Computers, Society, and Nature

The Elwood et al article raises many important and intriguing questions, many of which are very relevant to what I discussed in my presentation on critical GIS. There is definitely overlap between the topics, as is discussed in the article. I appreciated that the authors brought up how deeply political it is to create a crowdsourced data resource. The “long tail effect” that the authors discuss in terms of data contribution is really relates to the Leszczynski quote I brought up in my presentation, that just because a data set is crowdsourced and made available to everyone doesn’t mean that everyone is contributing.

Something I had never considered that the authors bring up is the “scaling up” of qualitative methods in GIS. I had looked at qualitative methods that mostly looks at individuals; for example, oral histories and narratives, and hand drawn maps. It’s difficult for me to imagine how that might look, to scale up qualitative data, but the issue of scaling up is a relevant one, considering that one of the big questions of VGI is how to deal with enormous amounts of contributed information. To do this, the authors point to a need to weave together qualitative and quantitative data in mixed-methods approaches.

I also found it interesting that the authors make such a distinction between space/place and spatial/platial, and the fact that they say that geography has long made this distinction. I’ve never been clear on the difference (or the fact that space and place are even different) so this inspired me to look into it further. I looked into Yi Fu Tuan’s work and found that he defines place as “a center with felt value.” Space, in contrast, is open, abstract and limitless. This is definitely relevant to discussions of VGI and critical GIS since, as the authors state, VGI is more place-based than traditional GIS. I hope that we can use VGI and discourses of critical GIS to explore the places that people identify and connect with.

~denasaur

References
Tuan, Y. F. (1979). Space and place: humanistic perspective (pp. 387-427). Springer Netherlands.

Sheppard begins this paper with a beautiful metaphor for GIS: the escalator that geography can ride to finally occupy its legitimate position as a significant member of the quantitative and empirical sciences. I chuckled because I often find myself defending geography to my engineering buddies by saying, “Hey, but we do GIS, it’s like a real science!”

Kidding aside, this paper makes several good arguments that continue to be relevant two decades later. His first argument is that GIS is a social process rather than an apolitical technology. His historic examples of the Mercator maps and the Manhattan project were both useful technologies for one group, but tools of oppression for other groups. I think that we see this same dual process playing out today among GIS researchers, most starkly in my topic of drones. Today we have researchers working on GIS technology that can both be used to target precision fertilizers to improve agricultural output in developing countries, or it can be used to strike human targets in Yemen.

As a remedy to the slightly troubling path that Sheppard sees for GIS, he advocates incorporating social theorists to reduce epistemological biases. I think that in the early stages of the GIS discipline, it was easier to propose bringing together different disciplines. However as a discipline progresses, we see more and more branches and specializations.

For example, on the first day of class, I believe Prof. Sieber mentioned that there’s no such thing anymore as someone who just “does GIS”. You have to be specialized, you have to be highly proficient in software development. My point is that as any domain develops, researchers become so focused on their area of expertise that it perhaps becomes impossible to ask these broader questions from Sheppard. Therefore you get a situation, like in drone research, where you have the physicists and engineers on one side getting all the funding for research, and ethics studies on the other side doing all the complaining. I look forward to this lecture on critical GIS to see what productive paths have opened up towards reforming this unfortunate situation.

¯\_(?)_/¯

-Anontarian

Eric Sheppard has truly provided an unbiased viewpoint on the various sentiments towards GIS. I feel the split between techies and individuals is not as profound as it must have been in 1995, due to the more universal acceptance of computing technology in the 21st century. I was very pleased with Sheppard’s point concerning the social context of the mercator projection; it really helped reconcile some of the issues I have with understanding the broader context of the development of GIScience and how little technical progressions contribute to a greater overall social process.

I do feel that too much consideration for this overall social process can be counterproductive from a technological standpoint. I find the idea of GIS as a limited way of representing space to be a baseless critique, as I take issue with the idea that a technology that is not all-inclusive must be limiting or inconsiderate. I also believe that inequity of access to GIS tech is not a sufficient reason to halt progress, but it is certainly an important consideration in examining the societal conditions shaping GIS. I would also like to say that I do recognize my positionality as a member of the sect of society that exclusively benefits from GIS technology and enjoys the privilege of relatively unrestricted access to data created by a world I am a product of.

