Top Ten Critical GIS Books of All Time

Part of my GIS Tools for Critical Thinking Series, here is a list of the top ten classics or defining texts in the field of critical GIS (in loose chronological order):

1. Pickles, John. (ed.).  1995.  Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems.  New York: Guilford.

Ground Truth is the one that started it all.  As a technician in training, struggling with ethical and subjective aspects of mapping, finding this book on the shelves in the College of New Caledonia's library was a conversion experience.  I wrote a paper on ground truth in GIS, which led to subsequent work in indigenous mapping (Wet'suwet'en) and a master's and PhD in the subject.

2. Curry, Michael.  1998.  Digital Places: Living With Geographic Information Technologies.  London and New York: Routledge.

My best association with this book was a discussion had during the defense of my master's degree with Simon Dalby, Sebastien Caquard, Iain Wallace, and Derek Smith.  The Curry text came up again and again.  Its citation and use as a theoretical base for my own master's work in northwestern BC was indispensable.  It still is.

3. Harley, J.B.  2002.  The New Nature of Maps.  Johns Hopkins University Press.

This book holds the ur-text of critical GIS, Harley's "Deconstructing the Map" published six years before Pickles Ground Truth.  It has several other key, indispensable, texts for critical geographical studies.

4. Wood, Denis.  2010.  Rethinking the Power of Maps.  New York: Guilford.

I find this text much more comprehensive and credible than Wood's earlier The Power of Maps.  Here we have the definitive statement on counter-mapping.

5. Pickles, John.  2004.  A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geocoded World.  London and New York: Routledge.

Pickles second critical GIS text is subtle, and it has the advantage of being a single-authored monograph.  It appeared just before the Google Earth revolution, which makes it interesting to read.  Pickles missed nothing by this timing.

6. Schuurman, Nadine.  2004. GIS: A Short Introduction.  Wiley.

Also pre-Google Earth revolution, it is this text's strength that it focuses on GIS, and the truly critical aspects for thinking that can be taken from that infamous suite of tools so closely associated with ESRI.

7. Harvey, Francis.  2008.  A Primer of GIS:  Fundamental Geographic and Cartographic Concepts.  New York: Guilford.  

This is an excellent text with pedagogical impact.  It covers GIS and mapping from a very well-grounded base in mapping practices, with sections on ethics of (indigenous) mapping.

8. Cope, Meghan and Elwood, Sarah. (eds.). 2009.  Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach.  London: Sage.  

Cope and Elwood's edited volume has chapters by Rambaldi and Corbett; Schuurman; and Matthew Wilson amongst other heavy-hitters in critical GIS.

9. Kurgan, Laura.  2013.  Close Up At A Distance.  Zone Books.

This book covers geospatial mapping projects over decades, with excellent coverage of GPS mapping as / and art.

10.  O'Rourke, Karen.  2013.  Walking and Mapping: Artists As Cartographers.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Finally we have a text that covers psychogeography and GPS comprehensively under one cover, from one of my very favourite publishers, MIT press.

(apologies to those left off the list...)

Maps and Memes meet the author

1-5 June 2015 at SFU (downtown Vancouver) at the Canadian Association of Geographers meeting

re-blogged from SFU.ca (CAG meeting 2015)

Gwilym.Eades@rhul.ac.uk, Royal Holloway University of London, Department of Geography

Abstract

Meet the author of Maps and Memes, out now with McGill-Queen’s University Press.  A reading will be followed by questions from the audience. This event will be of interest to academics doing research in Canada, with indigenous and northern peoples, mapping, GIS, and education.  From the back cover of the book: ‘Maps and cartography have long been used in the lands and resources offices of Canada's indigenous communities in support of land claims and traditional-use studies. Exploring alternative conceptualizations of maps and mapmaking, Maps and Memes theorizes the potentially creative and therapeutic uses of maps for indigenous healing from the legacies of residential schools and colonial dispossession.  [I] propose that maps are vehicles for "place-memes" - units of cultural knowledge that are transmitted through time and across space, focusing on Cree, Inuit, and northwest coast communities.’

French:

Les cartes et les mèmes, rencontre avec l’auteur de Maps and Memes (Presses de l’Université McGill-Queen’s)

Gwilym.Eades@rhul.ac.uk, Université Royal Holloway de Londres, Département de géographie

Résumé

Venez rencontrer l’auteur de l’ouvrage Maps and Memes paru récemment aux Presses de l’Université McGill-Queen’s. Des extraits de l’ouvrage seront lus, puis l’auditoire sera invité à poser des questions. L’événement vise à attirer les chercheurs universitaires du Canada qui s’intéressent aux peuples autochtones et des régions nordiques, à la cartographie, aux SIG, et à l’enseignement . On peut lire en quatrième de couverture (traduction): Les cartes et la cartographie ont longtemps été utilisées par les bureaux des terres et ressources des communautés autochtones du Canada en appui aux revendications territoriales et aux études portant sur les utilisations traditionnelles des terres. C’est d’abord en envisageant de nouvelles conceptualisations des cartes et de la cartographie que l’ouvrage Maps and Memespropose une théorisation des différents usages créatifs et thérapeutiques des cartes susceptibles de contribuer à la guérison des Autochtones aux prises avec les séquelles du régime des pensionnats et de l’héritage colonial de l’expropriation. L’idée défendue est que les cartes sont des supports aux « lieux de mèmes », qui constituent des unités de connaissances culturelles transmises à travers le temps aussi bien que dans l’espace, qui mettent

Maps and Memes UK book launch

Source: School of Advanced Study, University of London

Save this date! The 5th of May is the official launch date in the UK for Maps and Memes.  The launch will take place in the University of London's Senate House in central London (see image above).  The room number will be available at reception.  Drinks and books for purchase will be available at the event.

