The speaker at this week's seminar will be Michael Curry from the Geography Department at UCLA. Michael has worked extensively on the geographical implications of information technology, including digital representations of space, privacy, geographical information systems, geodemographics, and more.

Abstract:

One important theme in recent schemes for the identification of terrorists and other threatening individuals has been the desire for certainty, the desire to avoid letting potential miscreants slip between the cracks. Common among those schemes has been a belief that what is needed is not the creation of statistical profiles but rather the mapping into the past of an individual's actions, and thereby the disclosure of the intersections of those actions with the actions of others. Resting in part on the newest of spatially- enabled technologies, they see certainty as guaranteed where there is, in principle, an unbroken chain from the coffin back to the cradle.

Often embodying sophisticated data-mining systems, these schemes have nonetheless been little theorized. But they in fact share much with recent work in sociology, philosophy, and geography, where in each case the possibility of "following people (or objects) around" has been promoted as basic to the possibility of certain knowledge, and where absence becomes as important as presence.