PostGIS predictions for the new year

One of the few times I get to do 'pure' GIS is around the Christmas break, after grant proposals, teaching, marking, reading, writing, and other activities finally wind down.  This holiday I've taken some time to explore the latest version of QGIS (version 2.6, 'Brighton').  There are no major changes to report, but I have come across a new OpenGeo plugin (by Boundless).  This promises true integration of PostGIS/Postgresql GIS databases and spatial querying with free and open-sourced GIS software.  It makes it really easy to do 'true' object-relational spatial/SQL queries from an 'easy to use' desktop interface.

This development will, I predict, start to see the eclipse of ESRI or even the toppling of the industry-leader from its hegemonic perch.  Preaching to the converted, perhaps, I think it is time to commit to QGIS.  While ESRI's ArcGIS suite of tools is nicely curated and can be demonstrated to have evolved from the very rigorous academic provenance of the Harvard Graphics Lab (including Dangermond, Chrisman, and others), QGIS will by pass the dinosaur in the new year, and race ahead to lead the pack into the future.  (Alongside doing GIS you'll often find me with Pixar movies playing in the background so that I have something to focus on when I look up from pondering spatial indices or maps).

I'm excited to report that, as director of Royal Holloway's new Geospatial and Visual Methods Lab, we are acquiring a full suite (19) of iMacs with QGIS and Google Earth Pro installations.  I believe this new lab will be 'on the ball' when it comes to cloud/server-side mapping and integration with mobile devices such as phones or GPS.  It will also be a 'traditional' GIS lab in the sense that the GVML will run desktop GIS tutorials for georeferencing, multiple data frames, database design, and LiDAR mapping.  We will have ESRI capabilities on the Windows side of these 'dual boot' machines, but the fact that these machines run slower in 'dual' mode gives a disincentive to do so (or put another way, it gives an incentive to use QGIS).

I believe GIS will become truly 'post', and that this is a good thing.  GIS may already be dead.  If so, then what we've moved into is a space of mapping that is becoming truly boundless, or at least unbound.  GIS 'unbound' is integrated, qualitative, mobile, distributed, geospatial, and web-oriented.  We still need the desktop to learn fundamentals of projection, framing, and joining but only as one site among many.  It is exciting to think about moving more into the field, about that 'opening of the field' that GIS can become, even as we realise that GIS itself sous rature, is ever-increasingly an 'absent-presence' in mapping worlds.

Refrains for the body of GIS

Inspired by Derek P. McCormack's book Refrains for Moving Bodies, and unable to attend to reading group devoted to discussing it (led by Harriet Hawkins), I devote a blog post to an area of productive overlap between performance/dance study and GIS/geoweb.

GIS (let's just call it that, everybody does anyway) is a moving target.  What's more, it dances.  GIS performs, it is performed on the geoweb, in mashups, overlays, and various trans-disciplinary foldings.

At first I thought no GIS and dance have nothing in common (at the same time as I thought, almost intuited that they must in some way be related).  Then overlays kept repeating themselves, differently each time.  And then I knew.

That GIS and dance overlap, overlay, and perform difference in their intermingling might not surprise.  The non-rep, more-than-rep crowd able to espouse such theories more freely than I certainly have the upper hand here.

But it's not about that is it?  It's about staying on top of the unfolding of metaphor, of difference, of repetitious ways of being and doing GIS that involve bodies, rhythms, and blocks of spacetime.  Lefebvre and Guattari.  Deleuze and Tarde.  Dewey, Dawkins, and Pierce.

The names keep repeating, the foldings keep happening, diagrams keep mapping themselves into this bodily thinking about GIS that happens when I walk, when McCormack reminds me about Montreal, Massumi, and Manning.

A Laurel and Hardy movie, the soundtrack of which is played overtop of OK Go's Nike video. Assorted quotes.  Here are some of my favorites so far (underlined, and starting from the last), all to my mind applicable to GIS/geoweb practices:

"the wager here is that the affective refrain of one register of experience and experiment can fold into and inflect the other as part of an ecology of practices composed of multiple refrains, some of which work, some of which don't; some of which cross a threshold of consistency, some of which don't" ( page 161)

"allying Bergson with Spinoza does not lead thinking out of this world, nor does it precipitate a privileging of the virtual over the actual.  Instead, it requires us to think of how bodies are composed through the transformative actualizations of virtualities" (page 146)

"moving images have a nonrepresentational quality: that is, to grasp their participation in the generation of experience means understanding them as more than merely symbols whose effect registers primarily through and within processes of cognitive sense making" (page 143)

"the tendency to proceed by going out into the world, reporting back, and then analyzing events is inadequate to the task of apprehending the affective and processual logics of the spacetimes in which moving bodies are generative participants" (page 118)

I only hope to walk this talk, to talk it through as a locating, imitating, map-made thing.

