My research (https://sites.google.com/view/lukinbeal/home) investigates the intersection of cultural geography with cartography, landscape, media, and visual culture. https://sites.google.com/view/lukinbeal/home Address: The University of Arizona School of Geography Development and Environment Tucson, Arizona, United States 85721
This book uniquely bridges the conceptual gap between the history of geographic, cartographic tho... more This book uniquely bridges the conceptual gap between the history of geographic, cartographic thought, and film theory with the technological and cultural shifts that shaped the emergence of cameras and cinema.
Adorned with illustrative figures, examples, and case studies throughout, the book explores how cinema lends itself to cartography and, in turn, how cartography relates to both the individual and collective experience of cinema. By using cartography to understand space and scale in film, the book moves away from textual analysis or representation analysis to focus on the locational attribution of the sites where the cinematic landscape is being produced. It contends that viewers of moving images are active players in a complex network of cultural and mental geographies.
This volume is essential reading for students, scholars, and academics of cinematography, human, cultural, and social geography, cartography, and media studies, as well as those interested in these areas more generally.
Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, a... more Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, and power are habitually arbitrated across and through space and time. Media has an underlying mapping impulse – a proclivity to comprehend itself and be rendered comprehensible through metaphors of topologies, networks, and flows that lead to the constant evacuation of spaces in order to produce places of communication. Both media and cartography are never static, but instead, are ongoing scopic and discursive regimes that continually make and remake how we understand and interact with our world. Developments in mobile computing have not only increased the pace, flow, and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus the taken-for-grantedness, of mapping. Owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media requires geographical situatedness in which and for which media can take place. Media's Mapping Impulse is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the relationship between cartography, geospatial technologies, and locative media on the one hand, and new and traditional media forms such as social media, mobile apps, and film on the other.
This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and organizations in relation to socio-spatial relations, the dynamism of media in local-global relations, and in-depth case studies of mediated locales. Given the theoretical and methodological diversity of this book, it will provide an important reference for geographers and other interdisciplinary scholars working in cultural and media studies, researchers in environmental studies, sociology, visual anthropology, new technologies, and political science, who seek to understand and explore the interconnections of media, space and place through the examples of specific practices and settings.
This book addresses questions surrounding the constructions of space, culture, society, identity ... more This book addresses questions surrounding the constructions of space, culture, society, identity and representation. The geography of cinema extends beyond the screen, director and audience, to include the wider industrial and political complex of the cultural economy. In this sense, culture can be viewed as an economic commodity set within the broader frame of globalization and postmodernism. A cinematic world occupies a territory between our citys streets, the Cineplex, the TV set, and our geographical imagination and identity. These contexts invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of film as well as global cinema, hapticalities of viewing, critical political economies, and cinematic ethno-graphies. This collection provides unique and eclectic insights into the exciting and emerging subfield of film geography.
With this essay I seek to show one way to examine this theoretical junction; this meeting ground ... more With this essay I seek to show one way to examine this theoretical junction; this meeting ground of two conceptions of space. My argument is simply that the uneven development and dispersion of the film industry produces an uneven depiction of material space. Thus, the production of representational space is not a mirror of material space, but rather a product of the politics and economics of a specific industry. Consequently, if we wish to understand what we see on television and in the cinema we must begin by understanding how these images arise and where they originate. I first investigate how the demise of the studio industry changed the content of representational space. I then examine the top five cinematic cities in North America. A cinematic city is one which accounts for a high volume of on location filming. These cities dominate the economic activities related to the film production industry and are the most frequently depicted geographies in representational space.
The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practi... more The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practice that is made @work. Reading the cinematic landscape as a text has proven to be the most common avenue of engagement where it is a prewritten, inscribed cultural product to be theoretically interpreted. The idea of “@work” follows Don Mitchell’s argument that landscape is a product of human labor, and in the context of cinema @work is about building, staging, framing, and digitally replicating locational imagery for consumption. Narrative cinema is a constant process of placemaking: the conversion of location imagery harvested from production centers to ground diegetic spaces. The American cinematic landscape is always becoming and will continue as long as there are crews out filming. This chapter provides a tour of the ACL beginning with the primary production center of NYC, then moving to LA and the TMZ (30-mile zone) and onto film ranches and the legacy of Old Tucson Studio. Cities and regions since the 1990s have been chasing the dream of Hollywood through Motion Picture Incentives (MPI). Many cinematic cities have gained and lost prominence, including Vancouver, San Diego, Wilmington, Albuquerque, New Orleans, and Atlanta.
