects through each of these four networks. This approach illustrates well how geographers create typologies and develop conceptual tools which let them deal with processes simultaneously as social, functional, ideational, and spatial (e.g., tracking the various divisions of labor in those four categories).

What about e-commerce that deals not with virtual entertainment products, but with physical products that might otherwise be hauled home in an automobile from a local “bricks-and-mortar” retail outlet? Currah (2002, p. 1411) found that instead of positing an absolute opposition between “pure play” Web retailers and traditional stores, a fruit- ful research strategy was to conceptualize and investigate so-called multichannel retailers who “serve consumer markets via at least two routes, including any combination of e-commerce, catalogue or mail order, interactive television, telesales, and store-based retailing.’’ These so-called “bricks-and-clicks” e-tailers are ideally “able to draw upon an established brand name and customer franchise, thus affirming the


authenticity of the Web store and alleviating the marketing traumas experienced by the pure players” by having a “combination of an electronic and physical presence” which “provides the consumer with multiple points of access to the retailer, enabling, for example, offline purchases to be researched in the Web store or online orders to be exchanged at a traditional store” (p. 1414). These retailers “can leverage existing investments in warehousing, supply-chain management systems, customer-support centres, and product-return networks to facilitate the process of e-tailing fulfilment” (p. 1414). In his study of six such firms in the Toronto area, Currah (p. 1430) concluded that “the physical places that constitute the Internet commodity chain have remained geographically integrated with those of traditional retailing”: In other words, “there is little to be found in the physical places of e-tailing fulfilment in Toronto that is fundamentally unique” (p. 1433). Thus, Currah provocatively argued, “e-tailing is merely an electronically revamped model of catalogue selling” (p. 1433).

Of course, not every commodity can be purchased through a catalog. One of the most frustrating attempts at e-business has been the cyber- grocery, where local delivery areas and customer perceptions of food quality are considerable obstacles to electronic rationalization. A recent study by Murphy (2003, p. 1176) did not merely evaluate strategies of “compressing” time and space, but also considered the trade-offs involved in paying attention to one side of the dialectic of spacehime versus the other: “solving problems in time may compound problems in space, and vice versa.” Using qualitative, ethnographic interview and observation data, Murphy (p. 1195) found that having a third party go “picking” for groceries is a vastly different time-space activity than going “shopping” for one’s self:

The design of their selling space is not well suited to picking and packing by store employees on behalf of customers. Stores are designed to encourage customers to wander throughout the store, and thus possibly be tempted by addi- tional items: to them the store is a puzzle, and possibly an obstacle course. Pickers rely instead on information technology to guide them and provide shortcuts to the next item: for them the store is a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, with each aisle, shelf, and bay coded and tagged. Pickers compete with customers for store space and products on shelves, and as store representatives may be waylaid. (p. 1195)

Such geographical studies of new cyberspatial processes of production, distribution, and consumption usually focus on the dialectic between the space-time of the firm and the space-time of the customer in much the same way that digital library investigations in LIS might focus on the dialectic between the space-time of the library and the space-time of the patron. But there is another geography at work in


these e-commerce projects that can only be seen if one takes a step back from individual actors in place to look at collective patterns across space. The question of whether globalized e-commerce would favor one city, one region, or one labor market over another has also been investigated both reductively and relationally in the past few years. Geographies of work-whether “distributed work” that takes place over space and time through ICTs mobilized by a particular firm, or “labor guilds” that form over space and time through ICTs mobilized by a particular professional group of workers a t various firms-show how individuals are both empowered and constrained by ICTs as they strive to find and keep meaningful labor in particular firms, particular industries, and particular areas.

One example from this geography literature, building on the LIS- related field of “computer supported cooperative work,” is Brown and O’Hara’s (2003, p. 1566) ethnographic study of so-called “hot-desking“ workers, in which they argued that

mobile workers do not work in some sort of decorporalised hyperspace, as some accounts would seem to suggest. Indeed, as we will discuss, because these workers have much less physical certainty in comparison with conventional workers, place becomes a very important practical concern. When a mobile worker goes to work, he or she must decide where that work is going to be, under pressures of task and management.

Their key finding was that mobile work is relational, not reductionist: “The mobile workers were dependent on fxed aspects of the office place by proxy-they required other people to be there in order to facilitate their own decorporealisation” (p. 1585). Thus, “to ask if mobile work is virtual is simply to ask the wrong question; mobile work is different, it does not lose its corporeality, but rather that corporeality becomes something that has to be explicitly managed” (p. 1585).

Similar work in geography has drawn inspiration from workplace studies of technical labor that, once again, sit at the boundary between LIS and science and technology studies. Building on Orr’s (1996) classic study of Xerox service technicians, Ueno and Kawatoko (2003, p. 1531) explored “the practice of service technicians across multiple sites in a copying-machine company” in Japan. Ueno and Kawatoko (p. 1531) considered the new question of how “service technicians move about their area in appropriate ways and times by making their workspace visible with various technologies.” They argued from their findings that “space is not something given. It is not a container filled with people, artifacts, and other things. Rather, space is continually organized, described, and made visible by people who are also in space, with various technologies” (p. 1529).


One might explore the other end of the mobility spectrum at work in the same way. For example, Boyer (2004, p. 206) studied the different spatial relations of the ofice for early 20th century bank workers of different status (and gender) to reveal how those spatial relations were structured by technology:

Freed from the typewriter or dictaphone, these men worked at desks designed for conversing, reading, and thinking, in ofices equipped with doors and secretaries to buffer and regulate contact with others. Meanwhile, a t the bottom of the organizational hierarchy, clerical workers were “tied” or tethered to spatially fixed pieces of equipment such as a typewriter or dictaphone, in workspaces that more easily lent themselves to visual and auditory surveillance.

Her conclusion was that, “while women were free to claim authority over small, discrete pieces of ofice machinery, comprehending the broader sociotechnical systems of which those machines were a part was still considered men’s work (p. 209).