Where is the body of GIS?  Thinking it through.

Origins OVERLAY

"The visits to Harvard from these three prominent landscape planners provided a survey of the state of the art to the group that emerged from the Laboratory" -Nick Chrisman, Charting the Unknown (page 43)

GIS undoubtedly has its origins in the concept of the overlay.

Precisely who invented the overlay technique first or used it most effectively is debatable.

Attributing this technique to any one individual would be both fruitless and misleading.

Techniques were shared at the Harvard Graphics Laboratory in 1967, with visits from Angus Hills, Philip Lewis, and Ian McHarg (Chrisman, 2006, page 42).

Hills was associated with Tomlinson's Canada GIS and the Canada Land Inventory, but as Chrisman (2006, page 42) notes, "Hills's was the [technique] that needed GIS the least" because "each of the CGIS layers depended on expert photointerpretation."

Lewis (from the University of Wisconsin) used transparent map overlays to explore environmental corridors.

McHarg was famous for using comprehensive datasets cumulatively to delineate areas of constraint/possibility in the theory and practice of design with nature.

Source: Wiley

Design With Nature is classic of early or proto-GIS thinking.  I checked out McHarg's book from Bedford Library just to have a look at it again.  

Snow used overlays as well, a good century or more before McHarg.  You can check out the classic text on cholera, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, on Google Books.  

This post is an overlay of converging possibilities that fed into what is emerging in recent decades as a very plural universe of GIS possibility. 

References:
Chrisman, Nick.  2006.  Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS.  Redlands: ESRI Press.

GIS Tools for Critical Thinking

GIS is a literal and metaphorical set of tools for critical thinking. Taking inspiration from two books (Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking; and Gilles Deleuze's Spinoza) "GIS Tools for Critical Thinking" is a planned Place Memes mini-series.

These short conceptual reflections (of which I have approximately 100 potential sketches listed in my notebook) will go beyond the glossary or dictionary format, towards what Deleuze was doing in Spinoza, namely, adumbrating or outlining a new theory of practice.

My new theory of GIS practice is a radical programme for transforming how we think about GIS.  It is also a radical re-thinking of thought itself using GIS tools to drive the programme.  Dennett's memes are relevant here for deconstructing all-too-easy assumptions about what (we think we know) GIS is in order to transform what GIS can be.

Philosophical and practical implications will be considered without distinguishing between theory and practice.  For example, I would like to begin by examining overlay and proximity metaphors as used not only by John Snow, but also by poets, philosophers and critical geographers.  Stay tuned

GG3090

GG3090, Critical GIS and the geoweb, is a two term course with the first term focusing on Crampton's Mapping book.  The last two lectures of term 1 look at cartographic models and metadata, providing a bridge into some of the second term practical work.  Term 2 is lab-based as we work towards the final project, a poster for challenging 'official representations' of spatial information.

Place Memes, as a blog, should provide some indication as to my openness regarding range of subjects acceptable under the banner 'critical GIS and the geoweb.'  Just about anything goes, as long as it is rigorously documented in terms of method and source.  It should also engage in some way with maps or 'mappings.'  The latter are more nebulously or metaphorically defined.

Other important texts for GG3090 include Cope and Elwood's edited collection, Qualitative GIS; Harvey's A Primer of GIS; Schuurman's GIS: A Short Introduction; and Wood's Rethinking the Power of Maps.  Both the Crampton and the Wood texts engage with artistic cartographic and mapping practices in keeping with the pataphysical and (cyber)psychogeographical nature of many of the musings on Place Memes.

Feminism, Geography and GIS

I attended my first ever Landscape Surgery today at Bedford Square.  The subject was, first, the history of how women came to gain admission as fellows of the Royal Geographical Society and, second, the possible renaming of the Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG) at the RGS (now with IBG since the 90s).  The Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) group of the Association of American Geographers was mentioned as a similar group that keeps women in the title.  The debate revolves around whether or not to remove the word 'women' from WGSG's title and replace it with 'gender.'  The argument against this move is that it might de-politicize and take some of the focus on women away.

