Volunteered Geographic Information

The above is a quotation from the book “Foucault’s Pendulum” by renowned author Umberto Eco, in the context of the book the phrase relates to a discussion that is had regarding homunculi (singular: homunculus), literally ‘little humans’, which are being kept in a garden in vessels of liquid. When conversation errs towards a human treatment of these creatures, one member of the party remarks “they are only cartesian imps. Or automata”, essentially, it is not appropriate to feel responsibility for these creatures because they are not humans, merely representations of humans.

This led me to consider the position of Geographic Information Science, the ideas of cartesian imps (agent based models?) and automata (cellular automata?) seem to resonate some of the interpretation of Eco’s text, and it highlights some interesting debates. GISci relies on representations and models of reality, it cannot represent the true thing, it was made to generalise, and hence perhaps is a homunculus, the victim of a diminished status in the eyes of those seen to represent the true thing, the real world, in all its relational complexity.

In the Eco text the brief interlude of the homunculus is quickly forgotten with a return to a more established literary tradition: desire. However, it is less easy to turn our back on the same issue in GISci, can we conceivably endorse such a view, that GIS is just a system, a machine for geography? This is the perspective that led to the fiery debates in the 90s between human geographers or social theorists and the GIS community, the tool of GIS was divorced from a human nature, it had no ethic, no morality. This perspective is gradually changing, there is greater engagement with mapping through the naive geographies offered by google maps and co, likewise the GIS establishment have begun to embrace a humanising agenda, from VGI to reconceiving of GIS as media- communication is a powerfully humanising force- to the growth of a critical community that is seeking to rebuild and adapt GIS to a more social means from the inside, not from without. Increasingly GIS is moving away from its positivist roots to include a greater appreciation for human methodologies, one such being the ability of the public to challenge their geographic classification and feedback their experience into the system. Sure, people are still researching voronoi polygons and data structures, but increasingly it seems these projects are being realised in a form that in publically-readable, not merely expert-readable, or (god-forbid) only machine-readable.

I notice that there are stirrings within the GIS community of “the quantitative revolution 2″ (see Mei-Po Kwan and Tim Schwanen), which whilst sounding like a tacky sequel may herald something more than a large budget and meaningless special effects. The tag line of this revolution is: “The critical (re)turn”, I think this is essentially what is required in GIS, and it has been happening anyway, to me the ‘critical (re)turn’ means the inclusion of mixed-methodologies, engaging with people and having a more open and involved discourse. Of course we shall have to wait for Mei-Po and Tim’s paper in a forthcoming Professional Geographer to see whether this is the case, or whether there is something fundamentally more important to say.

From all of this, I guess the question is: to what extent have we humanised the homunculus? or, will we ever get over the fact that it is a homuncuus rather than a human?