The Routledge Companion to Media and the City, 2022
What constitutes a cinematic city? Investigations have queried the role of cities in film, the re... more What constitutes a cinematic city? Investigations have queried the role of cities in film, the relation between proto-cinematic devices and cities, and cities as backlots for film production. Whereas hermeneutical analysis tends to frame cinema as representational, cinema reflects more-than-representational activities of the production and consumption of film. The formation of a cinematic city is a complex and ongoing production of a topological web of networks and practices. It is also constituted by locational image facts that remain invariant to the transformations of turning filmed sights/sites, into narrative scenes. The cinematic city is constituted through an ontogenetic landscape at work. This chapter contests the notion that cinematic cites are only worldly cities with dense iconographic networks of recognizable locations. Using geographic information system analysis, in-depth interviews, and fieldwork, this chapter examines how cinematic topologies are created and maintained through social networks and filmed sites which produce unique backlots within the city. 3,790 filmed sites were geocoded from documents provided by the San Diego Film Commission which reflects most of the production that occurred between 1985 and 2005. The topological metaphor is a useful tool to engage the cinematic city as a more-than-representational series of ongoing practices.
The Routledge Companion to Media and the City, 2022
In this chapter we combine new archival research and GIS technologies to visualize the rich histo... more In this chapter we combine new archival research and GIS technologies to visualize the rich history of production at Old Tucson Studios. This detailed look at how and why filmmakers chose specific Western locations not only sheds light on Hollywood filmmaking, but also the construction of the mythical iconography that still shapes the cultural meaning of the American Western landscape. The following chapter addresses the thorny nest of methodologies required to put a wealth of archival documents, drone imagery, and GIS modeling to productive use. In order to illustrate and analyze why and how an isolated outpost in Arizona thrived as a production hub for Westerns and television series from roughly 1955 to 1995, we transect the fields of geography, landscape studies, film studies, urban studies, architecture, digital humanities, and to a certain extent, archeology, geology, and environmental studies. Joshua Gleich will address how production data and documents will shape the model and meaning of filmmaking at Old Tucson Studios; Chris Lukinbeal will detail how several ways of mapping the surrounding environment of Western settings reveals the logic and impact Hollywood image-making.
Routledge’s Companion to the American Landscape, 2023
The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practi... more The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practice that is made @work. Reading the cinematic landscape as a text has proven to be the most common avenue of engagement where it is a prewritten, inscribed cultural product to be theoretically interpreted. The idea of “@work” follows Don Mitchell’s argument that landscape is a product of human labor, and in the context of cinema @work is about building, staging, framing, and digitally replicating locational imagery for consumption. Narrative cinema is a constant process of placemaking: the conversion of location imagery harvested from production centers to ground diegetic spaces. The American cinematic landscape is always becoming and will continue as long as there are crews out filming. This chapter provides a tour of the ACL beginning with the primary production center of NYC, then moving to LA and the TMZ (30-mile zone) and onto film ranches and the legacy of Old Tucson Studio. Cities and regions since the 1990s have been chasing the dream of Hollywood through Motion Picture Incentives (MPI). Many cinematic cities have gained and lost prominence, including Vancouver, San Diego, Wilmington, Albuquerque, New Orleans, and Atlanta.
A sustained inquiry into film by geographers began in the 1980s. Films were studied as cultural t... more A sustained inquiry into film by geographers began in the 1980s. Films were studied as cultural texts and as cultural commodities. Film as text assumes that it is authored, read, and interpreted according to the unique positionalities and contexts of viewing. Geographers deploying the author-text-reader (ATR) model tend to operate from a variety of anti-essentialist standpoints and have used this approach to answer questions about how the internal meanings of films are produced and consumed, paying particular attention to issues such as the city, mobility, landscape, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics. Conversely, geographers interested in film as a cultural commodity, an object of symbolic value circulating within the global economy, may choose instead to follow a production-product-distribution-consumption approach. According to this model, the significance of cinematic goods cannot be wholly understood by focusing on the film texts’ internal meaning but must be examined in relation to the economic conditions of their production and consumption. Film is therefore an assemblage of textual and extratextual processes and actors. Research in this area has focused on issues such as the industrial complex of film production, distribution, and consumption; the transnational practices of film industries following the information revolution of the 1970s; and the ensuing cultural hegemony of Hollywood on the global stage. Although the continued use of the text metaphor has been the subject of debate since the turn of the twenty-first century, this approach and its attention to film content has come to prevail in film geography research and hence constitutes a large portion of the works selected in this article. There has been a rising interest in cinematic cartography with some special journal collections published as notable books, including Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema in 2007 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); a special issue on cinematic cartography (Cartographic Journal 46, no. 1 [2009]), edited by Sébastien Caquard and D. R. Fraser Taylor; Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool by Les Roberts in 2012from Liverpool University Press; the special collection “#Mapping” in NECSUS 18, no. 2 (2018) by Avezzù, Castro, and Fidotta; and
Media’s Mapping Impulse by Lukinbeal et al. in 2019 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). More recent publications are reflective of place-based film studies where landscapes are produced or consumed. A special issue, Doing Film Geography (Volume 87, Supplement 1), with fifteen papers was edited by Chris Lukinbeal and Elisabeth Sommerlad for GeoJournal in 2022. The editors’ work reflects a growing movement toward empiric place-based fieldwork paired with a variety of analytic techniques, such as hermeneutics, economics, cartographic, and nonrepresentational theories, to name a few.
