Lane DeNicola

I am currently a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities with the College of Arts & Sciences, Syracuse University.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

On a tour of the Turkish Mapping Directorate and INTA SpaceTurk facility outside Ankara during the XXth Quadrennial Congress of the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (2004).

The Technological Mediation of Space

Why has 'where' come to matter so much? How does society change when 'location' and fine-grained telemetry streams become a global commodity? Should the citizens of a democracy have a right to keep their (or their property's) location private? If (as Lefebvre suggested) "space" is produced as and through social relations, can we discern the political implications of geospatial technologies in part by examining their effects on our experience of space?

Technological innovations and the end of the Cold War have made geoinformatics and "location-based services" a growth industry. My interest is in helping to understand and shape these powerful technologies in such a way as to recognize their dangers and limitations and promote the social welfare.

Related publications:

DeNicola, L. 2007. "Techniques of the Environmental Observer: India's Earth Remote Sensing Program in the Age of Global Information" Doctoral dissertation, Science & Technology Studies Dept., RPI (Troy, NY).

DeNicola, L. 2006. Entries on "GPS," "cellphones," and "airborne surveillance and intelligence," Encyclopedia of Privacy (Greenwood Press).

DeNicola, L. 2006. "The Bundling of Geospatial Information with Everyday Experience" in Monahan, T. (ed.) Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life (Routledge).

A Landsat image acquired April 13, 2000 of North Slope Oil and Gas Operations, Alaska. A green outline of Washington, D.C. is superimposed on the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field [Image by SkyTruth, copyright 2004].

Environmental & Community Informatics

How are "the environment" and "our community" a product of information systems design? What qualities do such systems foreground or occlude? Does understanding the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) shape our sense of space and time help us to understand how they "produce" environmental knowledge or our sense of our own communities? How might ecological or civic sensibilities inform ICT design?

Alloyed with the areas of interest described above, environmental informatics is a principal focus of my dissertation research. Taking the case of India's earth remote sensing program, I explore environmental informatics not only as a science and craft, but as an industry, a global information infrastructure, a "mass medium," a regime of policy discourse, an assemblage of strategic "dual use" technologies, and as a symbol of state sovereignty. I am similarly interested in the ways geographic information systems and remote sensing analysis are being employed by non-governmental organizations for humanitarian applications, community empowerment, and environmental advocacy.

Related publications:

DeNicola, L. 2007. Entry on "Science & Technology Studies," in Robbins, P. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Environment & Society (Sage).

Students at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing display an infrared satellite image of the local region during a fieldcheck in the Doon Valley and lower Himalayas (2005).

Design, Development, and Technoscience in the Postcolonial Context

Where do the communicative processes of "culture" and "politics" intersect with what we typically refer to as "design"? How have science and technology been employed in the service of the developmental imperatives that define the modern global order of "developed" and "developing" world? What insights and lessons can the "developing world" provide the "developed world" for the design of appropriate expertise, socially-relevant scientific research, and just, sustainable technologies?

In addition to cross-cultural design projects I have contributed to and presented on (e.g. the Virtual Bead Loom component of the Culturally-Situated Design Tools project at RPI), my dissertation research builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in north India in 2002 and 2005, principally at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing in Dehradun, in the hill state of Uttaranchal. As part of my participant-observation activity, I completed the 4-month certificate course in Basic Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing at IIRS.

Related publications:

The Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, Germany. The projection planetarium—invented in Jena by engineers at the Zeiss optics firm in the early 1920's—is in many important ways the earliest example of "immersive" or "virtual reality" technology (2002).

Science & Communication

Can (and do) we communicate or understand "better" through images, simulation, or immersion? How does the public display of scientific knowledge or technological artifacts work to educate, entertain, persuade, or motivate? What are the cultural and political dimensions of these communicative modalities? What is the appropriate role of "scientific" expertise in a democratic society? How can conflicting perspectives on the subjects and methods of scientific inquiry be productively elicited and marshalled for the collective good?

My early graduate research examined the projection planetarium, an institution and display technology ostensibly designed for informal education of the public in the earth and space sciences. Combining historical and sociological evidence with museological analysis, it discloses planetariums as a key antecendent to virtual reality technologies and as an institution particularly revealing of the ways in which we seek "the Real" in "the Virtual," modernity in the postmodern, and the establishment of a secular spirituality through science.

I began developing an interest in these questions first as an electro-optic systems analyst and simulation designer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, and later with the Center for Space Research at MIT. In addition to graduate study at RPI, courses I have taught in the history of information and communication technologies, both at RPI and with the Digital Technology & Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver, have helped define my interests in this vein.

Related publications:

DeNicola, L. 2006. "Image Ethics in the Digital Age" [review], Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.

DeNicola, L. 2004. "Himmelsmaschine: Weimar Culture, the Projection Planetarium, and the Politics of Simulation" Master's thesis, Science & Technology Studies Dept., RPI (Troy, NY).

Houck, J. C., DeNicola, L. A. 2000. "ISIS: An Interactive Spectral Interpretation System for High Resolution X-Ray Spectroscopy" in Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conf. Ser. 216, Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems IX, ed. N. Manset, V. Veillet, and D. Crabtree (San Francisco: ASP), 591.

Boone, B. G., DeNicola, L., and Grabow, B. 1994. "Reconstruction of Surface Topography Using Fourier Phase of Structured Light" in Proceedings of the Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers, vol 2348, Imaging and Illumination for Metrology and Inspection, ed. Donald J. Svetkoff (Boston: SPIE Photonics East), pp. 196-210.

Other

My other interests include:

open source, in the broadest sense of the term (everything from LAMP and Moodle to Creative Commons and Librivox)
tools for qualitative research (especially open source ones!) and the computer-aided analysis of qualitative data
the social and political dimensions of alternative gaming modalities, including: non-video computer games and gaming appliances; board-based, miniatures-based, pen-and-paper, play-by-mail, and other "manual" ancestors of computer games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons, Third Reich, Diplomacy); hybrid manual/electronic games (e.g. Dark Tower); gaming as a pedagogical approach
woodworking

See my projects and hacks, for example.