Neogeography

Neogeography (literally "new geography") is the use of geographical techniques and tools for personal and community activities or by a non-expert group of users. Application domains of neogeography are typically not formal or analytical.

From the point of view of human geography, neogeography could be also defined as the use of new specific information society tools, especially the Internet, to the aims and purposes of Geography as an academic discipline; in all branches of geographical thought and incorporating contributions from outside of Geography performed by non-specialist users in this discipline through the use of specific geographic ICT tools. This new definition, complementing previous ones, restores to academic Geography the leading role it should play when considering a renewal of the discipline with the rigor and right granted by its centuries-existence, but also includes the interesting social phenomenon of citizen participation in the geographical knowledge from its dual role: as undoubted possibility of enrichment for Geography and as social phenomenon with geographic interest.

The term neogeography has been used since at least 1922. In the early 1950s in the U.S. it was a term used in the sociology of production & work. The French philosopher François Dagognet used it in the title of his 1977 book Une Epistemologie de l'espace concret: Neo-geographie. The word was first used in relation to the study of online communities in the 1990s by Kenneth Dowling, the Librarian of the City and County of San Francisco. Immediate precursor terms in the industry press were: "the geospatial Web" and "the geoaware Web" (both 2005); "Where 2.0" (2005); "a dissident cartographic aesthetic" and "mapping and counter-mapping" (2006). These terms arose with the concept of Web 2.0, around the increased public appeal of mapping and geospatial technologies that occurred with the release of such tools as "slippy maps" such as Google Maps, Google Earth, and also with the decreased cost of geolocated mobile devices such as GPS units. Subsequently, the use of geospatial technologies began to see increased integration with non-geographically focused applications.

The term neogeography was first defined in its contemporary sense by Randall Szott in 2006. He argued for a broad scope, to include artists, psychogeography, and more. The technically oriented aspects of the field, far more tightly defined than in Scott's definition, were outlined by Andrew Turner in his Introduction to Neogeography (O'Reilly, 2006). The contemporary use of the term, and the field in general, owes much of its inspiration to the locative media movement that sought to expand the use of location-based technologies to encompass personal expression and society.

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