GIScience I: Social histories and disciplinary crucibles

In this, my third annual report, I contemplate inquiries about time as these might impact the work of GIScience. I review how GIScience grapples with, and thereby constitutes, the temporal dimension. I suggest that while efforts in critical cartography and critical geographic information systems have opened GIScience to alternative spatial representations and imaginings (sometimes beyond Cartesian analytics), unsettling temporal linearity in GIScience remains an important pathway to realize political and radical agendas for the field.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

GIScience III: Questions of time

Wilson

2022

“…In contrast, Murray (2010) characterizes GIS as a core method within quantitative geography. Wilson (2021), writing about the origins of GIScience, appears to root the field in quantitative geography. However, GIScience and quantitative geography are treated as separate sub-fields in geography.…”

Section: Lamenting Our Eroding Community Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative methods III: Strength in numbers?

Franklin

2023

In this third and final report on quantitative methods, I focus on academic community: what we do, what we call ourselves, and why this is a matter of importance for the entire discipline of geography, but especially quantitative human geographers. I first highlight the increasingly diverse ways in which quantitative methods community is produced and manifested, before turning to the shifting, ever-expanding, and overlapping names and labels used to define this group. I argue that, although there is ample evidence that the quantitative methods community is thriving, there is also a growing disconnect from the sub-discipline of quantitative human geography.

“…After overviewing 40-plus years of Progress reports on mapping, cartography and GIS in my first report on GIScience, I suggested greater attention to how, and by whom, stories are told of GIS in human geography (Wilson, 2021). Doing so invites many other molecular histories of minor GISciences , of digitally ‘thriving otherwise’ (Elwood, 2021: 209), following calls in the discipline for ‘more conscientious engagement with whom and how we cite’ (Mott and Cockayne, 2017: 960).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

GIScience II: Newness and imminence

Wilson

2021

Self Cite

In this second report, I discuss the role of newness in GIScience, drawing distinctions between ‘the new’, as a state of emergent technology and technical situation, and imminence, a state of happenings and becomings. I suggest that GIScience often reduces the two to each other – what is imminent is that which is new – with specific implications for the use of geospatial techniques and technologies in explicitly radical, critical, and anti-racist projects. To engage in this work means often to make do with what is available and accessible, with no less need for experimentation and innovation.