Place becomes important in the study of the new-media workplace as well. Building on previous studies of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128, many geographers in the late 1990s turned their attention to New York‘s “Silicon Alley,” described by Girard and Stark (2002, p. 1929) as “a (post)industrial district ... running south of 41st Street along Broadway through the Flatiron District and SoHo into Chelsea and down to Wall Street.” These authors noted that

By 1999, new media was one of New York‘s fastest growing sectors, with almost 100,000 full-time equivalent employees in Manhattan alone (that is, more than the city’s traditional publishing and traditional advertising industries combined) and with an estimated 8,500 new-media companies in the larger New York City area. In that same year, the New York new-media industry produced revenues of $16.8 billion and generated $1.5 billion in venture-capital funding and $3.5 billion in IPO [Initial Public Offering] funding. (p. 1929)

Such statistics could easily be compared to other nascent new-media regions. But Girard and Stark combined this understanding of geographical space to explore, ethnographically, a more social space: “the web of a web project” (pp. 1938-19391, that is, the network of actors on a new-media project who existed in a “heterarchy” (not a hierarchy) of simultaneous engineering and distributed authority (pp. 1934-1936). Tracing the social network between Web developers, clients, third-party “technology partners,” venture capitalists, order fulfillment firms, credit services, and the like, Girard and Stark (p. 1939) concluded that the


knowledge necessary to successful delivery of a product in such a business environment is literally “distributed across this web.”

Thinking about new media in this way-fragmented in time and space as continual, short-term “project work” for a range of global clients-allows researchers to revisit the history of “old media” labor conditions and industrial landscapes and see how, even though industries such as filmmaking and advertising produced their own professional spaces (Hollywood, Madison Avenue), the existence of organized labor institutions within these places endowed these districts with a different set of meanings. For example, Christopherson (2002, p. 2004) has argued that

unlike their old-media counterparts, new-media workers (and their employers) did not have the intermediary institutions to set the rules for employment, to define roles in project production, or to facilitate project management. So, when we look at new media, we see idiosyncratic occupational titles (such as technical evangelist), an understanding of work as a commodity rather than a relationship, and a distinctly entre- preneurial approach to career development.

She went on to say that all this “has empowered individual workers but disempowered the workforce as a whole. It has also made collocation a virtual necessity both for employers and for new-media professionals” (p. 2004).

Thinking about both the processes of collocation and the construction of information systems to facilitate this kind of labor brings the geography of new-media production in contact with longstanding LIS research. For example, in her introduction to a recent issue of Environment and Planning A, Grabher (2002, p. 1914) explicitly drew on Star and Griesemer’s (1989) well-known concept of information artifacts acting as “boundary objects”:

Despite the fuzzy boundaries of professional profiles and roles, the work process in new media does involve a division of labor, no matter how vague and project specific. In the fluid new-media context, reliability of information and validity of expectations across the various domains and across time are achieved through ‘boundary objects’ which are both plastic enough to adapt to local contexts and constraints of the parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity.

Thus, she argued, “new media gravitate towards distinct metropolitan areas, which offer the infrastructural amenities of a central location and yet offer space for sociocultural and physical (re)development”- places, such as Silicon Alley, which contain “a rich pool of specialized


labor; a diversified infrastructure of specialized suppliers of intermedi- ate inputs and specialized services; and so-called knowledge spill-overs” (p. 1918). In this way, for a new-media industry marked by short-term projects, fragmented divisions of labor mediated by “boundary objects,” and distinct symbolic urban districts of activity, “the knowledge space” of both physical proximity and social networks can help produce what Grabher (p. 1922) called “locally diffused and enduring ‘repositories of experience.”’

Other geographers have continued to investigate how these repositories of experience are (relproduced in place. Benner’s (2003) work com- bines traditional “geographies of innovation” research (focused on high-tech regions) with newer (‘community of practice” studies (focused on informal networks of professionals) to examine how, especially in information technology labor, innovative regional economies are sustained in part by the learning that takes place through organized communities of practice. Using a case study of the “Silicon Valley Webgrrls” (SVW) group to make his point, Benner argued that “significant learning takes place in loosely structured communities of people with similar occupations, skills, and experiences in the regional labor market” and that “these communities of practice emerge not simply through informal social interaction, but are being actively built at least in part through the formal activities of professional associations” (p. 1810). But, crucially, these activities are situated in “geographical space”: “Spatial proximity facilitates the exchange of many kinds of information and knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge” (p. 1812). Benner (p. 1825) found that

When it was fully functional, SVW brought together a community of 1,200 people in the Silicon Valley involved in one way or another with Internet development and Web design. . . . In an environment in which social networks have worked to exclude women from positions of influence in the core of the region’s high-tech agglomeration, SVW provided the information resources and social networks to help promote their members [sic] careers effectively.

He concluded that “The high levels of trust, openness, and organized incorporation into the community, built through the combination of in- person and online communication, was a critical component of the organization’s success” (p. 1826).

Geographical investigations like this can help LIS researchers come to grips with the workings of local labor markets in ICT and ICA industries. But we must also remember that such labor markets are not given, but have to be produced. Many human geographers take the dialectical view that (‘the spatial division of labour [is] a product of capitalist social relations,” a process that must be understood as unfolding historically (Wills, Cumbers, & Berndt, 2000, p. 1524):


Workers did not just “happen” to be in a place of work at a particular time. Rather, they were understood to be there- with a certain package of skills, experiences, and opinions- as a result of previous rounds of economic investment.

This theoretical orientation can be productive when new ICTs and ICAs themselves provide the power to change the rules of the game for labor market production, creating potential employees and employers on a much wider spatial and temporal scale than ever before.

Niles and Hanson (2003) explored this very question, studying the way ICTs and ICAs are providing new methods for job seeking that can potentially (but not always in practice) transcend space. They began by observing that “information-and especially information about opportunities such as education, jobs, and medical care that affect individual livelihoods-circulates through social networks,” a process they termed “grounded social relations” (p. 1223). Because, in such social relations, “information available through a social network is partial and constrained by the spatial extent of network members’ experiences” (for example, where they’ve worked and lived in the past), Niles and Hanson (p. 1223) wondered if new ICT tools such as the online job-seeking service Monster.com would change these social relations. Their method involved qualitative, in-depth interviews of nine employers who had advertised openings on Monster.com:

Specifically we wanted to understand whether employers are able to attract qualified candidates from a broader social and geographic spectrum than that represented by their existing workers and whether expanding and diversifying the applicant pool were important reasons for employer use of the Internet as a recruiting tool. (pp. 1230-1231)

What they found was that the ICT of the Web, together with the ICA of Monster.com, was used to conquer time, but not necessarily space:

Using the Internet in this case does not mean dramatically changing the way firms hire people; it means looking for a way to make the existing methods more efficient. It was clear that efficiency is often measured by finding very specifically skilled candidates who already reside within the area inscribed by what the employer deems an appropriate commuting distance. Although hiring specifically like this may be efficient in terms of time and money, it necessarily precludes considering non-traditional, or more distance, applicants. (p. 1241)

Thus a “socially constructed” geography-the perceived space of action on the part of employers when conducting a job search, including


the meaning of “appropriate commuting distance”-conflicted with the widened “socially produced space of recruiting offered by the global ICT of the Web and the transnational corporate ICA of Monster.com.

