I’ve been intrigued with Lisa Parks’ presentation at Where 2.0 last week. Personally, I like the topic because I study the exact same stuff in my day job—when I’m not Twittering. Yet, it had an air of ignorance in it. It was observed from a cultural studies, almost post-modern view. It might be an observation from the outside that we don’t care for, but it is interesting and a needed perspective.
So, do we think of the effect of our media? Those media that are representations of real life in spatial terms.
We could put some deep thought into this for years and months, but for any geo-types who feel like Parks gave us a bum rap, and for those who may want to challenge her assumptions about geo as a medium, then start off by reading a paper by Daniel Sui and Mike Goodchild. It’s called, “A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan’s law of the media.”
This paper argues that GIS are increasingly becoming media for communicating various crucial social and environmental information to the general public. By reconceptualizing GIS as media, the paper conducts a detailed tetradic analysis on the social implications of GIS using Marshall McLuhan’s law of media. The analysis reveals the paradoxical and ambivalent nature of GIS technology. To make GIS fulfill democratic ideals in society, this paper calls for a shift of perspective, from viewing them as instruments for problem‐solving to viewing them as media for communication. This shift from instrumental to communicative rationality enables us to examine more critically and holistically how space, people and environment have been represented, manipulated and visualized in GIS and thus promotes a more critical and democratic GIS practice. [Emphasis mine]
For all things GeoWeb, this starts you off with some perspective where Parks was trying to come from. It did for me, and it’s probably why I’m reading books on media ecology and cultural geography of media. It’s a crazy shift for a kind of paleo/neogeography guy like myself, but just its another way of studying geography and our impact on place and people.
Understanding geo as a medium will help you realize the impact and design of your applications… As well as debating the academic film and media department’s evaluation of your lifestyle.
[imitating the Admiral] “The average Rooskie, son, don’t take a dump without a plan.” Wait a minute. We don’t have to figure out how to get the crew off the sub. He’s already done that, he would have had to. All we gotta do is figure out what he’s gonna do. So how’s he gonna get the crew of the sub. They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub…
[eureka!]
Someone doesn’t have a plan, or they’re friggin’ geniuses. Think about this. There’s going to be Google data going to ESRI users and ESRI user data will be visible to the Google indexers. That leaves us with some unanswered questions:
What is going to be the EULA going to look like on both sides?
Will data made w/ gData be the user’s data, or Google or ESRI’s data if it’s exposed to Google’s web?
Will the analysis layers be indexed by Google and will they own a copy?
Will “Big Iron GIS” users even want to expose their data to Google and the web?
Where’s Microsoft in this? ESRI + Microsoft makes for quick and easy GIS. Does (ESRI + Microsoft) * Google = Cloud Geoprocessing? Or, Google using Microsoft server and database platforms?
Getting back to ESRI users exposing data. Some of those users don’t let that stuff out of their command line. A friend was telling me today that cities in his region are ultra resistant to sharing data with other cities. So, how does Jack get his users to expose their data?
That’s what I really want to know.
The typical ESRI user “is an expert.” Or, at least in their own mind; and they typically don’t want to be usurped in anyway. Their Matrix gets turned off like that doll house by SAP. You may get a county to do something, but local sites are going to be a pain in the butt to turn onto the web by ESRI. Unless it’s ESRI’s responsibility in the pre-nup to bring in the “trusted interlocutors” to Google.
Something is askew.
On a side note: I spoke with Lisa Parks, who spoke yesterday about slippy map makers framing spatial media context, today. She has a grad student tracking the changes to the Google license agreement almost daily. That is because it changes almost daily.
In honor of Where 2.0, I figure I’d make the connection to all that the paleos like Jack Dangermond and Don Cooke and the like were once neogeographers about 30, 40 years ago. To illustrate this I’ll try to bring up some interesting facts from the past about neogeographers of the 60’s and 70’s and maybe older.
First person to be highlighted is Edgar Horwood from the University of Washington and first URISA president. Dr. Horwood created a card mapping and tape mapping computer program. Prior to 1960, Harwood offered the first academic course utilizing computer processing and geographic information.
Interesting thing about Horwood is that he has a series of “short laws” that every paleo and neogeographer should know:
Good data is the data you already have
Bad data drives out good
The data you have for the present crisis was collected to relate to the previous one
The respectability of existing data grows with elapsed time and distance from the data source to the investigator
Data can be moved from one office to another but it cannot be created or destroyed
If you have the right data you have the wrong problem and vice versa
The important thing is not what you do but how you measure it
In complex systems there is no relationship between information gathered and the decision made
Acquisition from knowledge is an exception
Knowledge flows at half the rate at which academic courses proliferate
First there’s the DevSummit this week, then there’s this!