The last of Sheppard’s points that I enjoyed was the danger of data driven analysis. Many times I have been discouraged by the lack of availability of data in determining the direction of a project. I can see the effect this data driven analysis may have on smaller institutions and the private sector employing GIS, but I feel larger government institutions and the leaders of the GIS and GIScience filed are equipped to circumvent this issue.

Smitty_1

I find Kwan’s article very helpful in demonstrating the opportunities and limitations of applying GIS to Feminist geography. Though some of the specific examples of Feminist critiques of GIS used language that seemed slightly hyperbolic, I found the overall essence of the critiques to be convincing. These critiques, not only of GIS but more broadly of positivist science, point to a false sense of objectivity, especially in the sense of the “god’s-eye” view of space that GIS promotes. Since technology like GIS is more often in the hands of powerful actors, the result is that this false sense of objectivity legitimizes the marginalization that powerful actors can inflict groups whose perspectives they dismiss as “subjective”. Embracing subjectivity and applying GIS to the lived experiences of people could indeed put GIS to use as an agent of positive social change. However, one problem for the GIS community could be that this use of GIS would fall on the tool side rather than the side of GIScience. This may be unappealing to those GIS practitioners who see GIScience as the more legitimate and fulfilling incarnation of GIS. Successful application of GIS to Feminist geographical perspectives would most likely be cases of Feminist geographers using GIS as a tool. However, if this application of GIS were to lead to the posing of new questions within Feminist geography that would not have been conceived without GIS, then such cases could indeed be examples of Feminist GIScience. The examples of Feminist Visualizations described by Kwan could potentially be described as such, if they can be used to test Feminist Geographical hypotheses.

• Yojo

Sheppard constructs a solid argument that to understand the social impacts of GIS will both improve our understanding of GIS as a tool (by better situating its epistemological underpinnings and their strengths and limitations) and because GIS has complex effects on society apart from positivist assumptions of general benefit. As a new method of investigation (and realm of investigation, therefore, in its own right) GIS has tended to reinforce the positivist inclinations of the “techies” while ruffling the feathers of the so-called “intellectuals” within geography.

“GIS and Society,” and, I would argue, Prof. Sieber’s course on GIScience in general, exhibit the need to bring a depth of philosophical and political debate to the forefront of geography as a discipline–or if you want, to put the now rapidly-expanding information harvest of “Big Data” under intellectual scrutiny. I am left somewhat unsure of the ability of Critical GIS, as a subdiscipline of GIS, to achieve this task on its own. What relationship, exactly, do the leading academic figures of GISCience have to philosophers of contemporary technology, if any? Are the philosophers of technology aware of the advances in GIScience, and their implications for political and social order in the world today?

If the lesson of colonialism and the Mercator projection illustrates the complex impacts of advances in technology on humanity, then we ought to engage in the same sort of scrutiny now, in the midst of this current wave of advances, rather than after the fact.

In studying Ontology, I constantly find myself searching for an overarching definition that satisfies all perspectives, philosophical and scientific, to mitigate my confusion surrounding the subject. I recently read a long article exhaustively exploring all aspects of ontology, but I found that clarity for this subject lies in application.

The main focus of this paper is the domain ontology, which are theoretical frameworks that apply to certain domains. The theoretical framework concept is an idea stemming from the scientific ontology. In layman’s terms these ontologies seek to standardize informal distinctions and definitions, such as the boundary between a boreal forest and a temperate rainforest. In the pacific northwest, these two biomes exist close to each other, but there is no formal boundary line universally agreed upon by scientists.

In his 2014 paper, Sinha et. al explore this same question, but rather than forests they explore  surface water features. The main goal of a domain ontology is to create an exhaustive and sturdy foundation for future study in a topic. In doing so, the researcher searches for the “most essential concepts of a domain” (15). How far must one go in defining and dividing a domain to create adequate definitions of features and classes that best display the relationships that compose that domain?