The Place of Libraries (and LIS) in the ”New Geography“ Geography has concentrated heavily on studies of new-media firms-

how these new ICAs are produced, reproduced, and understood in relation to new opportunities for action across time and space offered by new ICTs, and how the political economy of pre-existing spaces enables and constrains these processes. Thus, even though geography (so far) has had little to say about nonprofit information agencies such as libraries, one way that LIS might usefully engage with geography is to compare strategies and patterns for taking research on ICTs and ICAs into the realm of political-economic action (as if it were ever really free of this realm). The LIS community, unlike those of many other academic disciplines (but similarly to, say, those of journalism and mass communication), tends to be more comfortable in articulating and defending a core set of social norms defining a public interest, including free and open access to information without regard to ability to pay and without dis- crimination on the basis of socialkultural affiliation. Libraries-especially public, school, and academic-have long been a part of this public interest. But now, just as the creation of cyberspace threatens to undermine the power of particular urban places, the creation of largely privatized digital libraries of all sorts threatens to undercut public support for physical libraries at all spatial scales. In an environment of both increased private market investment in ICTs (e.g., corporate intranets) and decreased state funding for ICAs (e.g., public libraries), polarized arguments have emerged either (1) touting the inevitable and technologically determined replacement of the material world of printed texts and reference librarians with the virtual world of digital texts and Google queries or (2) declaring the eternal superiority of human versus automated information expertise and the natural comforts of sitting in a plush chair with a thick book versus the obvious difficulty of staring at a glowing screen. On both sides, particular imagined geographies are being invoked-the material versus the virtual, the place-bound versus the placeless, the human society versus the built environment. But on both sides as well, these geographical imaginaries are reductionist and deceptive.

Geographical reductionism is not a bad place to start, but it can reveal only a partial reality. For example, one might start on the “material” side with the enticing fact that “there are 16,180 public library buildings (including branches) in the United States (that’s more than McDonald’s restaurants)” (Wiegand, 2003, p. 369). One might also gather national-level statistics, such as the 2002 ALA survey, which “found that only 66 percent of respondents had reported using the public library within the past year” (Adkins & Bala, 2004, p. 338). Such


efforts a t counting the presence and influence of libraries across the landscape have been present in LIS research ever since Wilson’s (1938) Depression-era Geography of Reading. Today, one might use a GIS-based system such as the Florida GeoLib to identify each one of those library systems, branches, and buildings; with the addition of freely available government census data, one can then compare and correlate libraries and their communities in search of patterns of areal differentiation across the landscape at any particular political scale (national, state, or county) and in hope of finding evidence either praising the library as a co-determinant of successful communities or burying it as a relic too far removed from needy populations (Dorman, 2002; Jue et al., 1999; Koontz, 1997; Ottensman, 1997). Of course, these too were longstanding practices in the pre-GIS years (Chitwood, 1967).

An initial appeal to geography helps us define salient and polarized characteristics of things-pages versus screens, reading rooms versus chat rooms. But these things do not exist in isolation: They exist in relationship to each other in myriad ways that a reductionist view may or may not suggest; moreover, they exist as “moments” in larger social processes that a reductionist view allows us to glimpse only in snapshot. LIS researchers interested in ICAs have long attempted to pin down the “laws” of library siting that would allow LIS professionals not only to win legitimacy from library funding bodies (charitable, corporate, or state) but also to serve effectively both the populations who already demonstrate high demand for library services (elderly adults, young families with children, highly literate communities) and those who remain outside of the library’s doors (recent immigrants, those strug- gling with literacy, or oppressed communities) (Koontz, 1997). They have also tried to quantify the level of library outreach that is “produced” for various sizes and concentrations of metropolitan areas (Adkins & Bala, 2004). But such principles of where and when to build libraries or to pur- sue outreach must adapt to changing technological contexts. An issue of The Information Society on the topic of the digital divide, edited by Strover (2003, p. 2751, properly criticized “the mantra equating computer use with economic development and improved social conditions,” which drove many early digital divide projects (and which was exploited by large technology vendors such as Microsoft and Dell through value- laden, short-term donations intended to bolster their brand image and increase their long-term market share). One of the problems was that early analyses of the digital divide were often aspatial (focusing on differences between social groups) or crudely reductionist in their spatial terms (rural versus urban, “inner city” versus suburban). In the evalua- tion of libraries versus cyberspace, more relational and dialectical use of both geographical tools and geographic theory is needed to go beyond utopian or dystopian arguments.

A first step in such a relational research agenda might be geographically focused case studies of ICAs in relation to their communities a t particular historical moments. Sarah Anderson’s (2003) fascinating


Library Quarterly article on the 135th Street Branch library in New York City’s Harlem paid attention to the library within the geographical context of its local community, treating both the organization and the neighborhood as more than just “containers” for social processes and social actors. Anderson (pp. 417-418) argued that

The story of the 135th Street Branch library is larger than its transformation into a world-renowned repository of knowledge; it serves as a model of the library finding its place in its community. ... It served as a public sphere in whch sharply divergent ideas about race, art, literature, and politics could be exchanged. . . . Through church pastors, school teachers, artists, poets, playwrights, novelists, political spokesmen, magazine editors, society matrons, and librarians, networks of social contacts were established that filled the library’s auditorium and its reading rooms.

Leckie and Hopkins (2002, p. 327) also took a relational and dialectical view of the social processes within which ICAs are embedded in their study of central public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver, arguing that the public library is both a product and producer of “public culture” and, thus, a key institution in supporting the public sphere. Drawing on Zukin’s (1995) work, they defined the “public” in the following terms: “Public life is produced and reproduced by social practices that transpire in specific places-public places-and the library is certainly one of those enduring and successful public places” (Leckie & Hopkins, 2002, p. 332). They suggested that such places

are sites of neutral ground where people are free to come and go at their leisure and all feel welcomed. ... The primary activity is information exchange. . . . They operate beyond the regular weekday working hours. ... Ease of access is a prior- ity. ... They attract a regular clientele ... [and] the patrons themselves create a dynamic and animated ambience through their own activities, diversity, and vitality. (Leckie & Hopkins, 2002, p. 332)

