Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Forty Years of Planning the Future of Manchester: The Key Plans from 1926-1967

    MCR Plans

    “A series of key public planning documents and maps relating to the city of Manchester and its regional context have been digitised and made freely available for the first time. These eight historic Plans span the central decades of the twentieth century with the first published in 1926 and the last in 1967.”

    Martin Dodge and Joe Blakey have digitized a variety of plans and maps that have shaped the city of Manchester. They are available to view here.

  • ‘The New Social-ism’ – 11th December 2013

    What is knowable, valuable and visible in the emerging social economy?

    A one-day conference hosted by Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

    10am-6.30pm, 11th December 2013

    Room MS.01, University of Warwick

    The era of ‘advanced liberalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’ was characterized by an expansion of economic rationalities and methodologies, beyond the limits of the market. Sociology, social policy and other forms of social expertise were amongst the victims of this ‘economic imperialism’, leading to an apparent ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996).

    Today, however, appeals to the ‘social’ are everywhere: ‘social enterprise’, ‘social media’, ‘social neuroscience’, ‘social prescribing’, ‘social marketing’, ‘social analytics’, ‘social innovation’. This is thanks partly to the affordances of new techniques of accounting, network visualization and behavioural analysis, many of which take advantage of the ubiquitous digitization of market and non-market activity. The social world can be seen, quantified and influenced via new forms of expertise and data analytics. Managers, marketers and policy-makers make explicit appeals to the ‘social’, in order to sustain brands, rational decision-making, mental health and public goods. But the question of how the social sciences relate to this new-found interest, or contribute to it, remains an open one (Savage & Burrows, 2007).

    How do we make sense of this? What is the ontology of the ‘social’ that is being appealed to, and how does it differ from the ‘social’ of 20th century statistics, society and sociology? What methodologies are at work in rendering this form of sociality visible, measurable and governable? Is social network analysis now performative, as neo-classical economics has been described in the past? What power relations are latent in this new notion of the social, and to what extent is it in fact reducible to the economic after all – or, perhaps, the biological?

    This conference brings together scholars working in economic sociology, science and technology studies, social studies of finance, media studies, social studies of Big Data and other fields, to address these questions. Confirmed speakers include:

    The conference is free to attend, but registration is essential. You can register for this conference here. All queries should be sent to Will Davies –William.j.davies@warwick.ac.uk

    The event takes place in Room MS.03, which is in the Mathematics and Statistics building. A campus map is available here (the building is number 38 on the map). Information on how to get to Warwick University is available here.

    The conference is sponsored by Economy and Society.

  • John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library (1974)

  • Cartographica 48 (3)

    The new fall issue of Cartographica is now available online. In the review section:

    Chris Perkins tackles a new title on graphic design maps, A Map of the World According to Illustrators and Storytellers. 

    Richard Hornsey details another tube map book, Mind the Map. His ‘Listening to the Tube Map’ article for Environment and Planning D is well worth a read. Available (open access) here.

    I take on Jason Farman’s exhaustive Mobile Interface Theory.

    Clancy Wilmott delves into the fantastic Cities Without Ground (which I also talked about here).

    And, Gwilym Eades critiques Mapping Europe’s Borderlands.

    You can find my review on the About page.

  • OWS and Protest Tactics

    A 10 minute video on the police tactics employed during OWS nearly 2 years ago on the eve of its anniversary (via the sparrow project). The narration grounds the visual evidence of multiple arrests in relation to their apparent arbitrary nature, based on clothing, personal appearances and facial hair. Interesting in light of the mass arrests in Tower Hamlets recently.

    It is also worth noting the similarity to the strategies employed by the London Metropolitan Police Force over the last few years. Although I would perhaps break from the videographers’ narrative to suggest that onward movement during such events is not necessarily a bad thing, and can in fact, as the Met well know, create even more problems for the police.