Smitty_1

In this article Smith and Mark describe an experiment that investigates the possible existence of a “folk” geospatial ontology. The concept of different scientific fields all having a corresponding folk ontology is is fascinating. The notion that scientific ontologies actually have roots in their folk ontologies suggests that a scientific field comes about from a paradigm shift from the folk ontology. While the authors brought up the issue that the “legitimacy” of these folk ontologies is often brought into question, I wish they had gone into more detail about what constitutes legitimacy in these discussions. Also, I wonder if traditional Chinese medicine would be best described as a folk ontology corresponding to the scientific ontology of modern western medicine. The distinction between good and bad conceptualizations seemed slightly problematic to me. A good conceptualization is defined as one that is transparent to a corresponding independent domain of reality. A bad conceptualization, meanwhile, is associated with a pseudo-domain. However, isn’t it probable that in the future, conceptualizations that we currently consider good will be judged to be bad, and that domains of today will be regarded as pseudo-domains in the future? With regard to geographic folk ontologies, I’m not very surprised that folk geography was found to be a single ontology in this study. The fact that it is widely taught as a subject in primary and secondary schools around the world probably strengthens its unity. Geography has gone through so many paradigmatic changes since the 1950s, that what we may regard as a geographic folk ontology may actually be the remnants of what was considered the scientific geographic ontology half a century ago.

-Yojo

Spatial Cognition can be a misleading term. One of the authors first assessments is that one could argue all cognition involves space or exists in space, but it is important to distinguish between cognition that occurs within space and cognition that occurs about spatial relations, the latter being the concern of this paper. Spatial cognition also varies between individuals or sensors, given its interpretive mental component.

I find that unlike other topics we’ve examined as a class, spatial cognition plays a large role in one’s everyday life, but one does not realize this (at least consciously) until the term is defined. This unrealized component best fall under the second task involving spatial cognition, but also includes components of tasks three and four. I find these three categories to compose the most common and basic type of spatial cognition employed by most humans on a daily basis. Task 1 would have fit into this category before the mass production and utilization of mapping technology.

I am reminded of our explorations of  Inuit way-findings and how this difference in spatial cognition is entirely dependent on the use of technology. For iInuits, way-finding is a method of spatial cognition employed on a daily basis, similarly to use of spatial language, acquiring knowledge from direct experience, and using spatially iconic symbolic representations. This article has shed new light on the potential damage of cultural dissemination from settlers, mainly through the use of GPS. In my own experience, the application and utilization of the other tasks outlined on page 251 are very organic and uninhibited in nature. There is an individual freedom but collective benefit for each person gathering information from their environment and relaying or using this information. The impact of the GPS on Inuit culture and livelihood is not nearly as benevolent, but is rather a rapid and damaging infiltration that imposes on the six tasks outlined in Montello’s paper.