of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 2007
Motivated by a need to engage students in the critical evaluation of visual information, and by a... more Motivated by a need to engage students in the critical evaluation of visual information, and by a desire to teach students how to use digital technologies as a way of exploring and expressing geographical constructs and processes, the geography departments at Arizona's three universities sought and received funding from the Arizona Board of Regents for learner-centered curricular development organized around the theme of "Mediated Geographies. " In this paper, we explore how critical pedagogy and learner-centered education strategies were used to engage students in semester-long documentary and photo essay projects. Some of the student projects discussed in this essay are posted for viewing at the project Web site: http://geography.asu.edu/lukinbeal/mediated.html. This project was funded by the Arizona Board of Regents' (ABOR) Learner Centered Education Grant Program. For more information about ABOR's program, see
This book uniquely bridges the conceptual gap between the history of geographic, cartographic tho... more This book uniquely bridges the conceptual gap between the history of geographic, cartographic thought, and film theory with the technological and cultural shifts that shaped the emergence of cameras and cinema.
Adorned with illustrative figures, examples, and case studies throughout, the book explores how cinema lends itself to cartography and, in turn, how cartography relates to both the individual and collective experience of cinema. By using cartography to understand space and scale in film, the book moves away from textual analysis or representation analysis to focus on the locational attribution of the sites where the cinematic landscape is being produced. It contends that viewers of moving images are active players in a complex network of cultural and mental geographies.
This volume is essential reading for students, scholars, and academics of cinematography, human, cultural, and social geography, cartography, and media studies, as well as those interested in these areas more generally.
Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, a... more Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, and power are habitually arbitrated across and through space and time. Media has an underlying mapping impulse – a proclivity to comprehend itself and be rendered comprehensible through metaphors of topologies, networks, and flows that lead to the constant evacuation of spaces in order to produce places of communication. Both media and cartography are never static, but instead, are ongoing scopic and discursive regimes that continually make and remake how we understand and interact with our world. Developments in mobile computing have not only increased the pace, flow, and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus the taken-for-grantedness, of mapping. Owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media requires geographical situatedness in which and for which media can take place. Media's Mapping Impulse is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the relationship between cartography, geospatial technologies, and locative media on the one hand, and new and traditional media forms such as social media, mobile apps, and film on the other.
This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and organizations in relation to socio-spatial relations, the dynamism of media in local-global relations, and in-depth case studies of mediated locales. Given the theoretical and methodological diversity of this book, it will provide an important reference for geographers and other interdisciplinary scholars working in cultural and media studies, researchers in environmental studies, sociology, visual anthropology, new technologies, and political science, who seek to understand and explore the interconnections of media, space and place through the examples of specific practices and settings.
This book addresses questions surrounding the constructions of space, culture, society, identity ... more This book addresses questions surrounding the constructions of space, culture, society, identity and representation. The geography of cinema extends beyond the screen, director and audience, to include the wider industrial and political complex of the cultural economy. In this sense, culture can be viewed as an economic commodity set within the broader frame of globalization and postmodernism. A cinematic world occupies a territory between our citys streets, the Cineplex, the TV set, and our geographical imagination and identity. These contexts invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of film as well as global cinema, hapticalities of viewing, critical political economies, and cinematic ethno-graphies. This collection provides unique and eclectic insights into the exciting and emerging subfield of film geography.
