Revisiting critical GIS

Thatcher, Jim; Bergmann, Luke; Ricker, Britta; Rose‐Redwood, Reuben; O’Sullivan, David; Barnes, Trevor J.; Barnesmoore, Luke R.; Imaoka, Laura Beltz; Burns, Ryan; Cinnamon, Jonathan; Dalton, Craig M.; Davis, Clinton; Dunn, Stuart; Harvey, Francis; Jung, Jin Kyu; Kersten, Ellen; Knigge, La Dona; Lally, Nick; Lin, Wen; Mahmoudi, Dillon; Martin, Michael; Payne, Will; Sheikh, Amir; Shelton, Taylor; Sheppard, Eric; Strother, Chris W.; Tarr, Alexander; Wilson, Matthew W.; Young, Jason C.

doi:10.1177/0308518x15622208

Cited by 62 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 54 publications

(59 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Geographers have navigated the perils and promise of data through critical GIS and critical data studies. Raising questions about the politics of knowledge similar to those of EJ advocates, critical GIS researchers confront the ethical and power dimensions of data representation by asking who gets to map and be mapped (Rambaldi et al., ; Schuurman, ; Thatcher, Bergmann et al., ). For instance, scholars have discussed how new geoweb mapping software potentially realigns expertise in transformative ways through forms of “witnessing, peer verification, and transparency” that differ from institutional science (Elwood & Leszczynski, , p. 1).…”

Section: Critical Interventions On Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

Walker

Nost

Lemelin

et al. 2018

Geography and Environment

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGI seeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision‐making more accountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift from DataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an “environmental data justice” prioritising community self‐determination into practice. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship.

show abstract

Section: Critical Interventions On Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

Walker

Nost

Lemelin

et al. 2018

Geography and Environment

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An exciting and invigorating array of literature on big data discussion in geography is growing (Dalton and Thatcher 2014;Kitchin 2014;Burns 2015;Leszczynski 2015;Thatcher et al 2015;Wilson 2015;Dalton, Taylor, and Thatcher 2016;Gieseking 2017). Queer feminist theory can take these ideas a step further.…”

Section: Findings For By and About The Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software

Gieseking¹

2017

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS with special attention to the under-examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labor and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that "status quo" between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users good enough software. Instead, I argue that "status quo" between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted.Keywords: critical GIS, queer, QGIS, pedagogy, free and open-sourced software (FOSS) Key message:• I argue that "status quo" between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted.• Geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike • The production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users good enough software.Do not cite, quote, or reprint without permission. Instead, cite: Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2018. Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software. Canadian Geographer. 1Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software Jen Jack Gieseking American Studies Program, Trinity CollegeIn the last decade, conversations around queering of GIS have emerged. Queering allows scholars an analytic from which to refuse norms, hierarchies, and binaries in order to accept fluidity, rather than assume the fixity of positions and knowledge. Queering GIS is applicable in a variety of areas, from research to teaching, from other academic labor such as service and advising to the act of selecting and producing our software. Such a participatory position urges GIS users to let go of how we think GIS must work and reinvent the geographical imagination of GIS to create an operating system of our own.Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS with special attention to the underexamined political economy of GIS, I argue that "status quo" between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. My arguments derive from my experience of teaching critical GIS at two elite, U.S. New England liberal arts colleges: Trinity College and Bowdoin College. I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labor and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities, and participating in these debates. Extending a queer critical G...

show abstract

“…Reflecting on the limits of GIS is not a new exercise. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both the representation model of GIS and its worldview—who did GIS benefit?—came under scrutiny by geographers writing under the broad umbrella of “critical GIS.” (See Schuurman () and, more recently, O'Sullivan () and Thatcher et al () for a summary and an historical overview of the debate.) Early NCGIA Technical Papers from this period explored topics that include the language of spatial relation, cognitive science and GIS, and public participation GIS, while seminal works by Pickles () and others (Curry, ; Obermeyer, ; Sheppard, ) questioned the ideological foundations of the field.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The limits of GIS: Towards a GIS of place

Giordano

Cole

2018

Transactions in GIS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article we reflect back on our decade-long collaboration on the geographies of the Holocaust to argue for a GIS of place. Our previous work on ghettoization in Budapest and on the spatio-temporal patterns of Jewish persecution in Italy had a marked spatial dimension, both in the research questions we set out to answer and the methods we used, which were largely quantitative. During the course of our research, we progressively came to realize that a spatial perspective favors the voice of the perpetrator and that to fully comprehend and understand the geography of the Holocaust, we needed to engage with the voice of the victim, extend the set of methods and tools used, and broaden our epistemology. While proposing a fully-fledged model of a qualitative GIS of the places and spaces of the Holocaust is beyond the scope of this article, we: (a) argue for the integration of social network analysis, corpus linguistics, and spatio-temporal methods and for a mixed-methods analytical approach and (b) note how the topological and relational foundations we identify as fundamental to a GIS of place parallel the longstanding call for an "integrated history" of the Holocaust. | I N TR ODU C TI ONReflecting on the limits of GIS is not a new exercise. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both the representation model of GIS and its worldview-who did GIS benefit?-came under scrutiny by geographers writing under the broad umbrella of "critical GIS." (See Schuurman (2000) and, more recently, O'Sullivan (2006) andThatcher et al. (2016) for a summary and an historical overview of the debate.) Early NCGIA Technical Papers from this period explored topics that include the language of spatial relation, cognitive science and GIS, and public participation GIS, while seminal works by Pickles (1995) and others (Curry, 1998;Obermeyer, 1995;Sheppard, 1995) questioned the ideological foundations of the field.As a response from within the field, several academic GIS authors-for the debate barely registered outside of universities-attempted to re-envision GIS from alternative perspectives, including Kwan (2002) from a feminist one.Especially relevant to our objectives in this article is the discourse around qualitative GIS (Cope & Elwood, 2009)which is largely internal to geography-and, in a much broader context, the increased use of computational technologies and big data methods in the digital humanities and the spatial humanities (The challenge is how to map and represent the times and places of the testimonies, and to do it at scale (for all of Budapest, for example): how do we build a GIS of place by interrogating not one or two but 2,000 testimonies and narratives? Scaling up is not at all an issue for traditional GIS-it is easy to georeference 3,000 addresses on a map of Budapest, or to map the place of arrest for 6,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Italy-but it is likely to be the greatest conceptual and technical challenge for building a GIS of the places of the Holocaust. For a possible way of thinking about how to deal wit...

show abstract

Revisiting critical GIS

Cited by 62 publications

References 54 publications

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software

The limits of GIS: Towards a GIS of place

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About