Placing Technologies: Situated Histories of Geospatial Software

Abstract

Placing Technologies aims to place—that is, historically contextualize and situate—the production of digital technologies that translate physical reality into cartographic abstraction. Geospatial software (applications and products that can be used in computational analysis, manipulation, and visualization of geospatial data) has significant use-value to people but as a commodity tends to have low profit margins. While some of this is a result of inherent complexity and the maintenance costs common to all software, geospatial software is unusual among software products in that it has the added maintenance cost of collecting precise, up-to-date geographical information about the physical world, sometimes at planet-scale, and accurately reflect that world back to users. These costs contribute to geospatial software production relying on subsidy from institutional customers —often, the state, but also companies who derive indirect benefit from geospatial software like the automotive industry or technology platforms dependent on advertising revenue. Drawing from oral history interviews with software workers and archival media, this dissertation analyzes the political economies of desktop GIS, industrial personal navigation technology, and free and open source software (FOSS) for geospatial applications.