Image from The Geographical Journal article discussed at today's meeting in Bedford Square

The history of how women came to be included in the RGS, very nicely summarized by Innes Keighren at today's Landscape Surgery session, shows how much has been gained over the last century and a half or so, from the creation of spaces (including 'powder rooms') within the RGS such that women are able to participate, to the realization by men that the inclusion of women in geographical society will not necessarily lead to serious geographical research being turned into a tea party.  One of the most edifying parts of today's talk was when Katie Willis and Harriet Hawkins, at separate times in the discussion, reflected upon how radical certain texts from the 80s or the 90s seemed at the time they came out.

I was left wondering if WGSG includes any GIS people.  It seems to me that some of the issues around inclusion of women might be re-played out a bit in the development of GIS over the last half century.  In GG3090, Critical GIS and the Geoweb, we devote a large part of one lecture to feminism in GIS, noting along the way how early development of GIS was a kind of geek-heaven filled with hyper-competitive young men.  We show a video of Nicolas Chrisman with his big white beard explaining how the team at the Harvard Graphic Lab decided to solve technical issues around topology by a process of Darwinian selection, involving large sticks and bashing metaphors.  I follow this video up with one by Nadine Schuurman explaining her work in health and GIS.  The contrast is a comment upon how far we have come in GIS.

I was pleased this last semester to see so many women in GG3090, a strong majority in fact.  This should not be that surprising since the makeup of the Royal Holloway student population is a strong majority female.  But in the land of GIS it is worth noting that GIS does have its dalliance with a masculine past.  We do, more recently, also have a tradition of feminism developing, through the work of people like Nadine Schuurman (also part of GPOW) and Mei-Po Kwan.  We also have the work of Matt Wilson, Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski, all of whom appear in the 2009 volume Qualitative GIS. This text featured prominently in both the master's workshop run 10-14 December as well as the third year critical GIS/geoweb course at Royal Holloway.


Is GIS masculinist? I don't think so. But I could not have said this with such confidence even a decade ago when what Schuurman, Kwan and others were writing was still very new and risky. This only points out that what we take for granted today is the result of long struggle and overcoming bias, stereotype and exclusion.

Cartographies of Life and Death at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

The last two weeks have been excellent.  After a couple of years conference-free, I've enjoyed first a mini-conference at RBG with Doreen Massey; and second another mini-conference that ended a couple of hours ago at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  The name of the school might seem a bit quaint to some but it reflects a time when British colonial interests overseas were contending with some fierce diseases.  Not the least of which was cholera.

Spurred on by one of the presenters I took the opportunity during today's lunch break to walk from the conference location, passing first through the lobby where an exhibit features maps and books from archives as well as art inspired by John Snow.  There are a couple of animated digital maps as well, one of which uses choropleth classifications to depict outbreaks in Africa; and another of which plots occurrences of cholera through time on Snow's original 1854 map base, with a 'central tendency' point that follows cholera cases day by day.

Walking out onto the street wet from that morning's rain (which I'd been pulled up to that morning by an updraft coming from the Senate House Library behind me) I went straight ahead and then left, entering almost immediately the Royal Holloway Bedford Square (which I discovered on the way back has an architectural bookstore).  After arriving at Oxford Street I had to check a map to figure out how to get to Soho Square, just beyond which lie the streets where Snow lived and made observations on cholera so long ago.

This was really my first time going to Soho, and I followed a satisfyingly narrow back street over to Dean Street, and from there it was a short jaunt into a maze of streets with record and art stores and finally to the John Snow pub.  I had just joined the John Snow society too, and I shortly found the famous pump, which is a replica of the original.  Broad Street from Snow's day has been changed to Broadview Street.  There is a 'water bar' set up there (this was the last day), where a person could sample different kinds of water if they were so inclined.

The walk back was brisk, just in time to catch Tom Koch's talk on disease mapping.  He has a book out by that name with the University of Chicago Press.  Tom had the place livened up in no time as he cracked jokes about Sinclair Lewis and The Lone Ranger.  A fellow Canadian from B.C., we had a good chat at the break a bit later on.  He believes that science is never done by one man alone, despite the aura that goes with Snow.  One question from the audience challenged this view, pointing out that Snow was a unique man, going so far as to drink only distilled water (on top of being strictly tea-total).