Geospatial and Visual Methods Lab

The new Geospatial and Visual Methods Lab space 

at Royal Holloway

The new lab space in the Department of Geography features GIS and video software for use in post-graduate teaching and research.  

It is intended as a place for creative and participatory exploration of new ways of mapping, representing, and thinking about space (human, physical, cultural, political and more).

Teaching starts tomorrow with social and cultural geography master's students using video editing software.  We have an Apple TV module to aid with group learning and coordination.

The GVML also has its own new twitter account for keeping up to date with activities and developments occurring here.  Follow us @GVMLab or @gwilymeades for updates.

Heathrow Terminal 5 via Poyle and Staines Moor

Rode right up to the end of the runway on my bicycle

Ate an apple and just waited

Before long a jumbo jet 

Went full-bore across the tops of the signal towers

Air traffic control 

Tower winking

Shuttle pods shuffling along

And another 

This time higher

Took flight right over me

Now situated so close

I had to plug my ears

Maps and Memes and The Geography of Names

re-blogged from Geopolitics and Security

In a space between two books I find myself launching one while another takes shape.  Out now with McGill-Queen’s University Press, Maps and Memes: Redrawing Culture, Place and Identity in Indigenous Communities theorises the place-meme as a construct for talking about place and space across generations.  I focus specifically on Cree, Inuit, and Northwest Coast Canadian indigenous peoples, and how repetitive commemorative journeys shape intergenerational knowledge, landscape and language.  Place-memes are inscribed and performed, written and embodied spanning brains, bodies, maps, and tracks across the land.  I focus specifically on the northern Quebec Cree community of Wemindji, and their yearly commemorative return to an old dwelling site.  The annual return, kaachewaapechuu, means ‘going offshore’, and it has come to refer not only to a set of linked places through which one passes during the three day journey back; it also refers to a set of ongoing processes.  Land is rising in Wemindji, faster in James and Hudson Bays than anywhere else in the world.  Isostatic rebound, colonisation, the decline of the Hudson Bay company, and fluctuating fur and food stocks and prices all contributed to the re-settlement of Wemindji, and all are commemorated through the performance of the annual return journey.

Place-memes are at base sets of linked names, and these names follow pathways as they are uttered by elders, heard by youth, internalised, performed and in turn passed on through generations.  Place names and the so-called causal theory of names, or communication theory of names drive the theoretical core of The Geography of Names: Indigenous to Post-Foundational.  At the same time, the nature of place-names is itself evolving and changing as emerging social media and mapping platforms allow for ‘geo-tagging’ and rapid re-uptake of new labels, tags, and place-name forms to proliferate.  For example, in London, the twitter hashtag #greatnames tracks how Chinese (and other) visitors to London create descriptive new names for prominent features such as the Thames River, Big Ben, or Tower Bridge.  Coordinate pairs attached to tweets that include the #greatnames tag can be automatically mapped to show new landscapes of names overlain upon older names that have themselves evolved since at least Roman times (when London was established in 43 AD).  This new work takes a global view of place-names, also looking at how maps and politics shape new geographies of names that nonetheless find origins in older times.  It covers British, North American, and Australian spatialities, indigeneities, and neogeographies of names.

These two books fit together quite naturally, with the latter (The Geography of Names) growing out of questions that the former (Maps and Memes) raised.  Whilst the earlier book grew out my work as researcher and consultant based in Canada, I am now a lecturer based at Royal Holloway University of London, with a wide range of world class libraries and colleagues at my doorstep.  The Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Library, British and London Libraries, not to mention the fourteen libraries found on McGill campus in Montreal, all have contributed space, ideas​, and resources towards both books.  An excellent and very engaged set of colleagues at Royal Holloway, and world class librarians at all the institutions mentioned are making the sometimes isolating or stressful process of structuring arguments and book sections much more bearable.  The research overall is moving from questions of indigenous identity and maps towards more fundamental questions of geographical reality and thought.  The Geography of Names is digging into place-names as tools for shaping reality through use in politics, cartography, religion, philosophy, and social media.  Watch this space as new themes emerge, and for sample sections of the ongoing work.

Part of what has made this work possible is the fact that along Hudson Strait, for example, oral histories are beginning to be taken seriously again.  Interviews with elders telling stories over maps in community halls in places like Kuujjuaq, Salluit, and Quaqtaq are becoming a regular occurrence as provincial and federal governments scramble to keep up with land claims after the successes of the Nunavut and Nisga’a territorial governments.

A book launch for Maps and Memes will take place at the Canadian Association of Geographers annual meeting at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver 1-5 June 2015; with another planned in the UK, probably in Canada House.

http://www.mqup.ca/maps-and-memes-products-9780773544499.php

Counter-mapping Skin

Image source: The Independent

Kevin Pietersen probably did not intend for his new tattoo to be a counter-map.  Continents are shown in a mirror image of how they 'normally' appear, giving them the appearance of being viewed from inside the earth.  I had to think about this for a second, but it would seem to be a mistake, introduced into the representation through the process of transferring it from the stencil to the skin.  It really doesn't have the impact of the classic 'upside down' counter-map of the world though (in my opinion).