Joel Beeson has a Masters degree in Journalism with an emphasis in photojournalism, international communication and publication design. Beeson has worked as a freelance photojournalist for the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, and the AFP, AP, and UPI wire services. He is interested in cultural studies, documentary photography, ethnography and visual sociology. He has done research on the discourse of displacement, on maquiladora workers, and on visual ethnography.
Lonny Brooks has a Masters in library and information science from UCLA. For the past two years, Brooks has been studying computer mediated communication and the growth of the Internet for corporate and educational purposes. More recently, he has become interested in how corporate advertising affects public interest in computer use.
Marc Camras is a developmental psychologist with an MA from Harvard. Camras has spent 6 of the last 8 years doing work in social and educational development. Camras has been involved in the development and evaluation of in-school and after school programs for high risk youth.
perre dicarlo , whose BA is from the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, New York, locates himself as participant, performer, ethnographer, co-architect, artist, storyteller, and pedagogist. He was involved in three projects with many sets of communities in the Lower East Side of New York City. With a collaborator, dicarlo helped build a stone amphitheater with community gardeners of La Plaza Cultural. dicarlo and his collaborator also produced and performed poetry with groups of gardeners for annual processions, and they worked with children at the Lower East Side Magnet School and El Jardin del Paraiso to collectively build and refine model-size playground designs.
Tarleton Gillespie took his BA at Amherst College in 1994, where spent his junior and senior undergraduate years wrangling their English department around to studying popular culture and American mass media. His undergraduate thesis focused on television animation as a particular form of visual representation, one that (he argued) allows both more experimentation as a medium and an altered viewing experience that comments on how we experience television. Gillespie has spent the intervening year between his undergraduate work and joining the Communication department, working in Manhattan as a freelance production assistant on commercial shoots.
Chad Harris has a BA in Psychology and History from UC Riverside, and an MA in Political Science from Humboldt College. Harris is interested in propaganda in demographic societies, the political economy of mass media and television, the philosophical ramifications of new communication technologies, and the implications these new technologies have for the flow of information through society.
Sheila O'Rourke has a B.A. and an M.F.A. in Media Arts from UCSD. She began as an experimental video and performance artist producing work that addressed power and sexuality in a music historical context. From this foundation she began exploring ethnographic encounter as "performative interaction." During her residency in an Arab village in the Hatay province of Turkey in July and August, she began to develop her interests in such issues as : the forced assimilation of the Arab minority by the Turks; village gossip and ghost stories; and sexual lives that contradict assertions made by respected Western ethnographers.
Unalome Techamuanvivit (Pim) has a Masters degree in Communication from UCLA (with a focus on computer-mediated communication) and her BA in Speech Communication, from Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. For the past few years she has been working on computer-networking and communication and education. Her research interests revolve around the issue of how communication technology effects people, their lives, work and culture.
Kathryn Vann has a BA in Philosophy from Louisiana State University, an MA in social science interdisciplinary studies from San Francisco State. Her interests are centered around the primary question of what happens when an object, destined for a particular community, is made by intelligent actors. She is interested in the issue of how to characterize the reciprocities among material and semiotic culture, creative practice, and the logics of field negotiation, without over burdening the internal representational economy of individual actors. Her other concerns include developments in social science methodology and the visual and written representation involved there.
News Notes
Joel Beeson, one of the new graduate students, has
received an Alabama State Arts Council grant to document African
American community of blues musicians for Summer 1996.
Susan Davis' article on the international theme park industry, "Theme Parks: Global Industry and Cultural Form," was accepted by International Media, Culture and Society. At the beginning of summer Davis says she decided to drop everything except eating and sleeping and try to finish her Sea World book. Entitled, Spectacular Nature, the book deals with the production of nature in American commercial culture. It is scheduled to be finished and at U.C. Press by the end of the fall.
Joyce Evans has left Southern California to take a job with the Communication Department at the University of Indianna, Terre Haute.
DeeDee Halleck's film, The Gringo in Mananaland, was shown at the 52nd Annual Venice International Film Festival this year. (An interview with Halleck is available here).
Robert Horwitz has received a Fulbright Scholar Award under the African Regional Research Program. He will spend nine months in South Africa studying the politics of reform of that country's parastatal organizations telecommunications, broadcasting, electricity, and transportation.