The debates were wide-ranging and there was a lot of medical terminology.  In large part the conference was about cholera.  One of the best talks was by Christopher Hamlin from Notre Dame.  He is a historian of science who talks about Kuhn, paradigms, and ontologies of disease in a very compelling way.  This is quite relevant to how one views the spread and transmission of ideas; the latter may sometimes operate like viral outbreaks.  These are the memes that Dennett had been discussing in his talk (see previous blog post).

All of this is my idea of fun.  For more information click here.

Critical GIS and the Geoweb 4: Writing Worlds

This fourth installment of Critical GIS and the Geoweb (a supplement to GG3090 at Royal Holloway) is an attempt to let my readers know where I'm coming from (as much as that is possible).  As described in the introduction to my book, Maps and Memes (under review with McGill-Queen's University Press) and in my PhD dissertation, I came to the "Ground Truth" unexpectedly, feeling alone as a GIS technician in a world of academics and so-called "high-flying" thinkers.

Around the same time as I'd discovered John Pickles' edited volume Ground Truth, I discovered Writing Worlds, another edited volume that had appeared much earlier than Ground Truth, with essays by Harley, Pickles, Olsson, Curry and others.  The table of contents reads like a who's who in the world of critical cartography and GIS, although there have since been many additions to this world, most notably Jeremy Crampton and Nadine Schuurman.  I referred to Writing Worlds in my master's proposal, and I think that is partly what drew Simon Dalby (soon to become my master's supervisor) in.

When I talk about concepts like geographic information narratives and texts for telling stories about landscape, I am at some level talking about landscape as text.  This deconstructive approach to mapping and landscape has been in vogue for at least two decades in cartography, with mainstream cartographers regularly referring to Pickles and Harley as essential starting points for considering social implications of geographic information technologies (see Longley and Goodchild's text Geographic Information Systems and Science).  

So when I invoke the Ground Truth, or telling stories about geography through text, I am not simply talking about writing as sitting at a desk with a pen or keyboard.  I am talking about embodying mapping by being-in-the-world.  Maps as performances are phenomenological with no clear boundary between the inscription (the paper map) and the process by which that inscription comes to be.  Denis Wood and John Fels book The Natures of Maps is the best place to start to separate epimap from peri- and para-maps.  It is worth looking back some time to Pickles' first book (Phenomenology, Science and Geography), published in 1985, to see where he was coming from when he started to criticise GIS. 

It is a challenge for some to write about geospatial technologies because those technologies themselves are often quite new, and because it is tempting, if one is actively using them, to talk about the mechanics of what they do.  Remaining at that academic "high flying" level, one that is both critical and analytical while maintaining a logical and coherent narrative flow, is a definite balancing (or even juggling) act.  It is the challenge faced by students of GIS at Royal Holloway in all years, whether it is listening to my lectures in first year or writing about geospatial technologies for the first time in second year.  

It is clear however, that engagement with key texts by deep thinkers in critical cartography, GIS and the geoweb, those mentioned above in this blog post (and in course outlines and reading lists I've been circulating), is the best way to get to the place we need to be to begin to perform the high wire act of elucidating original thoughts about geospatially enabled technologies, discourses and worlds.

Mapping and the Art of Doing GIS

I read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quite some time ago, but I think that book has influenced my thinking more than I often admit to myself.  Why else would I attend a talk on Plato's Gorgias and Education (Windsor Building at Royal Holloway a couple of weeks ago), and cultivate an ongoing fascination with thinkers like Strabo, Cicero and Homer?  Why is the GIS guy reading all this stuff?

The reason I'm reading all this stuff (I had to defend my reading habits after I'd defended my master's degree at Carleton University and my supervisor said, "you sure read a lot for a GIS guy") is, first, out of general scholarly interest and a belief that it behooves teachers in sciences and humanities to be well read in a range of subject areas.  This is the same reason why I read The Times and The Guardian on a daily basis, to the point of being a bit of a news junky.

The second is that I'm fascinated by the idea of quality in general, by all things qualitative and how they overlap and inform quantitative considerations and stereotypes.  I believe there is an art to doing science and that aesthetics is as fundamental to doing science as are repeatability and falsifiability.  The idea that scientists are just hit on the head by great ideas is a myth.  Instead the best scientists must cultivate and channel creative powers in order to focus them in the most productive directions.

Creativity has been studied by some of the best scientists of all time, from Albert Einstein to David Bohm to Stephen Jay Gould. The diagrams and illustrations scientists use to convey their ideas benefit deeply from artistic endeavour, with atlases being at the forefront of such artistically informed scientific devices for communication (see Objectivity by Daston and Galison, published by Zone Books; or The Atlas of Science published by MIT Press).

