Check out my work and reflections in Open Source GIScience!
September 20, 2021
In St. Martin and Wing’s (2007) article on discourses within the field of geography, they discuss the meaning of geography being ‘stolen’ or otherwise hindered by GIS. I’ll admit, my geography coursework has been GIS-focused with the goal of improving those skills for the jobs I want. As a result, I don’t have a strong understanding of what the breadth of the field of geography represents, but I do see the direct association of geography with GIS here at Middlebury. The Environmental Studies program requires a GIS course, which is the reason many students take GEOG 120, with the purpose of giving students concrete technical ability (“GIS as a tool,” a la Wright et al. (1997)). I wonder if that focus has contributed to a loss of more complex understandings of geographic concepts here.
I feel as if the technical skills we gained in GEOG 120 were significantly bolstered by 1) practicing critical thinking and deductive reasoning, and 2) learning the social theories and spatial concepts that contextualized the projects we worked on. We discussed the implications of the tutorials and projects we completed, and practiced analyzing our results in a social context.
I’m not sure how that class compares with GIS courses elsewhere, but it seems to incorporate the “GIS as science” mindset. (It makes sense to me that a course designed by academics would have a focus on theory as well as the technical skills.) However, those aspects of the class don’t address the other shortfalls of GIS, which I hadn’t considered before. The loss of “other understandings of space, ways of knowing, and approaches to knowledge production or policy intervention” by the unquestioning approaches to GIS seem to further distance GIS from the scientific method and would allow users to overlook more nuanced implications of an analysis and its results (St. Martin & Wing 2007, p. 244).
While it’s true that the existence of GIS has made possible an impressive range of research and products, it also appears that the currently dominant use of GIS is tool-based. The role of open source GIS may be at least to provide a route towards more development and non-corporate-driven innovation.
St. Martin, K., and J. Wing. 2007. The discourse and discipline of GIS. Cartographica 42 (3):235–248. DOI: 10.3138/carto.42.3.235-248
Wright, D. J., M. F. Goodchild, and J. D. Proctor. 1997. GIS: Tool or science? Demystifying the persistent ambiguity of GIS as “tool” versus “science.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (2):346–362. DOI: 10.1111/0004-5608.872057