Computers, Society, and Nature

This essay presented an introduction to me for ABMs. Through the regular snapshot of a red colobus monkey’s positioning on GPS, both accounting for time and space, we can make soem strong empirical studies into the nature of movement for the monkeys. Up onto this point, most theories on movement whether they be animals or people were taken up on inference through observation of behavioral patterns. Now there is a significant presence of empirical data to back up these notions. Would this mean that zoologists tracking animals would be needing to pick up on GI Science soon? Perhaps. I understood that both quantitative and qualitative interpretations can be well married through the article.

One aspect that I found interesting was how the trackers were still working in tandem with other Arcmap layers, notably with DEM and land use mapping. Through this we can understand the constraining rules that surround the monkeys’ behavior. Hence, it sounds that with the right algorithm and inputs, it sounds like it would be possible to create adequate simulation models.

This feels as if it may have some repercussions with the advent of “big data”, and some issues concerning privacy arose while I was reading this. While it felt fine using this data on animals, and the amount of data available to measure their behavior was extolled by Sengupta, I wonder how this data carries on over to humans. Ubiquitous phone use is a real aspect of many people’s lives, and we are continuously producing data on a regular basis by the mere fact of having a phone on us. One thing that I wonder is how one would be able to access this data and who? Going by the same principle as the red colobus monkeys study, movement is subject to change largely by the change of external factors. This, I fear would mean that our assumed behaviors in ABMs may be recognized by public or private actors. One can take a cynical take on the presence of this data. This could lead to the advent of an exploitative social architecture that determines our movements in space time based on exploitative desires. This data may be potentially harmful and we ought to take note on how this is being used in the future.

-RTY

This article concludes that unitizing participation eventually hurts data quality.  Sieber also concludes that in many cases, VGI is an imperfect method for lack of traditional expertise. The cases examined in this article fall under the same umbrella of VGI applications for the public good, or specifically for narrowing the G2C relationship. The cases also all appear to require quite active participation in the form of content contribution.

I would argue that the four “avenues” discussed in the conclusion can be seen differently when examining PPGIS in the private sector. Many of the difficulties expressed in the articles vis-à-vis lowering barriers to participation are ameliorated in a private VGI effort. The private sector has more resources to develop friendlier GUIs. The issue of digital inequality would not be solved and participation by rural residents would likely still be stunted, however, passive participation such as location-sharing or simple multiple-choice prompts could see success in the form of quantity.

I think that additional research on the motivators behind citizen participation is a necessary step forward for this field of research. The article notes that PPGIS applications often maintain a facade of C2G proximity. If the desire for a louder voice in government supersedes that of “citizen science” or community-building, PPGIS projects should adapt and find a way to emphasize recognition and immediate response to citizen participation.

In this paper, Sieber (2016) review the history of Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS), explore four themes of it including place and people, technology and data, process, and outcome and evaluation. In my perspective, it is no doubt that PPGIS has been socially-constructed. However, there are some critical questions I think worth discussing.

Since PPGIS is contextualized, Sieber (2006) proposes a question about whether PPGIS can be generalized in certain degree. In my perspective, it depends what you regard PPGIS as. If it refers to approaches engage the public in application of GIS with certain goals, I would say it can be and should be generalized for sake of being learnt and adapted in different locations. Every approach or method needs adaptation when applied. The generalization helps understand an approach well, especially approaches that need to be applied in multi-disciplinary projects. While if you see PPGIS differently, such as a practical tool, I believe how to generalize it will be different. The significant problem is what is the nature of PPGIS. This also involves the question about how to define the public. For PPGIS, one of the goals is ensure the decision-making process more participatory. Consequently, I may question that whom we should include to claim the decision-making process is participatory enough. Surely, we can have multiple levels of public, while in a specific project, there must be a boundary exclude some people who may be relevant to the decision. Discussing such questions is the essential part when talking about PPGIS. Therefore, PPGIS, even as “GIS/2”, has been far more “socially-constructed” than its origins. Besides, it is a sad story that the public usually not engage with GIS directly, instead, they just provide inputs and evaluate outputs. The problem is whether this is enough to be called as “participation” since the public miss details when generating the decision. It increases the possibilities that vulnerable groups are manipulated by the whom with more power. I don’t think this can improve social justice. When the public provide inputs, there are problems about representing the knowledge; when they evaluate outputs, there are difficulties to match the empowerment goals and measure the intangible subjects.