Quality, art and creativity may not be strictly identical areas of inquiry, but they have a great deal of overlap between them.  Furthermore, they have a great deal of overlap with the business of doing science, and this includes the business of studying geographic information science and the geoweb.  Spatial information arts; visual arts of science; scientific illumination and drawing; randomness and chance in probability and statistics; visualisation of paradigm shifts and the charting of scientific progress: these are heady topics.  But they are all to some extent mappings, and as such they are worth paying attention to.

I am planning a manic project for very soon, one in which I will avoid ruffling the feathers of private citizens and/or authorities.  I want to explore public footpaths in Egham using my by now well developed method of systematic wandering.  I will document how public footpaths edge up against issues of privacy, surveillance and security.  Hedges, fences, windows, railway tracks, walls and all sorts of other boundary are encountered in my Egham rambles, and on Saturday as I was tromping through the mud to widen my horizons, I came to feel it high time someone made this map.

John Snow's Legacy

See below for a set of events on John Snow, discussed in GG3090 as a 'founding father' of epidemiology and GIS:

Event - John Snow's Legacy: Medical detectives yesterday, today & tomorrow

Posted: 29 Jan 2013 08:55 AM PST

John Snow (1813-1858) is an iconic figure in epidemiology and public health, best known for his pioneering work tracing the source of a deadly outbreak of cholera to a water pump in Soho, London. Visit the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in Spring 2013 for a series of events to celebrate the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth, his achievements and the new research that continues his legacy throughout society.

§ 15-16 March 2013: Mapping Disease
Discover the history of John Snow at a public lecture and reception on 15 March, followed by an all-day scientific symposium looking at historical aspects of his work on 16 March.             

§ 11-12 April 2013: Snow’s Legacy
This two-day conference will gather leading researchers in a contemporary evaluation of John Snow’s legacy and explore how epidemiology is influencing education, criminology and economics. The event will close with a panel debate chaired by Channel 4 newscaster Jon Snow. A conference gala dinner will take place at the Wellcome Trust on 11 April with after-dinner speaker Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science.                

§ 13 March - 17 April 2013: Cartographies of Life & Death exhibition
Historical treasures and contemporary artworks inspired by modern science feature in this public exhibition exploring the significance of John Snow’s work.                    

All events will take place at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT.

Further information on ticket prices, event programmes or to book your place

If you have any questions, please enquire via email.

Critical GIS and the Geoweb 2: Terminology

The following is a non-alphabetised glossary I wrote today for GG3090 class, prompted by a suggestion from a student.  It is an evolving document open to suggestions (the definition of 'map' might be contentious). I'm planning on adding some of these to the New Geoweb Wiki:

GG3090 Glossary

Georeferencing: using known points (such as road intersections) on a geographic information layer (such as a shapefile in GIS) to provide ‘anchors’ to an image with unknown positioning

Database: an information set, usually organised as rows and columns (or fields).  Explicit databases are those that are formalised in a written document or computer file

Map: a graphical representation of a portion of the earth’s surface

Projection: a mathematical procedure or formula for portraying earth-based (i.e. round) data on a flat medium such as a piece of paper or a computer screen

Topology: branch of mathematics concerned with attributes of surfaces that do not change when warped or distorted.  Inclusion, adjacency and connectivity are examples of three such attributes.  Vector layers in GIS require topology specification

Choropleth (map): a map made up of non-overlapping contiguous areas across which a value is evenly distributed as indicated by homogenous colouring of each area

John Snow (map): helped start the field of epidemiology, and an early example of a map ‘mashup’ (see below), John Snow’s map demonstrates the power of visualisation through maps in problem solving.  A distribution of cases of cholera combined with address information led to the identification of contaminated well water as the course of infection (and not air borne causes as previously thought)

Maps of, for and in cyberspace: maps of cyberspace depict material structures of cyberspace itself, usually in the form of numbers and strengths of connections across virtual or real space.  Maps for cyberspace help us understand immaterial aspects of cyberspace in terms of information space and social interaction.  Maps in cyberspace are essentially traditional paper based maps converted into a form (such as a .jpg file) that is uploaded (see the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography)

Ontology: branch of philosophy concerned with existence.  In computer science the term refers to a set of object specifications for use in an application.  A computer map of Cree land contains an ontology of lakes in which parts and certain configurations of lakes have their own categories

