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.