I’ve finally managed to do some reading for my own purposes rather than HEFCE’s, and in particular I’ve enjoyed a chapter in a book called Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior.  The chapter is by Roger Burrows and David Beer, on what they call urban informatics.  It’s a neat overview of a big field, and provocative to boot on its implications for sociology.

The chapter’s about the digital, it’s about the urban, so I was reading it as part of my efforts to finish a paper on the digital visualisations of new urban developments: part of the ESRC-funded ‘Architectural Atmospheres‘ project that I’m working on with Monica Degen and Clare Melhuish.

And I couldn’t fit the visualisations we’ve been studying into their argument.  Indeed, they don’t really fit into the much wider literature on how software scripts urban spaces – on ‘urban…