Epistemology: branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge and its acquisition

Representation: a mediating factor between an observer and the ‘real’ world.  A map is a representation of the territory it depicts

Mashup: the use of custom datasets on propriety platforms.  A Google Maps mashup takes user-made data and portrays it on a Google Map

Digital divide: a barrier or division, usually socioeconomic in origin, between the haves and the have-nots of digital information access

Geoweb: a set of geographically distributed services

Materiality/immateriality (of cyberspace): materiality includes the physical infrastructures that keep cyberspace ‘going’ such as cables, wires, hardware and bodies.  Immateriality refers to software, information, ideas and social relations that define empowerment or marginalisation in cyberspace

Semiotics: branch of linguistics concerned with sign systems

Map/territory: a mutually constituted set of practices for representing space.  Often the territory is assumed to ‘precede’ the map in the sense that the map represents territory and is therefore an objective portrayal of that territory.  A critical view holds that the map defines territory, producing social relations of human territoriality

Discourse: unspoken rules for producing statements of fact, fiction, science, culture or almost any conceivable aspect of human activity involving sign systems (see semiotics above)

Inscription: a written, recorded, printed, taped, digitally captured or otherwise ‘frozen’ representation of knowledge

Coordinates: a pair of numbers indicating a point (i.e. zero dimensional) location on the surface of the earth

Relational database: a database (see above) in which tables of information connect to each other through the use of primary keys, or columns of identical information found in two or more tables

Relational space: a space defined more by the relations between objects than by the objects themselves

Void space: a space defined more by positions (or coordinates) of objects and their attributes than by  the relations between objects

Wayfinding: travel towards a known goal through the use of landmarks, places and their names

Itinerary: a sequential list of places and distances between them used in wayfinding

Kml: keyhole markup language, the file type used by Google Maps and Earth

Distributed feature: an aspect of landscape that is mappable (i.e. has spatial extent)

Digital earth/virtual globe: an interactive representation of the earth in cyberspace that includes web 2.0 features (see below), as well as aspects of ‘traditional’ maps and atlases (e.g. place names)

Web 2.0: a worldwide web paradigm shift in which the user is able to define the look, feel and content of the resources and structures of cyberspace and the internet

Tracking function (GPS): a global positioning system feature that samples the position of a moving object (i.e. person) at a set rate and links these positions into a line

Waypoints: places encountered and recorded before or during the process of wayfinding

Visualisation: the use of on-screen graphics, maps or other spatial methods to display tabular data

‘Traditional’ GIS: usually refers to anything produced by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), the market leader in GIS software over the last few decades

Atomism: a database principle in which information is broken down into its smallest constituent parts

Commemorative Landscapes of Egham (on the Geoweb)

All photos by Gwilym Lucas Eades

Today I went for a stroll through Egham to do a little geoweb experiment.  The work is not yet done, but the photos above give a sample of some of the memorial architecture I encountered during my walk.  One does not, I think, often see these structures all covered in snow.

The next steps involve downloading the GPS track and waypoints and converting them to kml files, which I will then add to Google Earth.  The photos above will be added to all waypoints as will the notes I took at each site. 

An excel file of today's 'itinerary' will be created and opened in GIS as well, with some base data, and both the GIS and Google Earth files will be used to compare and contrast ideas of wayfaring on the geoweb.  

This work is inspired by my reading of Catherine Delano-Smith's "Milieus of Mobility" in Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (U of Chicago Press, 2006), from which extracts will appear in the 29th of January lecture.

Geoweb Links

The following links are worth looking at before a discussion about the geoweb, a complex topic that benefits from example in its elucidation:

http://geoweb.andrewshears.com

http://www.communitymaps.org.uk

http://www.mapkibera.org

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov

http://www.maptube.org/

http://openstreetmap.org

http://www.telegeography.com

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=165 (Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute)

mappingmashups.net (Alan McConchie's site)

lifeaftergis.blogspot.co.uk (Matt Wilson's site)

http://www.visualcomplexity.com

http://bbs.keyhole.com

http://housingmaps.com (a housing map mashup)

http://cybergeography.org/atlas

http://www.caida.org

(portions of this list were derived from the Mapping, Cyberspace entry of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography)

Introduction to 3D data

Source: amazon.co.uk

I have just posted a message about this book, written by Heather Kennedy, and available on Amazon.

