Wright, Goodchild and Proctor review debates around the conceptualization of GIS as a tool or as a science on a prominent GIS listserv in 1993. In so doing, they unpack the debates and situate possible conceptualizations of GIS on a continuum between tool and science, rather than as a simple dualism. The additional point on the continuum they introduce is the conceptualization of GIS as toolmaking, analogous to engineering being situated somewhere between the pure and applied sciences.
The article concludes that only the conceptualization of GIS as science is sufficient to be considered science, and thus the only way GIS in and of itself might attain academic credibility. However, it would seem as though the authors failed to anticipate the rise of critical GIS as a field of study. When they touched on “the scope of research [being] determined not by the tool’s value to geographers, but rather by the multifarious applications of GIS, to include all of the societal effects of the computerization of geographic information” (p. 356), I thought immediately of issues such as VGI, loaction-based services and geosurveillance—all burgeoning GIS research topics today. However, Wright at al never come back to these more qualitative opportunities for ‘doing GIS’. Perhaps they overlook this potential because it doesn’t quite fit into their continuum: critical GIS involves GIS gaining academic credence not within science (whether pure or applied), but by way of the humanities and social sciences.
The article also offers an interesting insight into the pitfalls of conducting debates over the medium of the internet, from the perspective of the 1990s. While the GIS-L debates of 1993 do not remotely approach the caliber of trolling and talking past one another typical of political debates on the internet today, Wright et al’s analysis on page 348 does a good job of anticipating the rhetorical impacts of the internet’s shift into widespread use.
-FischbobGeo