Given and Leckie (2003) pursued these patrons and their diverse, vital activities more systematically in a related study that drew on geographic methods of a different sort. Arguing that “the spatial data collection and analysis techniques used by geographers and other social scientists to investigate research questions relating to shopping malls and other social spaces are currently underused in LIS research,” they asked “what uses do individuals actually make of the public space of central libraries” (p. 366)? Through careful “seating sweeps” research they explored the interior space-time of their case sites, revealing the daily time-geography of patron numbers (how many?), demographics (what


social groups?), locations (where did they go?), transported possessions (what did they carry?), and activities (what did they do?). In a similar way, Sandvig (2003) traced the cyberspace time-space movements of children using library-provided Internet access terminals. His study produced some surprising findings. In the realm of the physical, he found that “children often share the computers a t the center . . . they are always aware of other users and often watch them. In doing so, they learn about computers from strangers” (p. 179). And in the realm of the virtual, he argued that

While justifications for Internet access in inner cities often rest on claims of educational benefit, in the EDC [the Electronic Discovery Center in San Francisco, the case study site], content that is explicitly educational was often avoided. In the EDC the Internet appears to be used most often as an active medium of play and leisure. (p. 179)

Such research prods practitioners to “remember to consider users’ real, necessary activities, creating policies and areas within libraries that fit their needs and expectations of libraries as places that are socially constructed by the myriad of activities and interactions taking place within them” (Given and Leckie, 2003, p. 384).

In a sense, these studies of user activity in the space-time of the physical library are similar to long-standing LIS studies of the way users interact with online information resources in space and time in nonli- brary contexts, such as the workplace and the home. For example, recent work by Gorman, Lavelle, Delcambre, and Maier (2002, p. 1246) noted that their users of virtual medical records missed the physical cues of browsing-“size, thickness, color, wear and tear of pages”-that they had previously experienced with paper files. And a recent study by Rieh (2004, p. 744) argued that accessing virtual information from household spaces was worthy of scrutiny because “home is considered to be a socially defined setting rather than merely a physical setting in which people play diverse social roles while engaging in various social activities.” Her findings, although limited, suggested that “home provides a unique interaction situation in which people conduct searches on the Web in ways different from searching in public settings such as work- places, schools, and libraries” (p. 752). All of these studies share common ground by investigating the border between the virtual and the physical in practices of information use within different geographical (social, spatial, and temporal) contexts.

This kind of research fits into Wiegand‘s (2003, p. 372) call for more attention to the process of reading and the “library as place” within LIS. Wiegand (p. 372) wrote:

To understand values the larger public assigns to the library ... it might be more illuminating to focus on the


library in the life of the user, especially in the areas of “place” and “reading,” both of which have already found comfortable homes in American Studies scholarship.

In fact, he pointed not only to American Studies, but also to political communication and community studies (from the classic work of Jiirgen Habermas to the recent work of Robert Putnam). Similarly, library professionals and researchers calling for libraries to take their “place at the table” in their local communities (McCook, 2000, p. 1) have often grounded their arguments in claims that libraries foster civic engagement and enact the ideal of the public sphere. But these efforts leave geography out of the mix. This is unfortunate, for, as Wiegand (2003, p. 374) pointed out, libraries can be conceptualized geographically not only as a reductionist ((source and site for the act of reading,” but also dialectically as a “place” that “influences community honesty and social trust” in the process of reproducing social capital. Similarly, although Leckie and Hopkins (2002, p. 330) recited the customary complaints of critical geographers in an attempt to illustrate the development potential of strong central public libraries-vilifjmg the automobile, the shopping mall, and gated communities as disasters for urban sustainability and social justice-they exhibited a rather reductionist view of the supposed decentralizing impact of the “information economy” on urban space, writing that

Due to the rapid transmission of electronic information from one place to any other place, location is becoming irrel- evant, and the emergent urban landscape is freed from conventional restrictions imposed by space. Cities are thus increasingly decentralized, fragmented, and seemingly organized by chance.

A corrective to this totalizing view might be found in the LIS literature on community networks and community technology centers, which focuses attention on the way ICTs arranged through certain ICAs can help bolster community social capital rather than fragment it. In their preface to a special issue of The Information Society focused on this topic, Huysman and Wulf (2005, p. 82) argue that “by addressing in more detail how people relate to one another, how shared practices emerge, and how communities evolve, we will be able to understand better if, when, how, and why such communities use or do not use technologies.” Case studies are the usual methods employed, such as the work of Pettigrew, Durrance, and Unruh (2002) who observed, surveyed, and interviewed users of three community information networks: NorthStarNet in northeastern Illinois, Three Rivers Free-Net in Pittsburgh, and CascadeLink in Portland, Oregon. What they found was that social ties of community were often invoked by individuals who used the network: “Several respondents described how they spoke about


their information need o r situation with a social tie before searching online” or even performed online searches “on behalf of another person (e.g., a relative, friend), and not always at that person’s behest” (p. 899). In a similar investigation, Kavanaugh, Reese, Carroll, and Rosson (2005, p. 128) studied community network users in the “wired city” of Blacksburg, Virginia, and found that

Heavy Internet users with bridging ties [that is, weak social ties to many diverse individuals] have higher social engagement, have greater use of the Internet for social purposes, and have been attending more local meetings and events since going online than non-bridges who use the Internet heavily.

This work illustrates well that reductionisthubstitution arguments, according to which time online is automatically either spent away from community or spent building community, are too simplistic.

These and other findings point to the value of relational, dialectical methods in considering the use of ICTs in conjunction with other forms of information seeking in place-the idea that “cyberspace fights against physical space less than it complements it” (Wellman, 2001, p. 247). As Venkatesh (2003, p. 345) argued in The Information Society’s special issue on community networks, simply counting and mapping these new spaces is no longer enough: “As befits a maturing field, we need to go beyond Adamic discovery and naming exercises to robust, theoretically informed accounts of community network development as socially embedded and socially constructed artifacts.” In doing so, LIS researchers often debunk the notion that such projects, because of their networked nature, can magically thrive without sustained attention from the state. Servon and Nelson (2001, p. 421) described community technology centers in Portland, Austin, and Seattle to argue that these places “have the potential to provide part of a solution to bridging the technology gap, particularly in low-income, urban communities.” But, they noted, this technological fix can only do so much on its own: ”to think of community-based efforts as the sole bridging solution raises expectations that they will not be able to deliver. Public sector support is necessary to nurture and promote these efforts” (p. 421).