With this essay I seek to show one way to examine this theoretical junction; this meeting ground ... more With this essay I seek to show one way to examine this theoretical junction; this meeting ground of two conceptions of space. My argument is simply that the uneven development and dispersion of the film industry produces an uneven depiction of material space. Thus, the production of representational space is not a mirror of material space, but rather a product of the politics and economics of a specific industry. Consequently, if we wish to understand what we see on television and in the cinema we must begin by understanding how these images arise and where they originate. I first investigate how the demise of the studio industry changed the content of representational space. I then examine the top five cinematic cities in North America. A cinematic city is one which accounts for a high volume of on location filming. These cities dominate the economic activities related to the film production industry and are the most frequently depicted geographies in representational space.
The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practi... more The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practice that is made @work. Reading the cinematic landscape as a text has proven to be the most common avenue of engagement where it is a prewritten, inscribed cultural product to be theoretically interpreted. The idea of “@work” follows Don Mitchell’s argument that landscape is a product of human labor, and in the context of cinema @work is about building, staging, framing, and digitally replicating locational imagery for consumption. Narrative cinema is a constant process of placemaking: the conversion of location imagery harvested from production centers to ground diegetic spaces. The American cinematic landscape is always becoming and will continue as long as there are crews out filming. This chapter provides a tour of the ACL beginning with the primary production center of NYC, then moving to LA and the TMZ (30-mile zone) and onto film ranches and the legacy of Old Tucson Studio. Cities and regions since the 1990s have been chasing the dream of Hollywood through Motion Picture Incentives (MPI). Many cinematic cities have gained and lost prominence, including Vancouver, San Diego, Wilmington, Albuquerque, New Orleans, and Atlanta.
The Routledge Companion to Media and the City, 2022
What constitutes a cinematic city? Investigations have queried the role of cities in film, the re... more What constitutes a cinematic city? Investigations have queried the role of cities in film, the relation between proto-cinematic devices and cities, and cities as backlots for film production. Whereas hermeneutical analysis tends to frame cinema as representational, cinema reflects more-than-representational activities of the production and consumption of film. The formation of a cinematic city is a complex and ongoing production of a topological web of networks and practices. It is also constituted by locational image facts that remain invariant to the transformations of turning filmed sights/sites, into narrative scenes. The cinematic city is constituted through an ontogenetic landscape at work. This chapter contests the notion that cinematic cites are only worldly cities with dense iconographic networks of recognizable locations. Using geographic information system analysis, in-depth interviews, and fieldwork, this chapter examines how cinematic topologies are created and maintained through social networks and filmed sites which produce unique backlots within the city. 3,790 filmed sites were geocoded from documents provided by the San Diego Film Commission which reflects most of the production that occurred between 1985 and 2005. The topological metaphor is a useful tool to engage the cinematic city as a more-than-representational series of ongoing practices.
The Routledge Companion to Media and the City, 2022
In this chapter we combine new archival research and GIS technologies to visualize the rich histo... more In this chapter we combine new archival research and GIS technologies to visualize the rich history of production at Old Tucson Studios. This detailed look at how and why filmmakers chose specific Western locations not only sheds light on Hollywood filmmaking, but also the construction of the mythical iconography that still shapes the cultural meaning of the American Western landscape. The following chapter addresses the thorny nest of methodologies required to put a wealth of archival documents, drone imagery, and GIS modeling to productive use. In order to illustrate and analyze why and how an isolated outpost in Arizona thrived as a production hub for Westerns and television series from roughly 1955 to 1995, we transect the fields of geography, landscape studies, film studies, urban studies, architecture, digital humanities, and to a certain extent, archeology, geology, and environmental studies. Joshua Gleich will address how production data and documents will shape the model and meaning of filmmaking at Old Tucson Studios; Chris Lukinbeal will detail how several ways of mapping the surrounding environment of Western settings reveals the logic and impact Hollywood image-making.
Routledge’s Companion to the American Landscape, 2023
The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practi... more The American Cinematic Landscape (ACL) is commonly conceived as a text or product and as a practice that is made @work. Reading the cinematic landscape as a text has proven to be the most common avenue of engagement where it is a prewritten, inscribed cultural product to be theoretically interpreted. The idea of “@work” follows Don Mitchell’s argument that landscape is a product of human labor, and in the context of cinema @work is about building, staging, framing, and digitally replicating locational imagery for consumption. Narrative cinema is a constant process of placemaking: the conversion of location imagery harvested from production centers to ground diegetic spaces. The American cinematic landscape is always becoming and will continue as long as there are crews out filming. This chapter provides a tour of the ACL beginning with the primary production center of NYC, then moving to LA and the TMZ (30-mile zone) and onto film ranches and the legacy of Old Tucson Studio. Cities and regions since the 1990s have been chasing the dream of Hollywood through Motion Picture Incentives (MPI). Many cinematic cities have gained and lost prominence, including Vancouver, San Diego, Wilmington, Albuquerque, New Orleans, and Atlanta.
