Dr. Daniel Cooper of Adler University and Dr. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, a writer and strategist, drew on our work on Million Dollar Blocks to map the incarceration landscape in Chicago. They used data collected by the Chicago Justice Project and built on research methods developed by the Spatial Information Design Lab.

Emily Badger of the Washington Post reported the Million Dollar Blocks project "On several dark-red blocks [mapped here in Chicago], the missing residents are so many — or their sentences so long — that taxpayers have effectively committed more than a million dollars to incarcerate people who once lived there. This is the perverse form that public investment takes in many poor, minority neighborhoods: "million dollar blocks," to use a bleak term first coined in New York by Laura Kurgan at Columbia University and Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center. Our penchant for incarcerating people has grown so strong that, in many cities, taxpayers frequently spend more than a million dollars locking away residents of a single city block."

Thanks to Andy Kirk for the nice write up on SIDL's collaboration with Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Humanities and History Division, Columbia University Libraries.

Craig M. Dalton reviews "Close Up at a Distance" in Geographical Review, Volume 103, Issue 4. He opens with: "Kurgan's Close up at a Distance is an ingenious and exciting push at the margins of what is possible to see and understand using satellite imagery, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The book is a review of and reflection on her provocative artistic and design projects using geotechnologies since the early 1990s."

UrbanTick reviews "Close up at a Distance": "What do we see, when we see the world? In today's world transcended by digital technology and flooded with representations, models and mashups the question of 'what are we looking at?' becomes more important. The many layers of data and visualisations in many cases start clouding the subject or in some cases appears completely detached from it and develop a dynamic of their own."

Columbia Peoples reviews Laura Kurgan's Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics in Society and Space "Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics is an insightful and innovative book that defies straightforward classification, ‘poised’ as it is “at the intersection of art, architecture, activism and geography”. Its subject matter—satellite images, satellite mapping and remote-sensing images—is by now an established concern of critical geographical scholarship in particular"

The Atlantic published an article by Laura Kurgan on SIDL's work in New Orleans: "Hurricane Katrina Displaced hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents; as they’ve returned, their struggles to remake their lives and communities have been well chronicled. But smaller waves of displacement, followed by straggling return, have been washing through the city, largely unremarked, for many years."

Domus reviews Exits in their States of Design 01: Visualization: "Commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, in Paris as part of a 2008 exhibition entitled Terre Natale and realised by a stellar team of architects, designers and programmers, Exit is a testimony to the political power of design."

The Atlantic City Lab reviews Laura Kurgan's new book Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. "Thanks to the open data movement and Google Map Maker, anyone with a computer can create a map. These maps tell a story, but it's a subjective one. And while that can be a powerful tool, it can also skew perspectives and cloud a debate."

Critical geographer Trevor Paglen reviews Laura Kurgan's new book "Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics" in Bookforum.