Seeing the city digitally: from picturing urban spaces to animating urban life

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Urban environments are increasingly saturated with digital sensors generating data of many kinds. Much of the data created by those sensors – among which is the smartphone – materialises as data visualisations, on the online screens of open data websites or the control rooms of smart cities, as many scholars have noted. Much more is hosted by apps like Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and, briefly, Vine. The sorts of dodgy images that Hito Steyerl has called "the wretched of the screen" jostle for attention, alongside the highly crafted computer-generated images of cities created for computer games, movies and major urban redevelopment projects. This lecture explores some of the consequences of the contemporary mediation of urban life by digital images on social media platforms.

Speaker: Professor Gillian Rose FBA, Head of School of Geography and the Environment; Professor of Human Geography, University of Oxford

Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fourth edition 2016), as well as many papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces.

Chair: Professor Sonia Livingstone FBA, Professor of Social Psychology, LSE