The same caveat holds for the socially embedded and socially constructed artifacts called libraries-long-standing ICAs that, like the newer community technology centers, must now produce and construct new relations between physical and virtual space. Atkinson (2001, p. 7) has noted the peculiar contradiction that in a digital universe of distributed, electronic documents,

the less important the geographical dispersal and location of objects are for the user, the more important the network of locations becomes for the library. Such a “placeless” culture of


research is only possible if someone behind the scenes is paying a great deal of attention to the geographical places where objects are kept. (p. 8)

In a similar vein, he suggested that in a perfect world of digital information access, physical information spaces might become more, not less, important:

Precisely because of the increased role of computer- mediated communication, each academic institution, and presumably each civic community, will need an agora of some kind-a central place where people can meet face to face and can work together, using digital and other information objects. (p. 8)

However, Atkinson defined “information” as reductionist “objects” and “knowledge” as “private and personal’’-a move resulting in an individ- ualistic, consumption-oriented definition of “information services” as those that “assist individual users in locating and making use of.. . information objects” (p. 3). His argument thus fell prey to a third geographical tension, as he both attempted to justify the continued existence of libraries by appealing to their provision of “public or collective benefit” and assumed that they would be maintained by “collectively created support” (p. 3). Yet, if the new geography of information is to be experienced individually, how can information professionals hope to build that geography collectively?

In the following year, D’Elia, Jorgensen, Woelfel, and Rodger (2002) explored that very question by conducting a telephone survey of some 3,000 adults to investigate the relationship between people’s use of the Internet and of the library. Their findings revealed a strong connection between the two worlds in the practice of their respondents: “75 percent of Internet users are library users and 60 percent of library users are Internet users” (p. 818). And their respondents voiced particular reasons for using each informational source: “Comments among the focus group participants who used both the library and the Internet suggested that the library is maintaining its edge in terms of such aspects as accuracy of information, privacy, and a place to go with children”; however, they also found that for people who use both the library and the Internet, “the library is already beginning to experience competition” in certain uses for which the Internet is chosen exclusively by these users (p. 818). Yet the connections between library space and cyberspace remain tantaliz- ingly vague. D’Elia et al.’s (p. 818) respondents indicated that they appreciated physical libraries in part because of the library‘s role in “providing for the dqgital have-nots”; moreover, in areas of competition between the two worlds, the authors admitted that “a critical distinction that cannot be made with this data is whether these preferences for Internet use represent new demands for information being satisfied by


the new provider or demands for information that were formerly met by the library.” All in all, the study defined libraries and the Internet on the basis of an aspatial “information service provision” model (really a “uses and gratifications” media model), which casts patrons as “consumers,” rather than on the basis of a “physical versus virtual space” model, which casts patrons as “citizens.”

But the very point of conceptualizing networked ICTs as “cyberspaces”-sites for social action-is that, especially over time, these ICTs are produced, maintained, and used for many purposes other than “information service provision.” The same holds true for ICAs like libraries-physical spaces where a variety of social processes take place in a mix that changes over time and space. Graham (1998, p. 180) reminds us that “we need to be extremely wary of the dangers of adopting, even implicitly, deterministic technological models and metaphors of technological change” and that “we need to be equally wary of the dangers of adopting simplistic concepts of space and place.” He warns that “only by maintaining linked, relational conceptions of both new information and communication technologies and space and place will we ever approach a full understanding of the inter-relationships between them” (p. 181). Two surprising threads of recent research in geography might offer some help through this thicket.

An example of the first strand of research is provided by Adams and Ghose (20031, who explored the virtual and transnational community sustained by many Indian citizens living in the United States. In the course of their study, they pointed to the contradiction that “technologies that appear to collapse space and time can make any community (including an ethnic community) seem more close-knit, and therefore closer to the ideal” (p. 415). Here again, a contradiction was revealed through the time-space reorganizations of ICTs: “Ironically, when ‘place-transcending’ technologies facilitate the creation of ties through space and reduce the separation between here and there, negating place, this can strengthen a sense of ethnic identity, which implies a tie between self and place” (p. 415). In exploring this contradiction, Adams and Ghose (p. 419) did not use the idea of “cyberspace,” but what they termed “bridgespace,” in other words, “a collection of interconnected virtual places that support people’s movement between two regions or countries and the sustenance of cultural ties a t a distance.” Bridgespace is made up of both networked ICTs and mass media products such as music CDs and “Bollywood’ films, precisely as these networks and products are used to connect real social communities in real geographical sites. Adams and Ghose not only drew on both mass media research and social informatics, but also brought these fields into effective dialogue with geography by observing that ‘hot only are technologies appropriated differently in different places, because of cultural differences, but that people in essence make different kinds of spaces in technologies” (433).


An example of the second strand of research comes from Dodge and Kitchin (2005, p. 1621, who have, in a similar vein, moved from analyzing cyberspace to defining what they call “codelspace”: “Despite the growing use and pervasiveness of [software] code in contemporary society, code and its effects on the production of space have largely been ignored by geographers in favor of studying the technologies and infrastructures that code facilitates.” They conceptualize code as “embedded in everyday objects, infrastructures, and processes” (p. 162) and basi- cally follow an actor-network approach to thinking through the place of “code” in society at different scales. Mediated in part by this now ubiq- uitous code, they argue, “the relationship between human and technology is complex, contingent, relational, and productive” (p. 169). Understanding codelspace begins with everyday practice:

Code enables everyday acts to occur, such as watching television, using the Internet, traveling across a city, buying goods, making transnational phone calls, operating health- care equipment, and withdrawing money from an ATM. While some of these practices were possible before the inven- tion of code, code is now vital to their operation, and in some cases possible only through the work of code. (p. 170)

The epitome of codelspace is thus a social situation in which “coded objects, infrastructures, and processes have entirely replaced older (wholly manual, electromechanical) systems, meaning that they can no longer be undertaken in an alternative way” (p. 173).

Now consider, for a moment, what these two recent examples from the geographical literature might have to offer the study of both physical libraries and the virtual information spaces connected to libraries. In addition to thinking about libraries as sites where the digital divides of information spaces might be leveled out, sites where the agencies of community information networks might be housed, or places where the quality of activities and surroundings affords the growth of social capital, we might think about libraries as sites of “bridgespace” and “codelspace.” Libraries, serving both as access points to electronic networks and as distribution points for both print and electronic media commodities, provide the ideal location for activities that can bring transnational communication together with transnational media consumption. But this can happen only if these ICAs recognize and orient themselves toward cohesive social groups within their local community service areas that might be able to make use of such bridging tools. Similarly, libraries, currently filled with both public-access computers and staff-only systems, are already profoundly integrated coded spaces, as almost every function of indexing, cataloging, processing and planning has moved into the orbit of electronic algorithms. Yet libraries also remain one of the few sites that defend the process of reading, conversing, meeting, and browsing against the intrusion of that most severe


manifestation of codelspace, where the only way to acquire information or engage in entertainment is through code-mediated technologies. Putting the physical library in opposition to a virtual cyberspace is both reductionist research and self-defeating policy. Thinking through the many ways that libraries might uniquely engage with cyberspace-roles as effective bridgespaces and carefully limited codelspaces are only two possibilities-is, to my mind, the best way that geographic ideas might engage with the LIS agenda.

