Page 1 of 18 Social Cartography and ‘Knowing Capitalism’: Critical Reflections on Social Research and the Geo-Spatial Web By Harrison Smith, Michael Hardey, Mariann Hardey and Roger Burrows 1 Introduction This chapter explores how, what Thrift (2005) has termed knowing capitalism, is increasingly invested in developing new techniques, methodological frameworks, and cultural discourses that exploit the potential of social cartography to realize new forms of economic value and analytical power. Social cartography is defined here as an analytical concept that encompasses new cartographic information practices specifically derived from non-expert epistemologies and everyday users of new interactive mapping technologies, platforms, and software. Although there are many sites, case studies, and applications for this new social cartography, of specific interest to us here is exploration of the development of the geo-spatial Web 2.0 (the Geoweb 2 ) that combines interactive map-making with crowdsourced, volunteered, and open data practices. This chapter therefore explores the emergence of the Geoweb by examining its genealogical connections with knowing capitalism through a critical examination of its rhetorical, cultural, and politico-economic approaches to social cartography. The rationale of this chapter is to stimulate future research into how these new geo-spatial tools can offer social scientists new methodological approaches to doing research, while also scrutinizing the underlying political economies of knowing capitalism that consider how the diffusion of cartographic literacies and data are embedded in a neo-liberalization of empirical research. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) typically require years of training in software such as ArcGIS or QGIS, as well as access to expensive data sets licensed by the private sector. By contrast, the Geoweb is perceived to signal a social diffusion of cartographic knowledge production in everyday life that leverages the vernacular information practices and non-expert information literacies. This diffusion echoes larger structural changes in the social relations of new media information practices that coalesce around the value of crowdsourcing and social production; for example, geotagged social media in the wake of natural disasters such as the 2012 ‘superstorm’ Hurricane Sandy, or Crampton et al.’s (2013) analysis of the geography of tweets that used the specific hastag #LexingtonPoliceScanner. The rationales for producing new forms of civic participation and community engagement, 3 crisis management, and other critical epistemologies of social stratification stress the value of non-expert knowledge. However, this is not to suggest an oversimplification; that the Geoweb represents some kind of antithesis to knowing capitalism - far from it. An overview of its political economy shows how the Geoweb emerged in tandem with knowing capitalism, specifically through its shared social history with the neoliberalization of geo-spatial infrastructures. The Geoweb is embedded in larger political economies of commercial sociology and, to such a degree, exacerbates the institutional distinctions and distributions of intellectual and economic capital necessary for conducting