A University of Redlands graduate student could face felony charges after police said he fired gunshots from the steps outside an off-campus student apartment complex.
Police found more evidence inside [the student's] apartment, Sgt. Travis Martinez said.
Police responded to a call of shots being fired about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday in the 1100 block of Central Avenue.
Witnesses helped police find [the student's] residence near Central and Cook Street, part of a university-owned apartment complex for students, Martinez said.
[The student] was not home when police arrived, but police later found and arrested him, Martinez said.
It was unclear why [the student] fired the gun.
“We don’t believe he was firing at anybody or anything specific,” Martinez said.
[The student] faces either felony or misdemeanor charges, depending on which way county prosecutors lean.
It is a case known in legal terms as a “wobbler,” Martinez said.
[The student], who was working on his master’s degree in geographic information systems, withdrew Friday from the university, said Katie Ismael, university spokeswoman.
Who’d a thunk that I’d be living a life of danger?
For our program director’s sake, I’ll have to say this was an isolated incident and that we’re still a good program. This isn’t the ESRI Summer Camp and Women’s Prison.
So, what can I say about GIS and firearms? Well, let’s say, they don’t mix in most places. Although, we do have a student who works for the Redlands PD. Check out this cool video of him on a ride-along:
No, that’s not Chris Schmidt either.
(Thanks to to Dave Smith for pointing the article out… Who probably found it in his Google News search for “geographic information systems.”)
Today the Summer Camp was blessed with a visit from Dr. Michael Goodchild from UC Santa Barbara. He was in town to speak at our colloquium w/ ESRI on VGI and what it means, but our class got to spend an hour with him discussing what else he’s been working on besides VGI. And no Andrew, I didn’t give away all your VGI secrets.
It sounds he’s interested in re-visiting how we do metadata. It depends upon VGI and the state of current technology from what he alluded to. He spoke of tags and ontologies and how the technology already describes what the data is for really well. What metadata today really doesn’t tell us—if we ever bother to look at it or write it—is how it has been used, what it’s good for, and how uncertain it is. And he went on to talk about how accuracy is out dated for today and how uncertainty is really what we’re wanting to know. So he sees the change in the world and wants to apply it so the rest of us really aren’t living in a world of paleo-metadata standards.
The other thing he spoke of was really about gazetteers, and he speaks of changing how we look at naming places. It takes a bit of VGI to do this. He and I went on about the First Law of Geography in terms of how persons volunteer the information around them. He speaks of involvement, ownership; I brought up the human need to justify our existence. What I should have recommended was the use of “Generation M: Me, MyMaps, MySpace” in his talks to describe this, but he’s the doctor… I’m not. BTW: I used that in a talk at the UC about two or three years ago.
We got on the topic of social networks and space and that was really interesting. Again, the First Law came up and I brought up the “compulsion of proximity” (pg. 257) about how people flock to like people. He also talked about how early mapping of social networks geographers would distort the physical space, but that really doesn’t represent the connections well and is kind of a poor—but fun—use of visualizing information via geography.
It was an hour well spent. Actually, he made me wonder why I was at Redlands getting a Master’s versus getting a PhD at Santa Barbara. He did praise Redlands as one of the best programs for what it is, with being a year long and having the resources that ESRI provides. Redlands might be the only year-long program? Also, he recommended talking to another one of his students who was working on something similar, so that is always helpful.
Then later this afternoon it was time for his presentation at our colloquium. It went really well. Jack was there for those of you who care. He went into a number of things that the whole social software world discusses, but with the focus on geographic information. He talked about the difference between authoritative versus assertive sources in mapping. Brought up how Don Cooke calls himself a “paleogeographer,” but how the only difference between him and the neogeographers is that their shirts are untucked and his isn’t. He used Open Street Map, Wikimapia, and Google Earth as examples.
Overall, Dr. Goodchild gave a good presentation about where the geospatial world is and asks what’s going to happen next and how is it going to effect us all.
I apologize that this post doesn’t capture everything, but it’s something.
Since it is that time of year and since everyone is doing it. I might as well list my top ten dumbest predictions about our world for 2008. If they become true, I’m heading to Vegas with Dave Bouwman’s profits this time next year.
10) Election Maps. It’s election year in the States and once again we’ll be hosed with “red vs. blue” thematic maps. These maps will polarize the country early on with predicted areas of support for candidates and bringing out the nastiness of who’s right, wrong, left, up, and down.There will also be a few mashups of election supporters with breakdowns of where obese folks, intelligent designers, and Oprah/NASCAR moms are.