As it can be seen, there are numerous problems in both theorizing and practicing the PPGIS. They stem from our society and may or may not be solved by more advanced technologies.

The way that neography is presented in this article sounds incredibly exciting. It presents itself as a radical counterpoint to the ubiquitous and predatorial cultivation of data from powerful private interests. The organizations discussed in this article all seemed to have altruistic measures with the reasons given for volunteer participation also reflecting that point of view. Volunteer participation stems from altruism, or pride of a place or open source convictions. In a large way this would reflect a kind of civic duty that I feel is still not ubiquitously recognized. I think of the digital divide discussed in the article, with different ontologies of the internet being in play.
I had the impression while reading this article that there these organizations had a poor level of communication with many of their volunteers. I think of the example of the blurring line of experts and nonexperts, and the anxieties contributors had of the validity of their own data. Perhaps these organizations are not properly reaching out and stating what kind of information they are looking for. This, I feel, stems from a lack of financial resources. This is often a problem when dealing with political action from a grassroots level.
Before the P/GIS becomes a truly disruptive force in the current world, it must become part of the regular social mores of as many people as possible. This would require a better level amount of education of it amongst the public, and it may even perhaps need to become a proper political force. I can imagine that on a municipal level, P/GIS may be an incredibly powerful tool for political mobilization and community knowledge.

-RTY

This paper’s truly interesting in that it addresses the philosophical questions of why people contribute anything, as well as the thought process that goes into contributions, and what makes them valid. I found that grounding of the geospatial web (a brand new topic) to its fundamental core, which is civic participation dating back to ancient Greece (Sieber 2007, p.1042) very needed. Along with reminding the reader that adding a map is a very aesthetic and fun way to contribute data, it still remains as just a GUI of sorts for the user to interact with a larger database. This increased interaction of user to web-architect does not necessarily equate to a reduced digital divide however, as was interestingly brought up with the rural participants of the FASNO project, who found Web 1.0 more comfortable than the Web 2.0. It’s sad to say the least that with technological advances, and increased access to the web that those left behind are now more behind than ever and are thus excluded (or feel excluded) from contributing in a new social group/setting.

It’s also useful to consider how ‘contributions are increasingly monetized’ (Sieber 2007, p.1034), as this plays a large hidden role into how the blurring of expert to non-expert occurs when we no longer know who is mapping. A large part of the time, it’s neither expert, nor non-expert, contributing to maps, though rather commercial entities. With this I mean how Google Maps differs from person to person based on ‘liked’/’saved’ areas, and sponsored markers. Though in the same sense of this article, this needs to be kept in the context that maps have always been made with an agenda, and you could argue that all maps lie to a certain degree to get their creator’s message across.

In short, I feel there should be more papers, or papers like this strip GIS and new forms of the neogeoweb past its GUI and fancy technological capabilities, to the fundamental data behind it, which is simple civic participation. Just this aspect being linked with the geospatial web is an incredibly powerful tool, though a better understanding of the user and to validate and quantify their contributions is definitely needed when moving forward with the discussion of P/PGIS.