Smitty_1

In his article “Cognitive Research in GIScience: Recent Achievements and Future Prospects”, Daniel Montello discusses some of the cognitive effects of the emergence of navigation systems as a “coordinated and goal-directed” form of travel (1828). In particular, Montello discusses how the designers of navigations systems seek to improve usability by providing “travelers with just the information they want and need, and not more,” and thusly, reducing the user’s intuitive sense of orientation in their environment (1829). In this topic, I see rich issues in several of the topics discussed in the course, as well as those I’ve encountered anecdotally.
One area that navigation systems and digital mapping platforms have spatial cognition implications is VGI. Personally, I am often startled to see how Google saves locations of places I’ve searched for in the past (e.g.: friend’s addresses, restaurants, cafés, etc.) and will show me these locations the next time I log in. Increasingly, Google is also becoming aggressive in its suggestions of similar venues, by either displaying the icons more prominently or suggesting them in auto-complete. For many people, Google Maps and other digital mapping interfaces are increasingly the only maps they consult, and increasingly, the ‘landmarks’ they are shown are personalized. My question, therefore, is what effect this will have on the on people’s experience of the city and, particularly, their tolerance of and exposure to third spaces that are not algorithmically calibrated for their personal preferences? If people begin navigating their city and consuming primarily based on their previously VGI-inferred preferences, will they ever have the opportunity to encounter people and places that will expand their awareness of people and communities outside theirs? My fear is that as geographic information becomes more fine-grained, comprehensive, and personalized, that people will be less likely to ‘stumble into’ places by chance, and that as the practice diminishes, it will be less acceptable to go to third spaces without fitting a particular target demographic.
Personally, I think that we should reconsider the way the VGI-derived information should be presented to end users. For instance, perhaps digital maps should first display a ‘base map’ which includes place names and neutral landmarks (e.g.: prominent buildings, parks, etc.), and then display the ‘personal’ layer only after the user makes a relevant search. This simple move could reduce the degree to which people use ‘personal’ landmarks which reduces their knowledge of other places in the area. Although this may slightly reduce usability, it could provide a less pre-determined and fragmented base for geographic cognition with the same community. I fear the emergent alternative could produce a form of soft ‘red-lining’ in user’s spatial cognition, where people’s geographic decisions about where to consume and where to go are reinforced by algorithmically determined paths, and thusly separating different social groups and cementing certain areas and businesses as economically prosperous or neglected based on their VGI footprint.

~CRAZY15

In “Cognitive Research in GIScience: Recent Achievements and Future Prospects” by Daniel Montello, the key aspets of cognitive GIScience are introduced. I feel like dividing the areas of cognitive GIScience into the six sections of “(i) human factors of GIS, (ii) geovisualization, (iii) navigation systems, (iv) cognitive geo-ontologies, (v) geographic and environmental spatial thinking and memory, and (vi) cognitive aspects of geographic education (1826)” as well as giving concrete examples of what each one meant, helped my understanding of the range of the field.

This paper had some very thoughtful observations about GIScience and I would like to bring attention to one paragraph in particular that encapsulates the challenges of studying GIScience to which I think our entire class can relate:

GIScience involves knowing about geography, cartography, surveying, mathematics, computer science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, economics, sociology, and more. It is asking a lot to expect any individual to achieve expertise in such a diverse array of fields; integrating all of it is even more challenging. But it is just such an integration of many diverse areas of intellectual content and method that is the central challenge of GIScience. Arguably, without such a coherent integration, there is little warrant for referring to ‘GIScience’ as a single entity.

Being a competent GIScientist seems to necessitate both specialization in many topics yet also the ability to construct a general understanding of how they all combine. Under the topic of cognitive geo-ontologies, the idea of language being a limiting factor resonates strongly – I am constantly searching for more precise phrasing and sometimes get the feeling that if only the right words were invented then all the half-formed conceptual relationships in my head could become real.

On a completely different tangent, a few weeks ago we talked about how it would be a challenge for geographers to keep themselves relevant in the face of increased dependence on advanced coding and computer scientists to tackle GIS issues. This article mentioned how the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and GIScience has not been properly explored and it might be that area can give a chance for a new type of specialized geographer to employ unique beneficial skills.

-Vdev

Returning back to my previous post’s concluding question, Sinha et al. (2014) make a statement that can provide some insight: “For a comprehensive understanding [“of different conceptualization systems”], substantial research on geographic cognition, nature of geographic categories, and naïve geography will be needed to discover general principles” (188). This statement relates to our discussions on Open Data last week, specifically how general standards need to be implemented in order to compare all the heterogeneous data. These general standards will develop through various research, including linked (open) data, spatial cognition, and spatial ontology.

Yes, I believe it is valuable to develop general categories that match physical facts cross-culturally; however, I wonder whether our increasing use of technology will dissolve the unique cultural ontologies that exist. Maybe they will be maintained orally, but how will marginalized ontologies be maintained and distinguished through the mass amounts of online data? This article describes the “Geo-Vocabulary Camp” as a “bottom-up” approach that involved “domain experts and ontology engineers… discuss[ing] and implement[ing] patterns for the geospatial domain” (190). Nevertheless, this workshop is still done by experts who, for example, may be taught a marginalized conception rather than actually experiencing first-handily a marginalized ontology. Let me clarify that I respect the team effort to develop ontologies, which shows just how complex and time-consuming it is to design ontological patterns (good luck Olivia), I just hope they include personal marginalized point-of-views in the decision-making scheme. I believe this is a more inductive process and allows more individuals to contribute as well.