9) OSHA. OSHA will step in to ban the Wii and GIS. Especially after James Fee has his Wii Bowling accident before Where 2.0 and becomes unable to spell GIS anymore, let alone blog about it. GIS is banned because is causes blindness and hairy palms.
8) Maps is bad. Once the non-western world melts down during the spring thaw, a number of baddies use [Google] maps for no good. Causing knee-jerk reaction by a number of governments to ban or highly regulate mapping. Especially China, who takes out WorldView-2 right after launch.
7) WorldView-2 Stuns GeoEye’s New Bird. Months after China whacks WV-2, WV-2 parts whack GeoEye’s new bird by having it’s debris scratch GE-1’s lens. Bill Gates secretly de-orbits GE-1 onto Sergey’s secret island Googleplex.
6) FOSS4G and the ESRI UC announce plans to combine in 2010. That’s after a prisoner exchange during a TC211 meeting.
5) Jeff Thurston discovers that GLONASS is really a space weapons system. Only because he watched a special on TV, then formed a rescue party that rescued a number of GLONASS engineers from captivity in Siberia. If he would only do that for Manifold users too
4) GooglePhone knows more about you than you do. Google releases the GPhone with its partners and eerily signs you up, books your car, room, and flight to attend Where 2.0 even before you own your GPhone. On a sad note, Glenn is tasered by his N95 when it discovers he decides to think about writing a comparison piece between N95 and GPhone.
3) Acronym soup! VGI, SDI, ESRI, FOSS4G, WTF? 2008 is the year we get acronym’d to death. It starts in DC with the ESRI FedUC and ends when SlashGeo stops with its sloppy seconds.
2) Surveyors reclaim the Earth—only because the lawyers let them. Dusting off the old chains, someone lobbies in DC hard enough to enact licensing for all geo professionals after a rash of high profile court cases that affect senators and representatives and the earmarked buildings, parks, and bridges named after them.
1) Nom de plumes. From me, to the Fake Steve Coast, to Fake Ed Parsons and the soon to be Fake James Fee. The fakes get unmasked; I stop posting b/c too many folks know who I am—and, yes, I will have to kill you; and everyone starts fake <insert name here> blog. On the bright side, in August, the Fake Jack Dangermond hosts the Fake ESRI UC and gives me my fake grad skool diploma.
A geographic information system (GIS), also known as a geographical information system or geospatial information system, is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the Earth. GIS is referred to as geomatics in Canada.
In the strictest sense, it is an information system capable of integrating, storing, editing, analyzing, sharing, and displaying geographically-referenced information. In a more generic sense, GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries (user created searches), analyze the spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying the geographic concepts, applications and systems, taught in degree and GIS Certificate programs at many universities.
It’s not so different than from what is in all of our textbooks. It says nothing about neogeography. Huh?
That doesn’t mean that neogeography isn’t GIS. The definition of GIS itself above is as a system, but can mean a science, or a service.Data in, gospel out. Same would hold true for neogeography applications and knowledge using the systems, the science and the services. I hear often enough from certain people in town that the web mapping applications that neogeographers build aren’t GIS and their data isn’t reliable. It’s all about the right tools for the right job folks, and it’s the right data for the right job too. As Tim O’Reilly once said, “It’s about the data stupid.”
We know our media is changing, but know that some things will remain the same: the geoid as an equipotential “lumpy potato”, Tobler’s First Law of Geography, and people will always say they like maps when you tell them you’re a geographer. I suggest we as GIS and geographer folk understand that change is happening otherwise. If you’re not down with change, get your acetate out and exacto knife and go start a hobby and preserve that lost art.
It has always been about the story of human life. Mine, yours, and the Fake Ed Parsons. (BTW: When the Fake Ed was at OS, he wrote the story of human life.) And we better damn well work together to help us tell it together. It does us no good to dump software packages into the deepest darkest collection of cubicles and say, “This is GIS, this will make your life so much better.” Then leave with no training and no discussion about sustaining a GIS. Employees with spatial info will blow it off, and it’s already been blown off inside the home. That’s why building the canvases of geography around the world are important. Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Yahoo maps, just to name the big guys. The likes of OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia, and Flickr and others where we’re mapping our communities and mapping our lives. Yes, this is great stuff. We need to let it grow and understand it, and not to kick your grandma off of Google Earth while she’s mapping her life’s story because “she’s not a geographer.”
(Written from the ESRI infirmary using Jack’s laptop.)
I guess it was a matter of time before there was academic research into this area and a meeting other than Where 2.0 to show off the goods. I guess GIS or geographic information as a media is pretty important to study. Especially when it comes to the have’s and have not’s in this world when it comes to access to tell stories about themselves. I wish I could go to watch, this would be a pretty good meeting to be at to see what comes from all of this.