A sustained inquiry into film by geographers began in the 1980s. Films were studied as cultural t... more A sustained inquiry into film by geographers began in the 1980s. Films were studied as cultural texts and as cultural commodities. Film as text assumes that it is authored, read, and interpreted according to the unique positionalities and contexts of viewing. Geographers deploying the author-text-reader (ATR) model tend to operate from a variety of anti-essentialist standpoints and have used this approach to answer questions about how the internal meanings of films are produced and consumed, paying particular attention to issues such as the city, mobility, landscape, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics. Conversely, geographers interested in film as a cultural commodity, an object of symbolic value circulating within the global economy, may choose instead to follow a production-product-distribution-consumption approach. According to this model, the significance of cinematic goods cannot be wholly understood by focusing on the film texts’ internal meaning but must be examined in relation to the economic conditions of their production and consumption. Film is therefore an assemblage of textual and extratextual processes and actors. Research in this area has focused on issues such as the industrial complex of film production, distribution, and consumption; the transnational practices of film industries following the information revolution of the 1970s; and the ensuing cultural hegemony of Hollywood on the global stage. Although the continued use of the text metaphor has been the subject of debate since the turn of the twenty-first century, this approach and its attention to film content has come to prevail in film geography research and hence constitutes a large portion of the works selected in this article. There has been a rising interest in cinematic cartography with some special journal collections published as notable books, including Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema in 2007 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); a special issue on cinematic cartography (Cartographic Journal 46, no. 1 [2009]), edited by Sébastien Caquard and D. R. Fraser Taylor; Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool by Les Roberts in 2012from Liverpool University Press; the special collection “#Mapping” in NECSUS 18, no. 2 (2018) by Avezzù, Castro, and Fidotta; and
Media’s Mapping Impulse by Lukinbeal et al. in 2019 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). More recent publications are reflective of place-based film studies where landscapes are produced or consumed. A special issue, Doing Film Geography (Volume 87, Supplement 1), with fifteen papers was edited by Chris Lukinbeal and Elisabeth Sommerlad for GeoJournal in 2022. The editors’ work reflects a growing movement toward empiric place-based fieldwork paired with a variety of analytic techniques, such as hermeneutics, economics, cartographic, and nonrepresentational theories, to name a few.
of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 2007
Motivated by a need to engage students in the critical evaluation of visual information, and by a... more Motivated by a need to engage students in the critical evaluation of visual information, and by a desire to teach students how to use digital technologies as a way of exploring and expressing geographical constructs and processes, the geography departments at Arizona's three universities sought and received funding from the Arizona Board of Regents for learner-centered curricular development organized around the theme of "Mediated Geographies. " In this paper, we explore how critical pedagogy and learner-centered education strategies were used to engage students in semester-long documentary and photo essay projects. Some of the student projects discussed in this essay are posted for viewing at the project Web site: http://geography.asu.edu/lukinbeal/mediated.html. This project was funded by the Arizona Board of Regents' (ABOR) Learner Centered Education Grant Program. For more information about ABOR's program, see
Rapid urbanization has led to an ever increasing proportion of our population living in cities an... more Rapid urbanization has led to an ever increasing proportion of our population living in cities and surrounding suburbs. With this increase, the actual and perceived quality of intensely humanized urban and suburban landscapes grows in importance. As humans we long for a habitat, a landscape, in which we can develop our full potential. How well do suburban landscapes currently meet our needs? This paper presents an overview of three suburban landscape types in the East Bay. Recurring and unique elements found in each type are discussed. Views on suburban landscapes are reviewed. And, finally, we argue that these landscapes are much more than "walled gardens", not only are they integral parts of suburbia, but, as a whole comprise an American symbol.
Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, a... more Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, and power are habitually arbitrated across and through space and time. Media has an underlying mapping impulse – a proclivity to comprehend itself and be rendered comprehensible through metaphors of topologies, networks, and flows that lead to the constant evacuation of spaces in order to produce places of communication. Both media and cartography are never static, but instead, are ongoing scopic and discursive regimes that continually make and remake how we understand and interact with our world. Developments in mobile computing have not only increased the pace, flow, and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus the taken-for-grantedness, of mapping. Owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media requires geographical situatedness in which and for which media can take place. Media's Mapping Impulse is an interdisciplinary collection that e...
