Neogeography
The use of the term “neogeography” serves as a shorthand for a range of technical practices and attitudes that embrace ludic and everyday uses of geospatial technologies, amid their general proliferation. While the origins of the early-21st-century use of the term is often attributed to a post on the website Platial by Di-Ann Eisnor in 2006, neogeography has a more extended, if punctuated, provenance. This article will take up this more recent emergence to overview the conditions through which neogeography becomes a response to variants of academic and industrial mapmaking. Neogeography, as a more recent attitude or response, operates at a different rhythm than that of academic publication, and, as such, an overview of the efforts nominally considered neogeographic requires a broader understanding of the modes of production—academic and industrial—as these ideas proliferate. As part of this broadened understanding, this article places neogeography within a continuity of discussions that gained traction in the mid-1990s, under the umbrella subfield of GIS and society. This includes specific debates around participation and democracy, privacy and pervasiveness, and commodification and connectivity. Those promoting the idea of neogeography tend to do so in absence of the history of the industries and academic fields that led to its early-21st-century provenance. This overview article is meant to establish some foundations for such departures.