As soon as I read the following statement, “a pattern needs to be generic enough to find recurring use in diverse contexts,” it reminded me about the anthropological debates I was taught (191). Within anthropology, structural anthropologists argued in the 1960s-80s that cultures across space can be compared by identifying underlying general patterns, however, post-modernist anthropologists argued back that these methods are too generalizing, ignoring the variations that exist between different individuals within the same space. With this spatial/cultural complexity in mind, and once we come up with a general standard for spatial data, then maybe (hopefully) we can reflect on how to incorporate all the specifics.

-MTM

Montello’s overview of research in spatial cognition highlights interesting paradoxes. Research on the subject has been quite extensive, yet the benefits of this research have so far been extremely limited. Yet the author advocates enhanced research on specific aspects of spatial cognition. In particular, research would be more useful if there was a greater emphasis on how to preserve human cognitive abilities while simultaneously achieving greater convenience in daily life through devices that are better suited to human cognition. I fear that this goal may be difficult to achieve when research is so industry-driven. Unfortunately the private sector probably has no incentive to prevent technological infantilization and would in fact have very strong incentives to encourage it. Another issue stressed by Montello which I found particularly interesting was that of how uncertainty metadata affects the decision-making process of users of geographic information. I wonder, however, what sorts of uncertainty metadata users are exposed to at all. GIS users with an academic background may be exposed to such metadata as standard error, but I can’t picture how uncertainty metadata could be presented to ordinary users of Google Maps, for example. I would guess that it would mostly be people from a particular educational and cultural background who think of uncertainty quantitatively. I suppose a good application of this research would be in the management of automobile traffic. Planners could provide uncertainty metadata about how bad traffic might be on certain route options, in order to bring about an optimal scenario of how many drivers opt for which route. They could thereby maximize the efficiency of the distribution of traffic. However, I think this would be greatly complicated by the diversity of conceptions of uncertainty between individuals and cultures.

– Yojo

Daniel Montello’s article (2009) provides a brief summary on cognitive research and its development within GIScience. Similar to what we discussed in our Indigenous Mapping seminar about GPS’s implications on way-finding, Montello argues that technology alters “how we think” by “reducing our ability to reason effectively without technology” (1835). Reflecting on my days in GEOG 201, I certainly can agree with this statement; I found students, including myself, were memorizing ArcMap’s tools at times instead of spatially understanding what certain tools do.

In another case, navigation systems within cell phones are shifting humans’ conceptions of space. Although our mobile phones are useful navigational tools and sensors, I also believe that it is important to maintain a strong cognitive map, or at least some basic spatial knowledge (e.g. the ability to know which direction one is moving). As for concerns over “‘infantilizing’” within my own topic, VGI scientists need to develop models that users can spatially understand (1835). Specifically, models that are visualized in a way that allows users to easily input their own geographic information (e.g. providing a user-friendly interface). However, VGI scientists are solving users’ lack of spatial knowledge through automatic algorithms as well (e.g. crowdsourcing user-generated data through coded filters). This means, VGI scientists are maintaining and standardizing people’s conceptions of space prior to input, and then solving “infantilizing” issues through refining data post-input.

This tug-of-war between the benefits of technology versus benefits of a strong individual cognitive map will persist because GIScientists are at a crossroads. Like Montello states, one of the most difficult obstacles for cognitive GIScientists, as well as other GIScientists, will be “to clarify its values in the design and use of geographic information technologies” (1836). As such, where do ethics come in? Is it more important for people to understand new ways of conceptualizing space (i.e. ‘infantilizing’), or is it more important for people to maintain old ways of conceptualizing space? How can we improve both at the same time? Furthermore, how can we consider different ways of conceptualizing space other than the Western centric model?

-MTM