Richard Jonasse recently published two papers. The first is entitled "The Forester's Eye: Technology, Techniques and Perceptions in Early American Forestry" and was published in the July/August issue of Alternatives: Perspectives on Science Technology and the Environment. The second is entitled "Collectively Seeing the Wind: Distributed Cognition in Smoke jumping" and was published in the Spring 1995 issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity.
Helene Keyssar is the recipient of a Rockefeller grant that will allow her to spend one month this fall at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, working on her book on American film, theater, and television, as well as on her novel about US- Soviet interactions. Keyssar will also spend time doing research in Switzerland and Paris.
Dan Schiller's book on the history of communication study, provisionally entitled Theorizing Communication: A Historical Reckoning, is forthcoming in 1996 from Oxford University Press.
Greg Stephens presented a paper at the ACM Conference in Santa Fe on May 25, entitled" The Communicative Culture of Multi-racial Audiences: Notes towards a Theory of Interracial Communication."
Sara Waterman will be spending fall quarter as a resident fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. The research group is called "Toward Common Frames: Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies." The group convenor is Professor Val Hartouni.
New Dissertations
This past Spring, five graduate students in the department finished
their dissertations and were awarded their doctorates
Cynthia Baur: Incommunicado: The Arrested Development of Telecommunication Systems in Latin America.
Claire Buchwald: New Work in Old Institutions: Collaborative Curriculum Work of a Teacher Team.
Kimberly J. Dilley: Not Just Sam Spade in a Skirt: Women Redefine the Heroic and Ordinary: Women's Detective Novels in Late 20th Century America.
Sarah Banet-Weiser: Crowning Identities: Performing Nationalism, Femininity and Race in U.S. Beauty Pageants.
Brett M. Rhyne: Efficiency, Empowerment, Control: Quality Management in Contemporary American Academia.
New Babies
This past Spring, five women in the graduate program finished projects
of a different sort:
Sarah Banet-Weiser had a baby boy on July 16th. His name is Lucas Benjamin Weiser, and he weighed in at 8 lbs. 2 oz., and 20 1/2 inches long.
Cynthia Baur had a baby girl on April 9th. Her name is Sophia Baur-Waisbord. Sophia weighed 8 lbs. 10 oz. at birth and she was 21 inches long.
Maribel Castaneda had a baby boy on June 28. Miguel Angel Paredes weighed in at 7 lbs. 13 oz. and was 20 inches long.
Meighan Maguire had a baby boy on August 7. Jager Evan Metz weighed in at 10 lbs, 9 ozs and was 22 inches long.
Jennifer Troutner had a baby girl on May 19th. Her name is Alexandra Joanne Smith. Alexandra weighed 6 lbs. 12 oz. at birth and she was 19 inches long.
GIS proponents tell a tale of a wondrous new technology that is
rapidly altering how we think about the world. A special advertising
section on GIS in a 1991 issue of Business Week puts it this way:
There is a quite revolution going on. It's a revolution that impacts
each of our lives, although few of us have heard anything about it. It
affects the rates we pay for utility services and the quality of our
roadways. It can influence the speed with which emergency vehicles
respond to our calls and how quickly criminals are put behind bars. It
can help prevent famine, blight, and pestilence. It has played a role
in planning and fighting wars and then rebuilding war-torn
communities. It is being used for applications as far flung as finding
delinquent tax-payers, developing pizza delivery routes and setting
insurance rates. It is even being used to increase the impact of the
"junk" mail you receive
2.
As with other information technologies, GIS has developed along
a path that falls short of its glorious potential as the savior of
humanity. Its applications tend instead to reinforce existing sets of
social relations. Among other things, these applications include state
surveillance for purposes of controlling land, resources, and people;
and the exercise of rational power- knowledge by business interests
over consumers. Indeed, GIS are primarily extensions, via new
technologies, of the techniques which have been practiced by these
interests for some time. Maps and files have been replaced with
computer graphics and database technology, and the means of gathering
information have been supplemented using new scientific techniques and
military surveillance spin-offs such as satellite technology. But,
like new technological developments in other areas, GIS also offers the
potential for resistance at the grass roots level for those who have
access to the various databases. I would like to provide a brief
overview of a few of the uses to which this technology is being applied
and gesture towards some of their implications.