-MercatorGator

Sieber’s literature review and framework for public participatory GIS (PPGIS) effectively situates PPGIS within existing bodies of thought in GISciences, and highlights relevant critiques and considerations. This article discusses ways that local knowledge can be integrated into GIS frameworks to democratize the technology and use it as a tool for empowerment and social change.
This article challenged my existing notions of what it really means to undertake “participatory” research methods. Sieber’s critique of the “PPGIS as GIS” approach was particularly interesting to me as she notes that public participation may often need to go deeper than simply extracting input from communities. Despite solicitations for public input, participatory research may still be top-down and impose the agenda of the researcher.
In reading this article, I was often reminded of what I have learned about “qualitative GIS”, which attempts to capture subjective forms of spatial knowledge in a GIS framework. Both qualitative and public participatory GIS respond to the technocratic social critiques of GIS and attempt to employ the technology in a more bottom-up process. I would be curious to investigate how these two domains intersect and are distinct from each other.
The key theme that I took away from this article was the highly context-based nature of PPGIS. Sieber asks whether or not the presence of such contextual factors leave us unable to generalize PPGIS. This question is a very important one and stayed in my thoughts as I read through the rest of the article. To effectively engage and empower a given community through PPGIS, a researcher must consider factors such as how this community communicates knowledge, the community’s level of technological literacy, and how the local knowledge can best be integrated into a GIS to meet the goals of the project. How can a set of best practices for PPGIS be established if what it means to “do” PPGIS changes with each project or initiative?
– janejacobs

Similarly to Mark’s (2003) paper, Kuhn advocates for a conceptual consensus on spatial information – what it is and how it can be used – by proposing a set of ten core concepts of the field intended for specialists and non-specialists alike. Kuhn also argues along the same line as Mark in that GIScience transcends the boundaries of a single discipline. Spatial information is what bridges separate fields, it integrates multiple scientific disciplines and ties them with other stakeholders in social policy making. Given its essential role, a consensus amongst experts of what spatial information actually is is needed to then open the field to non-specialists and be conducive for transdisciplinary research.

One of the main challenges Kuhn briefly mentions is the need to “map the concepts across disciplines.” Concepts are human constructs and vary from one discipline to another, in what they mean, what they are used for, or how they are used. Especially in trandisciplinary research, these concept variations can become very confusing and inhibit successful collaboration. For a paper that is intended to be intelligible to non-specialists from various disciplines with different backgrounds, I find that Kuhn offers a somewhat narrow-minded definition of each concept – that is, from the perspective of the GIScience field –without necessarily acknowledging any possible disparity with other disciplines’ understanding of the concept. While I do agree that building a foundational ontology of spatial information drawn and complemented from existing ones from other disciplines could offer conceptual clarity, I believe this paper needs more practical elaborations on each concept and less abstract conceptual definitions to be understood by non-specialists.

-topinambur

The debate surrounding the use of GIS as either a tool or a science did not occur to me while I was taking introductory courses in the field. I simply understood it as being a subset of geography, distinct in its own right as it compelled the visualization of geographic data for the maps. While reading through this article I was struck by the complexity and rigour this debate engendered. One thing that was evident to me was its place in history. The article was published in 1997 and used data extracted from early messaging boards shared between people who did GIS in their respective universities. I am unsure of how developed GIS was at the time, but I imagine that it was much more rudimentary than the way I was introduced to it. I mention this as I recall Wright et al’s positioning of GIS as a science, injecting that in order to be considered a science it would need to be in a position in which it drives technology. We are in a position today in which the demand for GIS knowledge is in high demand due to the sheer immensity of GIS data being produced and consumed on a daily basis. As it is advertised as a skill or a tool, as I would imagine many of those trained in it consider it, it would lack the same sort of scientific rigour that other disciplines will have. While scientists and psychologists are subject to a code of conduct with their disciplines, I imagine that there are many people using GIS who do not acknowledge the power that the technology may have on the wellbeing of people. As we look back embarrassingly on the racist and colonialist legacies of other academic disciplines, perhaps one day we will look back on the mismanagement of GIS data in a similar light. Perhaps by establishing GIS as a science, an broader understanding of its ethical implications may unfold.

