Textbook in PDF format

Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps explores the mundane act of navigating cities in the age of digital mapping infrastructures.
Noone follows the frictions routing through Google Maps’ categorising and classifying of spatial information. Complicating the assumption that digital maps distort a sense of direction, Noone argues that Google Maps’ location awareness does more than just organise and orient a representation of space―it also organises and orients imaginaries of publicness, selfsufficiency, legibility, and error. At the same time, Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps helps to animate the ordinary ways people are challenging and refusing Google Maps’ vision of the world. Drawing on an arts-based field study spanning the streets of London, New York, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam, Noone’s encounters of "asking for directions" open up lines of inquiry and spatial scores that cut through Google‘s universal mapping project.
Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps will be essential reading for information studies and media studies scholars and students with an interest in embodied information practices, critical information studies, and critical data studies. The book will also appeal to an urban studies audience engaged in work on the digital city and the datafication of urban environments.
Acknowledgements
The Lost Art of Location Awareness
Two Starting Points
The Lost Art of Reading the Map
A Sense of Direction
Orienting Location Awareness
Programming Location Awareness
Reorientating Location Awareness
The Art of Location Awareness
Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps
Notes
Geographies of Public Good
Organising | Grafting
Organising Space: Ground Truth and Street View and Performances of Objectivity
Imagining a Public Vision
Organising Safety and Risk
Grafting Publics
Thank Goodness for Google
Notes
Geographies of Self-Sufficiency
Exploration | Experience
Exploration: Make the World Your Own
Why We Map the World
Exploration and "What the World Has to Offer"
Experience: Accessing Time
The Insufficiencies of Access
Notes
Orientations of Legibility
Templates | Surfaces
A Template for the Legible Map
A Surface for the Legible City
Notes
Orientations of Error
Faults | Absences
A Fault in the Map
The Shutdown
Absence
Notes
Epilogue: Reorienting Location Awareness
Notes
Bibliography
Index