Fortunately, that agenda is already broad enough to allow such relational work. In their set of wide-ranging essays on the social and contingent nature of classification, Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star (1999) revealed how supposedly scientific and objective systems of classification are actually normative, contradictory, and cultural. Such work, situated at the center of the field of science and technology studies, already provides one disciplinary bridge with LIS (Van House, 2004). But when Bowker and Star suggested that such socially constructed classification schemes might actually become embodied in physical and virtual space, they invoked the geographical imagination as well. We might call such space “classification space,” using this term to specify spaces, places, and scales that depend on classification for their use, meaning, and value. Bowker and Star (1999, p. 3) themselves referred to “the material force of categories”:

Try the simple experiment of ignoring your gender classification and use instead whichever toilets are nearest; try to locate a library book shelved under the wrong Library of Congress catalogue number; stand in the immigration queue at a busy foreign airport without the right passport or arrive without the transformer and the adaptor that translates between electrical standards.

Just as codelspace is invisibly present in our digitally mediated lives, so is classification space invisibly present in our knowledge-structured lives, making up what Bowker and Star refer to as “infrastructure” (p. 35). And just as bridgespace provides a site for translation between disparate and social worlds, Bowker and Star’s classification spaces would necessarily contain what they refer to as “boundary objects,” such as information artifacts that are, again, “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites“ (p. 297). Expanding on Bowker and Star’s metaphors t o conceptualize spaces of Classification in this way is no mere linguistic exercise: as they themselves point out, “we need a richer vocabulary than that of standardiza- tion or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and the processual nature of information ecologies” (p. 293).

For those researchers (and practitionere) who attempt to focus on the social aspects of information production, organization, distribution, and


consumption within such “information ecologies,” thinking geographically can help to define those ecologies in a way that can bridge the gap between the “L” and the “IS” in LIS. Geographical analysis suggests that libraries are not just places in the sense of cultural, social, and commu- nal sites, but also serve as spaces of important but fragmented social action, connected to endless digital realms and diverse representational schemes. Interfaces and algorithms are not just more or less efficient ways of storing, accessing, distributing, and evaluating information, but systems that create spatialities of their own, both in abstract representational ways and in concrete experiential ways. And increasingly the social processes that revolve around the production, distribution, and consumption of “information” itself work in, and through, both physical and virtual spaces, through both social networks and technological networks, in such complicated ways that mapping the overlap, the intersection, and the doorways between such spaces is crucial.

LIS researchers are well aware of the difficulties encountered when information artifacts formerly available only in material form-as books and periodicals printed on varying-quality paper, analog audio recordings on magnetic tape, or images on celluloid and microfilm-are sud- denly able to be translated into “virtual” form through digital sampling, storage, distribution, and display. The challenge now is to find ways of theorizing, conceptualizing, and studying what happens when human social processes move from material places, spaces, and scales to virtual ones. Not only can human geography help in this pursuit, but it, in turn, can learn much from the long tradition of LIS research. Over 20 years ago, Harvey (1984, p. 11) argued that “geography is too important to be left to geographers. But it is far too important to be left to generals, politicians, and corporate chiefs. . . . There is more to geography than the production of knowledge and personnel to be sold as commodities to the highest bidder.” Today, geographical knowledge and data (especially mustered through GIS) threatens to be appropriated in the service of reinforcing technologically determinist, normative capitalist myths such as the inevitable networking of society into a global market and media, the decentralizing destruction of physical concentrations of people and texts, and the uncritical acceptance of the necessary secrecy of all sorts of private and government information. Yet, as Sui (2004, p. 67) has observed,

Geography is a fertile ground for crossing the traditional boundaries of science, social theory, technology, and the humanities, and capacious imaginations will be required to realize the potential of GIS to better understand-and, in some limited cases, even solve-scientific problems, illumi- nate social injustices, and feed the human spirit.

If researchers, professionals, and activists within the LIS community are to question, manage, and challenge the assumptions that would


shake their foundations and undermine their mission, they too must have more than a passing understanding of geography. And I hope that intellectual laborers within geography continue to give them more than a passing glance as well.

References Abbott, L. T., & Argentati, C. D. (1995). GIS: A new component of public services. Journal

ofAcademic Librarianship, 21, 251-256.

Adams, P. C., & Ghose, R. (2003). 1ndia.com: The construction of a space between. Progress in Human Geography, 27, 414-437.

Adkins, D., & Bala, E. (2004). Public library outreach as a function of staf€ing and metropolitan location. Library & Information Science Research, 26, 338-350.

Adkins, D., & Sturges, D. K. (2004). Library service planning with GIS and census data. Public Libraries, 43, 165-170.

Anderson, S. A. (2003). “The place to go”: The 135th Street Branch Library and the Harlem Renaissance. Library Quarterly, 73, 383-421.

Aoyama, Y. (2003). Sociospatial dimensions of technology adoption: Recent m-commerce and e-commerce developments. Enuironment and Planning A, 35, 1201-1221.

Aoyama, Y., & Sheppard, E. (2003). The dialectics of geographic and virtual space. Enuironment and Planning A, 35, 1151-1156.

Atkinson, R. (2001). Contingency and contradiction: The place(s) of the library at the dawn of the new millennium. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and nchnology, 52,3-11.

Benedikt, B. (Ed.). (1991). Cyberspace: First steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Benner, C. (2003). Learning communities in a learning region: The soft infrastructure of cross-firm learning networks in Silicon Valley. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1809-1830.

Benoit, G. (2002). Toward a critical theoretic perspective in information systems. Library Quarterly, 72, 441-471.

Benton Foundation. (1997). Buildings, books, and bytes: Libraries and communities in the digital age. Library Dends, 46, 178-223.

Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Boxall, J. (2003). Geolibraries: Geographers, librarians and spatial collaboration. The Canadian Geographer, 47, 18-27.

Boyer, K. (2004). “Miss Remington” goes to work Gender, space, and technology at the dawn of the information age. The Professional Geographer, 56,201-212.

Brown, B., & O’Hara, K. (2003). Place as a practical concern of mobile workers. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1565-1587.

Buschman, J. E. (2003). Dismantling the public sphere: Situating and sustaining librarianship in the age o f the new public philosophy. Westport, C T Libraries Unlimited.