-RTY

Mark(2003) give a comprehensive review of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) in term of its history and components. He presents a number of GIScience definitions but doesn’t synthesize them for setting a clear boundary between GIScience and other disciplines. However, it remains to be answered nowadays since its multidisciplinary nature. GIScience, as an independent scientific discipline, is not independent because it relates to and interacts with many disciplines such as geomatics, cartography, computer sciences.

It is interesting that Mark(2003) deem GIScience as a branch of information science, which makes me consider why there is no other kinds of “information science”. For instance, we can call “bioinformatics” but not “biologic information science”. Why not regard GIScience and geomatics as the same thing? I think it is not important to explore whether GIScience is a branch of information science. The nature of “geographic” is significant, which makes GIScience standout. In any disciplines, things always happen over space and time, which can be modeled and managed as spatial information. Therefore, GIScience emphasizes on dealing with spatial data and computation. These are indicated in both Mark’s(2003) component review Kuhn’s (2012) core concepts.

Being one of the early proponents of GIScience, Mark sets out in this paper to lay out the intellectual scope of the field – what is it? What are its components? Can it be considered a legitimate multidisciplinary field? What is clear from this paper is that there is no consensus yet (or then) on what defines GIScience. Mark presents definitions of Geographic Information Science, Information, and Information Science borrowed from different organizations and as they evolved over time, but does not truly propose a crisp definition to be accepted (or not) as the standard by the community. He then sets out to list the main components of the field, borrowing from Goodchild’s (1992) and the UCGIS’s own lists, defining new headings, and reorganizing components into different topic categories.

From this paper, it seems that Geographic Information Science shares much more similarities with Information Science than the discipline of Geography. Although GIScience and Geography are intricately linked since they “address the same aspects of reality,” GIScience goes beyond the concept of spatiality and looks at aspects of ontology, representation, computation, and cognition, to only name a few, to investigate the properties and behaviour of geographic information, and how it affects people and society at large. It is a much more rounded field than I previously thought and in my eyes unequivocally qualifies as a multidisciplinary one. Studying the human-computer interaction and human cognition of geographic environments, for example, is something that is completely out of the scope of traditional Geography yet is of crucial relevance to better understand the nature of spatial relations and geographic ontology. To me and many others, Geographic Information Science is a legitimate multidisciplinary field that has only been gaining more and more attention since this paper was published.

-topinambur

Michael Goodchild in 2010 published an article attempting to grasp the progress that GIS science had made over the course of its 20-existence. He uses this paper as a way to encapsulate the state that it is seen is from Academia, touching on the debate as to whether GIS is a science, discussed its major accomplishments and discussed further dilemmas the GIS world will soon be needing to address. A few statements proved to be prophetic, he stated that we may soon be in a world in which all public transportation vehicles would be possible to monitor in real time and it has come to be that way. Many websites free to the public offer this service. Issues of privacy and data collection come at the forefront as citizens become both consumers and producers of geographic information, which has become ubiquitous since the mass popularity of smartphone devices. People are thus always tracked, and governments, app developers and other private interest may have access to these things. Would it be the role of GI Science to determine the opacity and access of their produced results? If it were to be a science, its ethics would have to be more clearly defined. As I had been learning GIS as an undergraduate, I understood the ethical dilemmas being dealt with on a case-by-case basis. He brings up issues of education quite often, would ethics be necessary to be taught with a university context? I would say so, it’s important to acknowledge the utility and the potential dangers of such a tool. Harkening back to the major accomplishments Goodchild discusses in the second part of his article, perhaps a major accomplishment GIS can aim for is the recognition of a universal ethical code.

-RTY

I found this article quite interesting, not only for its commentary for the role of GIS as a science or a tool,  though also for the methodology used in this paper. This is the first paper I’ve read before the burst of the internet bubble, in which the volume and intensity of blog post entries has been used to measure interest and analyse interest in a topic. Mixing these results (quantitative) with a qualitative approach of interviewing certain GIS specialists on their views shows the author’s commitment to making this debate as legitimate as possible, and look at several angles of the debate.