Modern states have been using thematic mapping technologies for hundreds of years. Most notable in this regard is the cadastral map, which record land ownership and resource characteristics. These maps date back to ancient Mesopotamia, but resurfaced as a tool of the emerging modern state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were used to consolidate political power by aiding in the management of state resources such as forests and for property taxation purposes 3. GIS continues this trend with the aid of satellite spectroscopy to catalogue resources, and the spatialization of census and crime data for purposes of social control. Furthermore, just as cadastral maps were used to map colonial resources, this technology is used to survey resources in developing countries in order to acquire knowledge of them by countries and business interests who can afford expensive surveillance technology.
GIS technology can also be used to map health and environmental
information so that one might be able, for example, to visualize the
relationship between a paper mill, an aquifer, and cancer or
miscarriage rates. But these kinds of representations can be
misleading as well. Since a GIS contains software that translates
mathematical data into a spatial format, it can hide the way that
numbers have been "tweaked" so that the same set of information can be
presented in such a way that no "significant" correlation between the
paper mill and the cancer rates is revealed. Similarly, since
gradations of color are often used to display different numerical
values, colors can be manipulated to either enhance or downplay the
significance of statistical differences. We can expect to see GIS maps
more and more in policy debates, just as competing statistics have been
used in the past. One difference is that it is easier (although not
easy) to look at a set of numbers and realize that they are statistical
manipulations. People looking at data arrayed in a brightly colored
GIS representation are less likely to perceive the manipulations behind
the image.
The GIS visual language is much like other languages in that it is possible to say many things with it. While this "view from above" tends to obfuscate certain kinds of social relations, it can be used to bring others to light. I have already mentioned the possibility of charting the dispersion and heath effects of industrial toxins. It has also been used by community groups as a weapon in urban land use battles. It can be used to show income disparity as well. All three of these--industrial toxins, land use, and resource allocation--can also be displayed in conjunction with the location of racialized or indigenous communities in political actions (but I've yet to see a GIS advertisement that celebrates these kinds of applications). GIS has also been helpful in providing proof that global warming is indeed occurring and may be helpful in showing the relation between deforestation and changing weather patterns.
The diversity of "problems" to which GIS applied is broad enough that critical scholars should at least be aware of it. The amount and range of critical analysis done on GIS has thus far been relatively limited--primarily to the very interesting work being done by Marxist geographers--but, given the fact that it is a permanent phenomenon in our cultural environment and will continue to grow in prominence, we can expect that to change. One aspect of GIS that merits attention is its propensity for purely quantitative analyses, which tend to reify the causes of socio-ecological problems by masking the social relations that have created them. Another area of interest may lie in the very complex relations between GIS representations of space and the (social) production of social spaces. As Henri Lefebvre, among others, has argued, maps have a way of prefiguring the spaces that they purport to represent and control of space is one of the keys to social power 7. Finally, we might ask what are the cultural ramification of seeing the world through GIS representations? GIS is not simply a tool for representing the world. It is a particular kind of tool geared towards particular kinds of representations--and planning decisions will increasingly be made based upon these visions of the world.
This brief sketch just scratches the surface of the hundreds of applications to which GIS is being applied. In general, GIS is used to: 1)bring together and apply spatial data about land (resources), the people on it, and the infrastructure, and 2) bring together different environmental datasets. Most importantly it is a tool for managing people and resources. One thing is clear. GIS is not so much a new revolution in thought as a technology which facilitates practices and sets of social relations that have been in place for some time. GIS is new however in that it enables the assembly, presentation, and use of information on an unprecedented scale, while continuing to restrict access to information to those with sufficient resources and technical knowledge.
References
1
Maguire, David J.,
"An Overview and Definition of GIS."
eds. David J. Maguire, Michael F Goodchild, and David W Rhind
in
Geographical Information Systems: Principles and Applications.
New York: John Wiley and Sons. 1991.
2
Business Week.
"GIS: Special Advertising Section."
Business Week. (July, 1) 1991.
3
Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent.
Cadastral Mapping in the Service of the State.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1992).
4
Business Week. (July, 1) 1991
5
Goss, Jon.
"'We Know Who You Are and We Know Where You live':
The Instrumental Rationality of Geodemographic Systems".
in
Economic Geography 71,2 (April 1995).
6 ibid.
7
Lefebvre, Henri.
The Production of Space
Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1991.
If you wish to contribute to the newsletter or have suggestions for us, please contact Bruce Jones (bjones@ucsd.edu) 619/534-0417 at the Department of Communication, UCSD (FAX 619/534-7315).