Digitality Origins, or the stories we tell ourselves

The “Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography” were edited by Bill Warntz (1922–88), the second director of the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis (LCGSA). The point is to thicken the digital lines drawn with computation, recognizing these moments as technosocial – not in order to constitute a rigid intellectual history but to disrupt easy origin stories with the cul-de-sacs of experimentation and failure, tenuous allies and adversaries, and the fragility of thought and action. Pure regional geography would have a home, and the chief cartographer would be Erwin Raisz, who was introduced to Rice by William Morris Davis. William Warntz joined in 1966. Previously at the American Geographical Society in New York City with training as an economic geographer at Penn, Warntz had worked with John Q. Stewart at Princeton to advance a spatial social physics.