Miller’s article was a very interesting introduction to temporal considerations and a person-centered approach in the context of geography. Why have I never encountered Hägerstrand’s time geographic framework before? It’s a fascinating way of looking at the world!
While focusing on the potential for advances in urban transportation modeling, Miller looks at cutting-edge trends in theory and technology to cut past the McNolegian scope on today’s dominant spatial data models and computational tools. He also zooms out from place-based representations of geospatial phenomena to propose person-based data models grounded in both space and time. Rather than simply applying GIS as-is, Miller makes an effort to advance our understanding of how we may create more faithful abstractions of our universe to, in turn, undertake more faithful analyses of our universe’s phenomena. For these reasons, it can be said that this article conceptualizes GIS as a science rather than a tool.
Could Miller’s work also be considered toolmaking? My initial thought was ‘yes’: he urges on the continual improvement of GIS tools and posits certain ways in which we could begin such improvements. However, he doesn’t go quite as far as implementing the data models and analytical methods that he introduces. It is up to subsequent work to take the theories collected and synthesized by Miller and translate them into practice—this is where the distinction between ‘doing GIS’ as science and as toolmaking appears to lie.
Yet by getting the scientific ball rolling, Miller has made a contribution to GIS as toolmaking. To borrow a concept from time geography, advancing the science of GIS and improving the tool can be considered an activity bundle, as the former eventually becomes a necessary precursor to the latter. Thus, the continuum for GIS conceptualizations may be messier, and less mutually exclusive, than one might gather from Wright et al: it may indeed be possible to ‘do GIS’ in more than one way at a time.
-FischbobGeo