In this paper, I engage in a cartographic analysis of 500 Days of Summer. I use the concepts of t... more In this paper, I engage in a cartographic analysis of 500 Days of Summer. I use the concepts of the map and tour and relate them to cartography as representation and practice. Where a focus on cartography as a representation enhances a textual analysis of a film, cartography as practice emphasises the map production process. Central to the map production process is geocoding, ground truthing, and indexing. Finally, this paper offers a cartographic tour of the film that provides an example of how a processual approach to cinematic cartography can be put into practice to produce an affective geovisualisation.
This study investigates the sense of place portrayed in Ming Pao, a Chinese-language daily newspa... more This study investigates the sense of place portrayed in Ming Pao, a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in the Greater Toronto Area (gta). Mapping and content analysis of local news stories and photographs show that while the newspaper provides more coverage of the Chinese community than the mainstream media, there is an overwhelming emphasis on homeland news and a relatively limited range and amount of local news coverage. These findings, combined with the newspaper’s preoccupation with crime and lack of representation of other ethnic groups in a metropolitan area of unparalleled diversity, result in a portrait of the gta that is incomplete and potentially misleading.
Aether: The Journal of Media Geography. Vol. VA, Mar 1, 2010
This paper argues that locative media studies offers much broader insights on the logic of new me... more This paper argues that locative media studies offers much broader insights on the logic of new media than is currently espoused. Media scholars have largely restricted the analysis of locative technologies to hand-held and immersive gadgets and experiences. I argue for an expanded theorization of the "locative", one that develops a broader understanding of the conditions of networking of new media platforms, users, and content. In addition to developing a geographical perspective on media consumption and use, it is argued that locative media studies should seek to analyze the means by which users both locate information on networks and are themselves located. A theory of the "locative", in other words, helps us understand the means by which we find information and also seek to be found on various technological platforms and networks.
Aether, the Journal of Media Geography, Mar 1, 2009
The daily newspaper in North America has long been a locally based medium that offers an opportun... more The daily newspaper in North America has long been a locally based medium that offers an opportunity for media geographers to explore concepts of place and locality. I explore how newspapers create a sense of place about the locality they serve. I review some of the major geographic theories of place and the local and also the work of communications scholars on how newspapers construct reality in their pages. I apply these ideas to the notion that newspapers construct a sense of place using both the form and the ...
A professor in one of my film courses once asked if we get lost in the movies. By 'lost'... more A professor in one of my film courses once asked if we get lost in the movies. By 'lost' she meant being immersed in the intentionalities and problematics of the film's narrative structure that sutures you to its story and makes one forget about the political economy involved behind the ...
Television, cinema, books, newspapers and the Internet mediate our experiences of place and geogr... more Television, cinema, books, newspapers and the Internet mediate our experiences of place and geography. Geography is a visual discipline that is an embedded means of documentation, orientation and representation in appearance of maps, globes, travel descriptions, landscape ...
The ways that a city (or at least its elites) represents itself to itself and to the world indica... more The ways that a city (or at least its elites) represents itself to itself and to the world indicate something of that city's overall sense of self.1 The manufactured image of Los Angeles, as McClung suggests, is part of the city's structure, part of its historical memory and collective sense of ...
... Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn's (1994) essay, Re-Presenting the Place Pastiche, was... more ... Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn's (1994) essay, Re-Presenting the Place Pastiche, was an innervating introduction to film geography and an opening salvo in moving beyond mimetic, representational thinking. ... This is the direction in film geography that I find most innervating. ...
This paper explores the semantic geographies inscribed by the news-making process. Previous resea... more This paper explores the semantic geographies inscribed by the news-making process. Previous research suggests that the commercial value of news audiences may contribute to the selection of places deemed worthy for reportage by publishers and editors. For example, the “newsworthiness” of different municipalities, or the ability of specific cities to attract news coverage, has been found to be related to financial aspects of municipalities as news markets. This study examines the amount of news attention given to local cities in a metropolitan area, and the geography that is created by the act of mentioning places in media texts. I utilized an automated content analysis of local news articles from 1999-2007 from a large metro daily newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. Names of local cities were identified and mapped by their prevalence and co-occurrence in these newspaper articles. Results showed that per-capita rates of news coverage were positively correlated with city per-capita incomes, but not related to median age, total population, or proximity to the newspaper’s main office. Cities mentioned together within news articles also exhibited high rates of spatial autocorrelation; cities were more likely to be mentioned with neighboring cities than distant cities. I contend that the process of news production is also a cartographic process, since journalists are involved in representing places—and implicitly mapping places—through the semantic geographies of their media texts.
