Black boxes, geospatial narratives, and the art of constructing location data
Download PDF Cooke, Thomas N, Dan Cohen, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2025. “Navigating digital geographies: Black boxes, geospatial narratives, and the art of constructing location data.” Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice. 26349825251365637. doi.org/10.1177/26349825251365637.
Summary
We set out to interrogate how smartphone location data is produced, challenging the assumption that the blue dot on a map is a straightforward technical fact. To do this, we adopted an interdisciplinary, datawalking approach that involved modifying open-source software for granular GNSS data collection, integrating Google’s Fused Location Provider via Roam/GeoSpark SDK, and conducting field experiments in both Baltimore and Kingston. Our methods allowed us to capture and visualize three distinct narratives of location: device-level raw signals, cloud-smooth outputs, and our own embodied routes.
Our walking route in Kingston where we found solace under the shade of a tree.
We intend to defetishize and unmask these processes and data types to reveal how location data and the narratives they generate are not neutral or objective
Through comparing these data streams, we discovered that technical architectures, commercial algorithms, and lived human choices combine to produce overlapping, often contradictory stories of movement and place. As we walked, we made real-time decisions—like seeking shade or rerouting for convenience—that eluded the computational logic built into location services. These frictions demonstrate that “location” is always actively produced, shaped by power, profit, and infrastructural context rather than objective measurement alone
The contest over geospatial narrative authority shows that our embodied experience—often the most authentic representation of movement—is paradoxically granted the least agency in the digital age.
Path deviation in our tracking. Top Left: Baltimore OsmAnd. Top Right: Kingston OsmAnd. Bottom Left: Baltimore GeoSpark. Bottom Right: Kingston GeoSpark.
What we reveal is that spatial data, rather than originating from pure measurement, are assembled through techniques designed to serve commercial interests and maintain infrastructural power.
In our conclusion, we argue that digital geographers need to radically defetishize the construction of spatial data and acknowledge how these black-boxed systems mediate surveillance and capitalist extraction. Rather than taking computational results at face value, we call for methodological transparency and critical engagement, centering the situated, embodied, and political processes that underpin digital spatial knowledge. This is essential if we hope to resist surveillance logics and build more accountable forms of mapping and GIS.