Carlin, A. P. (2003). Disciplinary debates and bases of interdisciplinary studies: The place of research ethics in library and information science. Library & Information Science Research, 25, 3-18.


Castells, M. (1989). The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process. New York: Blackwell.

Castells, M. (2000). Grassrooting the space of flows. In J. 0. Wheeler, Y. Aoyama, & B. Warf (Eds.), Cities in the telecommunications age: The fracturing of geographies (pp. 18-27). New York: Routledge.

Chitwood, J. (1967). Library and community: Community analysis, population characteristics, community growth, governmental relationships, library site criteria. In R. J. Shaw (Ed.), Libraries: Building for the future (pp. 23-28). Chicago: American Library Association.

Christopherson, S. (2002). Project work in context: Regulatory change and the new geography of media. Environment and Planning A, 34,2003-2015.

Craig, W. J., & Elwood, S. A. (1998). How and why community groups use maps and geographic information. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 25, 95-104.

Currah, A. (2002). Behind the Web store: The organisational and spatial evolution of multi-

D’Elia, G., Jorgensen, C., Woelfel, J., & Rodger, E. J. (2002). The impact of the Internet on public library use: An analysis of the current consumer market for library and Internet services. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53,

Day, R. E. (2005). Poststructuralism and information studies. Annual Review of Information Studies and Technology, 39, 575-609.

Dear, M., & Flusty, S. (2002). Introduction: How to map a radical break. In M. Dear & S. Flusty (Eds.), The spaces of postmodernity: Readings in human geography (pp. 1-12). Oxford, UK Blackwell.

Dodge, M., & Kitchin, R. (2005). Code and the transduction of space. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95, 162-180.

Dorman, D. C. (2002). GIS provides a new way of seeing service areas. American Libraries, 33(2), 62-63.

Dutton, W. H., Blumler, J. G., & Kraemer, K. L. (1987). Continuity and change in conceptions of the wired city. In W. H. Dutton, J. G. Blumler, & K. L. Kraemer (Eds.), Wired cities: Shaping the future of communications (pp. 3-26). Boston: G.K. Hall & Go.

Ellis, D., Oldridge, R., & Vasconcelos, A. (2004). Community and virtual community. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 145-186.

Gandy, M. (2005). Cyborg urbanization: Complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 ,2649 .

Gibbs, J., Kraemer, K. L., & Dedrick, J. (2003). Environment and policy factors shaping global e-commerce diffusion: A cross-country comparison. The Information Society, 19(1), 5-18.

Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, C A Stanford University

Girard, M., & Stark, D. (2002). Distributing intelligence and organizing diversity in new-

channel retailing in Toronto. Environment and Planning A, 34, 1411-1441.

802-820.

Press.

media projects. Environment and Planning A, 34, 1927-1949.

space of the public library. Library & Information Science Research, 25,365-385.

tial information needs. Library Quarterly, 66, 408-448.

Given, L. M., & Leckie, G. J. (2003). “Sweeping” the library: Mapping the social activity

Gluck, M., Danley, E., & Lahmon, J. (1996). Public librarians’ views of the public’s geospa-


Gorman, P., Lavelle, M., Delcambre, L., & Maier, D. (2002). Following experts at work in their own information spaces: Using observational methods to develop tools for the digital library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Ilkchnology, 53,

Goss, J . (1995). "We know who you are and we know where you live": The instrumental

Grabher, G. (2002). Fragile sector, robust practice: Project ecologies in new media.

Graham, S. (1998). The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space,

Graham, S. (2000). Introduction: Cities and infrastructure networks. International Journal

1245-1250.

rationality of geodemographic systems. Economic Geography, 71, 171-198.

Environment and Planning A, 34, 1911-1926.

place and information technology. Progress in Human Geography, 22, 165-185.

of Urban and Regional Research, 24, 114-119.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25,405-410.

places. London: Routledge.

to the commercial Internet. The Professional Geographer, 54, 259-278.

Graham, S. (2001). Information technologies and reconfigurations of urban space.

Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the city: Electronic spaces, urban

Grubesic, T. H., & OKelly, M. E. (2002). Using points of presence to measure accessibility

Harley, J. B. (1989). Deconstructing the map. Cartographica, 26, 1-20.

Harvey, D. (1973). Social justice and the city. Oxford, U K Basil Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1982). The limits to capital. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (1984). On the history and present conditions of geography: An historical mate- rialist manifesto. The Professional Geographer, 3,l-11.

change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature, and the geography of difference. Cambridge, MA:

Harvey, D. (2004). Retrospect on The Limits to Capital. Antipode, 36, 544-549.

Hornbeck, D., Earle, C., & Rodrigue, C. M. (1996). The way we were: Deployments (and redeployments) of time in human geography. In C. Earle, K. Mathewson, & M. S. Kenzer (Eds.), Concepts in human geography (pp. 33-61). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Huysman, M., & Wulf, V. (2005). The role of information technology in building and sustaining the relational base of communities. The Information Society, 21, 81-90.

Janelle, D. G. (1991). Global interdependence and its consequences. In S. D. Brunn & T. R. Leinbach (Eds.), Collapsing space and time: Geographic aspects of communication and information (pp. 49-81). London: Harper Collins Academic.

Jeong, W., & Gluck, M. (2003). Multimodal geographic information systems: Adding haptic and auditory display. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and lkchnology, 54,229-242.

Jue, D. K., Koontz, C. M., Magpantay, J. A., Lance, K. C., & Seidl, A. M. (1999). Using public libraries to provide technology access for individuals in poverty: A nationwide analysis of library market areas using a geographic information system. Library & Information Science Research, 21, 299-325.

Kavanaugh, A., Reese, D., Carroll, J., & Rosson, M. (2005). Weak ties in networked communities. The Information Society, 21, 119-131.


Kitchin, R., & Kneale, J. (2001). Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geo-

Kitchin, R., & Tate, N. J. (2000). Thinking about research. In R. Kitchin & N. J. Tate,

Kling, R. (Ed.). (1996). Computerization and controversy: Value conflicts and social choices

Koontz, C. M. (1997). Library facility siting and location handbook. Westport, C T

Koontz, C. M., Jue, D. K, McClure, C. M., & Bertot, J. C. (2004). The public library geographic database: What can it do for you and your library? Public Libraries, 43,113-118.

Leckie, G. J., & Hopkins, J. (2002). The public place of central libraries: Findings from Toronto and Vancouver. Library Quarterly, 72, 326-372.

Leitner, H., & Sheppard, E. (2002). “The city is dead, long live the net”: Harnessing European interurban networks for a neoliberal agenda. Antipode, 34,495-518.