... Aether is in many ways is a reflection of this very process. What started out as film geograp... more ... Aether is in many ways is a reflection of this very process. What started out as film geography in the mid 1990s has evolved into geographies of journalism, marketing, newspapers, photography, video, internet, gaming, geovisualization, music, and television. ...
In tandem with the boom in mobile media, the number of scholarly articles and essays on the socia... more In tandem with the boom in mobile media, the number of scholarly articles and essays on the social impact of the mobile phone is increasing every day. Some recent studies have expanded their focus to pay closer attention to specific social and individual uses in "developing" countries, acknowledging mobile use at different social and political levels in different regions of
Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, Summer …, 2008
Publikationsansicht. 59608859. Playing the World: Computer Games, Cartography and Spatial Stories... more Publikationsansicht. 59608859. Playing the World: Computer Games, Cartography and Spatial Stories (2008). Lammes, S. Details der Publikation. Archiv, DSpace at Utrecht University (Netherlands). Keywords, Letteren. Typ, Article. Sprache, Englisch. ...
Page 1. Point of Purchase Perceptions: Selling Products with Place M. Marian Mustoe Eastern Orego... more Page 1. Point of Purchase Perceptions: Selling Products with Place M. Marian Mustoe Eastern Oregon University The word point can suggest a wide range of geographic implications. Near West Seattle, Washington, there is ...
Page 1. Digital Digs, or Lara Croft Replaying Indiana Jones: Archaeological ... critique. The int... more Page 1. Digital Digs, or Lara Croft Replaying Indiana Jones: Archaeological ... critique. The interplay of game architecture and narrative in the scenarios of Lara Croft's archaeological adventures aesthetically develops these ambiguities. ...
In this essay I consider Graphical User Interfaces (guis) as instruments that generate spatiality... more In this essay I consider Graphical User Interfaces (guis) as instruments that generate spatiality according to the logic of the cartographic representation of reality. By analyzing the history of guis I explore how some latest generation interfaces can partly transform space ...
... It's not that commercialized radio sound where it's there and it's... more ... It's not that commercialized radio sound where it's there and it's almost like it's untouchable. I think the Homebrew [listeners] feel that they can reach out and touch it, and play around with it a little bit (Whiffen 2005, Personal Communication). ... Brian O'Connell explained: ...
... (Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. ... in Boys Don't Cry (1999); Chris Lukinbeal&... more ... (Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. ... in Boys Don't Cry (1999); Chris Lukinbeal's (2006) discussion of the outsourcing of movie production to foreign countries; Stuart Aitken's (2007) investigation of the representation of childhood in Scottish film; and Giorgio Hadi Curti's (2008 ...
Thinking about place and our experiences of being in the world through montage, in this edition o... more Thinking about place and our experiences of being in the world through montage, in this edition of you are here we asked for contributions that expressed experiences of place through the technique of montage, but also those that illustrate how our experiences of place are always already a montage effect, constructed by selection, variance, the cut, and the unseen. Following precedent, poems, prose essays, and visual art comprise the majority of the selected submissions, all of which were chosen for their ability to impress upon us the fact that montage is not merely a visual device that differentiates art-house from Hollywood cinema, but rather underpins communication itself.
by Ann Fletchall and Kristy Smith, provides background information related to the inception and g... more by Ann Fletchall and Kristy Smith, provides background information related to the inception and goals of the project Mediated Geographies: Critical Pedagogy and Geographic Education.
by Sam Herr, Chelsea Kappeler, and Stephanie Lipple. The documentary is the story of Shanti Sell... more by Sam Herr, Chelsea Kappeler, and Stephanie Lipple. The documentary is the story of Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss, two No More Deaths volunteers who were arrested in 2005 for providing humanitarian aid in the Sonoran Desert. The documentary follows the lives of Shanti and a small contingent of other humanitarian aid workers and sympathizers over the last couple of months leading up to their trial. The lawsuit would later be thrown out in 2006.
by Katie deVriese, James Wagner, Chris Lukinbeal, Marilyn Dantico, John Finn, Natalie Lopez, Sara... more by Katie deVriese, James Wagner, Chris Lukinbeal, Marilyn Dantico, John Finn, Natalie Lopez, Sarah Bongiovanni, and Stuart Bricker (with music by Peter deVriese), explores civic engagement, neighborhood revitalization and community building in the Garfield neighborhood of Phoenix, AZ.
