Ryan Burns

Lecturer

Ryan Burns smiles at the camera

Teaching

I am an interdisciplinary-minded geographer working at the intersections of GIScience, digital human geographies, urban studies, political economy, and Science & Technology Studies. Much of my research questions how people, places, and knowledge come to be encoded as data, and then analyzed and acted upon through other digital objects, practices, and spatialities. I recently finished a Visiting Professor position at George Washington University, and have held past visiting positions with University of Erlangen-Nuremberg; UC, Berkeley; Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt; University of British Columbia; and University of Antwerp. I also recently finished a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship at the National Science Foundation’s National AI Research Institutes.

I have two ongoing research projects. In the first I explore the social and political implications of urban open data platforms and ‘smart cities’ agenda. I am drawn to the politics underwriting the reasons places and phenomena are represented the way they are in open data platforms, and the implications of open data platforms on community organizations’ strategies in city politics. For this, with Mellon Foundation and SSHRC sub-grants, I have started the YYC Data Collective, a platform for community associations and non-profits to share their data — a complement to Open Calgary. I also helped launch Smart Cities Partnership YYC, a collaboration with the City of Calgary on their smart city strategy; and an Urban Alliance project reviewing municipal data sharing agreements across North America.

Second, I am currently looking at how the digitalization of petroleum extraction labor is impacting urban politics, labor markets, Indigenous and First Nations spaces, and the transition to post-carbon economies. This SSHRC-funded research seeks to understand what happens to Calgary specifically and Alberta more broadly when digitalization is seen both as a way of working toward climate goals *and* as a way of improving the operations of extractive firms – a seeming contradiction. In a world moving away from petroleum as its primary energy source, how does digitalization of extraction sit uneasily with the overwhelmingly dominated local industry base’s reliance on extraction?

These activities build upon my prior work in spatial data analytics and web mapping. In research conducted 2008-2009, I used the high-dimensional visualization technique the Self-organizing Map (SOM) to explore people’s (digitally) written descriptions of San Diego neighborhoods. The SOM is a quantitative data science technique useful for teasing out themes and structures from large volumes of unstructured semantic data. I used this technique to arrange neighborhoods on a map based on similarities in people’s descriptions of them, allowing me to identify similarities between neighborhoods’ attributes, as condensed from a very large dataset. In another project on youth mapping co-PI’d by Sarah Elwood and Katharyne Mitchell, I built an interactive web mapping interface for use in Seattle after-school programs. Youth mapped their everyday geographies and the spatial histories of racial and ethnic minorities in Seattle, illustrating the ways in which geoweb technologies may be used to impact youth civic engagement.

I have served my home discipline and my universities in numerous capacities. I am currently Associate Editor for GeoJournal. I sit on the Editorial Board of Digital Geography & Society, ACME, and Frontiers in Big Data. I’m currently the vice chair of the Digital Geography Specialty Group of the AAG.

Research/Scholarship

  • https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=grfQwUIAAAAJ&hl=en
  • https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5025-4947

Selected Publications

  • 2023 Mackinnon, Debra, R. Burns, V. Fast (Eds.). Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN: 9781487527174. https://utorontopress.com/9781487527174/digital-injustice-in-the-smart-city/ (Reviewed in The Canadian Geographer (2023)).
  • 2023 Burns, Ryan. More Queer, More than Human: A Framework for Digital Justice for Smart Cities. In D. Mackinnon, R. Burns, V. Fast (Eds.), Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City, 53-66. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN: 9781487527174.
  • 2023 Burns, Ryan, D. Mackinnon, V. Fast. Toward Urban Digital Justice: The Smart City as an Empty Signifier. In D. Mackinnon, R. Burns, V. Fast (Eds.), Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City, 3-23. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN: 9781487527174.
  • 2023 Burns, Ryan, E. Tretter. Digital Transformations of the Urban – Carbon – Labor Nexus: A Research Agenda. Digital Geography & Society 5: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2023.100062.
  • 2023 Burns, Ryan, P. Welker. Interstitiality in the smart city: More than top-down and bottom-up smartness. Urban Studies. 60(2): 308-324. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221097590.
  • 2022 Burns, Ryan, P. Welker. “Make Our Communities Better through Data”: The Moral Economy of Smart City Labor. Big Data & Society 9(1): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221106381.
  • 2021 Mouton, M., R. Burns. (Digital) Neo-colonialism and the Smart City. Regional Studies 55(12): 1890-1901. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2021.1915974.
  • 2021 Miller, B., K. Ward, R. Burns, V. Fast, A. Levenda. Worlding and Provincialising Smart Cities: From Individual Case Studies to a Global Comparative Research Agenda. Urban Studies 58(3): 655-673. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020976086.
  • 2020 Burns, Ryan, M. Andrucki. Smart Cities: Who Cares? Environment & Planning A 53(1): 12-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20941516.
  • 2020 Barbosa Jr., Ricardo, R. Burns. A Community Farm ‘Maps Back’! Disputes over Public Urban Farmland in Calgary, Alberta. Journal of Maps. OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2020.1805806. Competitively selected for a special issue edited by Joe Gerlach.
  • 2019 Burns, Ryan, G. Wark. Where’s the Database in Digital Ethnography? Exploring Database Ethnography for Open Data Research. Qualitative Research 20(5): 598-616. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794119885040.
  • 2019 Burns, Ryan. New Frontiers of Philanthro-capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism. Antipode 51(4):1101-1122. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12534.
  • 2018 Burns, Ryan. Datafying Disaster: Institutional Framings of Data Production following Superstorm Sandy. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108(2): 569-578. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1402673.