Leyshon, A. (2001). Time-space (and digital) compression: Software formats, musical networks, and the reorganisation of the music industry. Environment and Planning A, 33, 49-77.

Li, F., Whalley, J., & Williams, H. (2001). Between physical and electronic spaces: The implications for organisations in the networked economy. Environment and Planning A, 33, 699-716.

Lievrouw, L. A,, & Farb, S. E. (2003). Information and equity. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 37, 499-540.

Lim, E.-P., Liu, Z., Yin, M., Goh, D. H.-L., Theng, Y. L., & Ng, W. K. (2005). On organizing and accessing geospatial and georeferenced Web resources using the G-Portal system. Information Processing & Management, 41, 1277-1297.

Martell, C. (1999). Human geography/cyber geography. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 25, 50-51.

McCook, K. (2000). A place at the table: Participating in community building. Chicago: American Library Association.

Mihalache, A. (2002). The cyber space-time continuum: Meaning and metaphor. The Information Society, 18, 293-301.

Mitchell, W. J. (1995). City of bits: Space, place, and the infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Molz, R. K., & Dain, P. (1999). Civic spacelcyberspace: The American public library in the information age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Murphy, A. J. (2003). (&)solving space and time: Fulfilment issues in online grocery retailing. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1173-1200.

Niles, S., & Hanson, S. (2003). The geographies of online job search: Preliminary findings from Worcester, MA. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1223-1243.

6 Riain, S., Parthasarathy, B., & Zook, M. A. (2004). Flows and filters: The politics of ICT regions in a global economy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28, 617-620.

Openshaw, S. (1991). A view on the GIS crisis in geography, or, using GIS to put Humpty

Orr, J . E. (1996). Talking about machines: An ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, IW

graphies of the new millennium. Progress in Human Geography, 25, 19-35.

Conducting research in human geography (pp. 1-27). New York Prentice-Hall.

(2nd ed.). San Diego, CA Academic Press.

Greenwood.

Dumpty back together again. Environment and Planning A, 23,6214328.

Cornell University Press.


Ottensmann, J. R. (1997). Using geographic information systems to analyze library utiliza- tion. Library Quarterly, 67, 24-49.

Pettigrew, K. E., Durrance, J. C., & Unruh, K. T. (2002). Facilitating community information seeking using the Internet: Findings from three public library-community network systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53, 894-902.

Pickles, J. (1999). Social and cultural cartographies and the spatial turn in social theory. Journal of Historical Geography, 25, 93-98.

Rieh, S. Y. (2004). On the Web at home: Information seeking and Web searching in the home environment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55,743-754.

Rorty, R. (Ed.). (1967). The linguistic turn: Essays in philosophical method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sandvig, C. (2003). Public Internet access for young children in the inner city: Evidence to inform access subsidy and content regulation. The Information Society, 19, 171-184.

Sawyer, S., & Eschenfelder, K. R. (2002). Social informatics: Perspectives, examples, and trends. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 36,427-466.

Schoenberger, E. (1997). The cultural crisis of the firm. Cambridge, IVW Blackwell

Schoenberger, E. (1998). Discourse and practice in human geography. Progress in Human

Schoenberger, E. (2001). Interdisciplinarity and social power. Progress in Human

Schoenberger, E. (2004). The spatial fK revisited. Antipode, 36, 427-433. Schumpeter, J. A. (1942). Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York Harper &

Servon, L. J., & Nelson, M. K. (2001). Community technology centers and the urban tech-

Sheppard, E. (1995). GIS and society: Towards a research agenda. Cartography and

Sheppard, E. (2001). Quantitative geography: Representations, practices, and possibilities.

Sheppard, E. (2004). The spatiality of The Limits to Capital. Antipode, 36, 470-479. Smith, L. C., & Gluck, M. (Eds.). (1996). Geographic information systems and libraries:

Geography, 22, 1-14.

Geography, 25,365-382.

Brothers.

nology gap. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25,419426.

Geographic Information Systems, 22, 5-16.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19,535-554.

Patrons, maps, and spatial information. Urbana: University of Illinois.

Smith, N. (1990). Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space (2nd ed.). New York Blackwell.

Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387-420.

Stolfi, F., &i Sussman, G. (2001). Telecommunications and transnationalism: The polariza- tion of social space. The Information Society, 17,4942.

Strover, S. (2003). Remapping the digital divide. The Information Society, 19,275-277. Sui, D. 2. (2004). GIs, cartography, and the “third culture”: Geographic imaginations in the

computer age. The Professional Geographer, 56,62-72.


Ueno, N., & Kawatoko, Y. (2003). Technologies making space visible. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1529-1545.

Van House, N. A. (2004). Science and technology studies and information studies. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 3 8 , 3 4 6 .

Venkatesh, M. (2003). The community network lifecycle: A framework for research and action. The Information Society, 19, 339-347.

Watters, C., & Amoudi, G. (2003). GeoSearcher: Location-based ranking of search engine results. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Zkchnology, 54,

Wellman, B. (2001). Physical place and cyberplace: The rise of personalized networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25,227-252.

Wiegand, W. A. (1999). Tunnel vision and blind spots: What the past tells us about the present; Reflections on the twentieth-century history of American librarianship. Library Quarterly, 69, 1-32.

Wiegand, W. A. (2003). To reposition a research agenda: What American studies can teach the LIS community about the library in the life of the user. Library Quarterly, 73,

Wills, J., Cumbers, A,, & Berndt, C. (2000). The workplace a t the millennium: New geographies of employment. Environment and Planning A, 32, 1523-1528.

Wilson, L. R. (1938). The geography of reading: A study of the distribution and status of libraries in the United States. Chicago: American Library Association and University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, M. (2003). Chips, bits, and the law: An economic geography of Internet gambling. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1245-1260.

Winchester, H. P. M. (2000). Qualitative research and its place in human geography. In I. Hay (Ed.), Qualitative research methods in human geography (pp. 1-20). Oxford, U K Oxford University Press.

Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Xia, J. (2004). Using GIS to measure in-library book-use behavior. Information Technology and Libraries, 23, 184-191.

Zellmer, L. (2004). How homeland security affects spatial information. Computers in Libraries, 24, 6-8, 37-40.

Zook, M. A. (2000). The Web of production: The economic geography of commercial Internet content production in the United States. Environment and Planning A, 32,411-426.

Zook, M. A. (2006). The geography of the Internet. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 40, 53-78.

Zukin, S. (1995). The cultures of cities. Cambridge, M A Blackwell.

140-151.

369-383.

human geography and information studies

Documents