by Kirby Brady, Nell McCallum, Mary Perry, and Nick Sexton, examines the relationship between the... more by Kirby Brady, Nell McCallum, Mary Perry, and Nick Sexton, examines the relationship between the US/Mexico border and the people of Douglas, Arizona.
by Tad Barker, Michael Wyman, and Ellis Harper, is about US/Mexico border pharmacies and their cl... more by Tad Barker, Michael Wyman, and Ellis Harper, is about US/Mexico border pharmacies and their clientele. The film shows people that frequent these pharmacies, what they purchase, why they purchase medications there, their opinions on prescription drugs from both the US and from Mexico, and the legal circumstances in which they buy prescription drugs in Mexico.
by Claire Kleese, Chris Bentley, John Holden, and Nicole Disante, examines the market of tourist ... more by Claire Kleese, Chris Bentley, John Holden, and Nicole Disante, examines the market of tourist goods in Nogales, Mexico and Mexicans crossing the border to shop in Nogales, Arizona at big stores like WalMart. This documentary focuses on the exchange of goods between the two countries sharing Nogales
by Katie Smith, Shuko Ogi, Carson Cherland, and Mark Poland, takes us on a tour of Arizona’s Rout... more by Katie Smith, Shuko Ogi, Carson Cherland, and Mark Poland, takes us on a tour of Arizona’s Route 66 near Flagstaff, Arizona.
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Books by Chris Lukinbeal
Adorned with illustrative figures, examples, and case studies throughout, the book explores how cinema lends itself to cartography and, in turn, how cartography relates to both the individual and collective experience of cinema. By using cartography to understand space and scale in film, the book moves away from textual analysis or representation analysis to focus on the locational attribution of the sites where the cinematic landscape is being produced. It contends that viewers of moving images are active players in a complex network of cultural and mental geographies.
This volume is essential reading for students, scholars, and academics of cinematography, human, cultural, and social geography, cartography, and media studies, as well as those interested in these areas more generally.
This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and organizations in relation to socio-spatial relations, the dynamism of media in local-global relations, and in-depth case studies of mediated locales. Given the theoretical and methodological diversity of this book, it will provide an important reference for geographers and other interdisciplinary scholars working in cultural and media studies, researchers in environmental studies, sociology, visual anthropology, new technologies, and political science, who seek to understand and explore the interconnections of media, space and place through the examples of specific practices and settings.
Papers by Chris Lukinbeal
Media’s Mapping Impulse by Lukinbeal et al. in 2019 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). More recent publications are reflective of place-based film studies where landscapes are produced or consumed. A special issue, Doing Film Geography (Volume 87, Supplement 1), with fifteen papers was edited by Chris Lukinbeal and Elisabeth Sommerlad for GeoJournal in 2022. The editors’ work reflects a growing movement toward empiric place-based fieldwork paired with a variety of analytic techniques, such as hermeneutics, economics, cartographic, and nonrepresentational theories, to name a few.
Adorned with illustrative figures, examples, and case studies throughout, the book explores how cinema lends itself to cartography and, in turn, how cartography relates to both the individual and collective experience of cinema. By using cartography to understand space and scale in film, the book moves away from textual analysis or representation analysis to focus on the locational attribution of the sites where the cinematic landscape is being produced. It contends that viewers of moving images are active players in a complex network of cultural and mental geographies.
This volume is essential reading for students, scholars, and academics of cinematography, human, cultural, and social geography, cartography, and media studies, as well as those interested in these areas more generally.
This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and organizations in relation to socio-spatial relations, the dynamism of media in local-global relations, and in-depth case studies of mediated locales. Given the theoretical and methodological diversity of this book, it will provide an important reference for geographers and other interdisciplinary scholars working in cultural and media studies, researchers in environmental studies, sociology, visual anthropology, new technologies, and political science, who seek to understand and explore the interconnections of media, space and place through the examples of specific practices and settings.
Media’s Mapping Impulse by Lukinbeal et al. in 2019 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). More recent publications are reflective of place-based film studies where landscapes are produced or consumed. A special issue, Doing Film Geography (Volume 87, Supplement 1), with fifteen papers was edited by Chris Lukinbeal and Elisabeth Sommerlad for GeoJournal in 2022. The editors’ work reflects a growing movement toward empiric place-based fieldwork paired with a variety of analytic techniques, such as hermeneutics, economics, cartographic, and nonrepresentational theories, to name a few.