We will be using the book later on in labs and you can purchase it (well worth the investment) or use one of the 5 copies Bedford Library has ordered.

It requires very little previous GIS knowledge to master the exercises in this book.  I found it very enjoyable working through clear and logical steps with plenty of diagrams.

Critical GIS and the Geoweb 1: GISystems, GIScience and the Schuurman text

The first lecture of the year for GG3090, Critical GIS and the Geoweb, at Royal Holloway was quite a pleasure to deliver.   We covered "GIS Tool or Science?" noting the three basic positions written about by Wright et al. (1997): tools, toolmaking and science.  A couple of basic metaphors were used to examine the 'business' of 'doing' GIS, those of the mechanic's shop and the overlay.  

The mechanic's shop envisions the new GIS user as an apprentice mechanic entering a tool-filled garage for the first time.  The new apprentice mechanic (GIS technician) will not, of course, attempt to learn all the tools in the shop at once.  Instead, he or she will be guided in the use of a select few of the most useful and fundamental.  In GIS we learn first how to stack and symbolise layers, how to run simple buffers or do basic spatial analysis.  We learn how to make simple and effective maps.

The overlay metaphor is part of the founding myth of GIS, in which an architect seeking an ideal route through several diverse sites, attribute fields and land uses, stacks translucent map overlays on top of each other and maps (draws) a route through areas in which several basic criteria are met.  This metaphor/myth is borrowed from Nadine Schuurman's GIS book.  During lecture I had recommended this book as one of the best, if not the best, on critical GIS.  Having been published in 2004, however, it doesn't cover the geoweb material as well and, in the end, this is why it did not become required reading.

Schuurman's book is well worth checking out, and Bedford Library has two copies.

GISystems, Science, Art and Toolmaking

GIS is an art and this realization begs a couple of questions.  Does the status of GIS as art make it any less a science?  Is arty GIS aligned somehow with its tool-status, in this case for making cool patterns/maps?

I'm thinking specifically of Mei-Po Kwan's Professional Geographer article "Affecting Geospatial Technologies," in which remotely sensed images were turned into maps of emotion.

Reviewing the GISystems/Science debate again in preparation for the upcoming GG3090 Critical GIS and the geoweb course at Royal Holloway has got me thinking about how the debate is still fresh.

A popular image of GIS or GIS-mappy things in movies or games would probably objectify the technology as a tool for making parts of movies or games work.

The map is often a sort of deus-ex-machina that comes in at the right moment to save the day.  Think of the cool maps the mop-haired tech-geek in the latest Bond movie Skyfall uses to leave a trail of ever-so-subtle-and-not-too-obvious breadcrumbs (or mapcrumbs) to lure the bad guy into Scotland where his fate will be sealed.

Cinematic maps obviously have to be flashy and nowadays usually animated to make the cut for cameo appearances in such high stakes movies as those in the Bond or Bourne series.  I've always fallen more for Bourne because the sense in those movies is that you never get off the geospatial platform, that you are always in the map as it zooms in and out of various locales across the globe.

So perhaps in the end GIS as art falls in the realm of that under-discussed area of the debate, that of toolmaking.  GIS provides a means for making tools artists and cinematographers and feminists can use to represent aspects of life that no other toolmaking technology can represent in quite the same way.

This has always been the case with maps.  Maps are both a science and an art.  Think of the crucial guiding role of the map in Hitchcock's 39 Steps.  Obviously there was no GIS when that movie was made, but the map serves to guide a viewer's emotions around the various landscapes in which the action of the movie takes place.  Conley has written about this map, which made me go watch it partly because I was interested but also partly because I didn't have an internet connection in my flat yet, and it was the only thing on my computer I hadn't watched.

So I would hazard a guess, that GIS is art, science and tool, and that toolmaking drives both the art and the science sides of the equation.

Critical GIS and the Geoweb (GG3090)

I'm getting pretty excited about the upcoming Critical GIS and the Geoweb course starting next term in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway.  We will touch upon how GIS rides an alleged physical/human divide in geography, how this technology offers a unique way of analysing and criticising origins and reasons for constructing that divide.

There will be two streams students can follow.  The first will focus upon BRITICE and the visualisation of geomorphic landscapes of northern England.  The second will be a critique of statistical constructions of more urban areas around London, starting from the choropleth map in the classic industry standard GIS package view, moving from there through ethnographic investigations of the same places with eventual qualitative data to be posted and saved in Google Earth's kml format.