The debate itself, which I understand must be important to those working closely in the field for personal reasons (as the author clearly seems annoyed at the remark of ‘something needing to call itself a science, probably isn’t one’), and for academic funding I assume, doesn’t seem all too pressing/important to me. Whether GIS is a tool, science, or both (I would argue) seems unimportant compared to how you use GIS. I found Wright’s view of GIS having three positions (tool, tool making, and science) out of date since 1997, as with the web 2.0 even all GIS users essentially incorporate all of these positions, while seldom thinking of it. In the use of a tool, your findings of new applications and sending error reports ‘builds’ these tools, and the scientific reasoning behind the use of one tool over another is a science I would argue. In modern day GIS (and post-GIS) the line between these three positions is even more as information is harvested passively through geolocational apps, and clauses in the terms of agreements to ‘help the program out’ by volunteering crash reports and bugs passively. Also the distinction between GI-Scientist and Geographic Information user becomes quite fine outside of academia as almost anyone these days is capable of placing points, lines, and polygons on a map and inferring basic analyses like clusters and buffers.

-MercatorGator

Much like Mark (2003) , Kuhn (2012) seeks to create a comprehensive list of core concepts in GIScience. Kuhn emphasizes the multi-disciplinarity of GIScience, and its importance in the growth GIScience. In general, I think that multi-disciplinarity is beneficial to any field, as different perspectives can provide fresh outlooks. Kuhn’s list of 10 core concepts is approachable for researchers in many disciplines, which can help promote cross-disciplinary GIScience research.

The core concepts are all relatively basic, but Kuhn’s more philosophical approach to them is really interesting. I found the discussion of location and accuracy particularly thought-provoking. Kuhn states that nothing has a true location, as location is based on relativity and context. While I immediately agreed that the understanding of a location is based on context, it took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that a theoretically unmoving object’s location would necessarily be relative to something else in order to establish its location (ie. I can’t be ‘here’ unless there is a ‘there’). I haven’t ever considered location as a dualism, but Kuhn has opened up my mind to the notion.

In the discussion on accuracy, Kuhn suggests that one aspect of accuracy depends on regularity in repeated measurements, but goes on to say that measurements must be understood as a random process. I will readily agree that units of measurement can be random, but shouldn’t the outcome of a measurement be far from random? Either I haven’t thought t enough about it, or a more in-depth explanation of this would be helpful.

In Geographic Information Science: Defining the field, Mark (2003) presents the “intellectual scope” of GIScience, and seeks to precisely define the science in a way that Goodchild (1992) did not do. He does this by suggesting that GIScience is a multi-disciplinary branch of information science, comparable to computer science. Mark clearly lays out the basic tenets of GIScience, and, in my opinion, successfully presents Geographic Information Science as a discipline that reaches far beyond GISystems and their applications. While reading the article, I often thought about the shortcomings in my GIS education during my undergraduate degree. GIS was presented almost exclusively as GISystems, and this article helped to provide me with a  base understanding of GIScience, its scope and its importance.

One thing that stood out to me, is that Mark suggests that GIScience became a truly academic field when the National Scientific Fund of the US began funding GIScience research. I find the use of agency funding as a source of science legitimacy incredibly interesting. On the one hand, funding is a crucial component of science and academia: without any funding, scientific research cannot be done. On the other hand, the fact that Mark’s understanding of the basic components of GIScience rests partially on successful funding proposals seems troubling. If government funding agencies have the power to define the scope and content of the science, is the science moving forward freely?

While this is a philosophical and ethical question that speaks more to our society than GIScience itself, given the personal privacy concerns tied to GIScience that we discussed in class, I feel somewhat perturbed by this. If government funding is pushing forward the scope and content of GIScience, how will citizen and consumer rights be protected?