GIScience II: Newness and imminence

Abstract

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.

GIScience III: Questions of time

“…Although my previous reports highlighted storytellings of other GISciences (Wilson 2021) and ways of thinking newness in GIS as a technical event (Wilson 2022), this final report takes up another horizon of the technical: the handling of time in GIScience. The point is not to resolve the problem of time, but to recognize the various implications for conceiving time (as the placing of history, as an absolute and distinct coordination, as measured and managed, as anticipated, etc.).…”