Volunteered Geographic Information

Recently I had the privilege of reading two books that occupy ground at the relative forefront of their respective fields. These books were “Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory” edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins; and “Qualitative GIS: A mixed methods approach” edited by Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood. The fields represented by such work could be said to be Critical Cartography and Critical GIS respectively, however despite these two emergent traditions it is quite clear that there exists a lot of crossover and a lot of potential for crossover between them.

Critical Cartography is a catch-all for a set of mapping practices that engage critical theory. As a basic summary, analysis in critical Cartography aims to uncover the hidden social power structures operating within mappings; such intent derives from the post-positivist work of neo-marxists in the late 70s but is more commonly associated nowadays with the postmodern and poststructuralists. The origins of this kind of work are collected in the work of J. Brian Harley (see for example – “The new nature of maps: Essays in the history of cartography”), such an approach to mapping has since been supplemented, or surpassed, to include a broad number of critical readings of maps, notably focusing on characteristics such as process and practice, and reconceiving of mappings as inscriptions, propositions, part of the actor-network (see Latour’s work on Actor Network Theory) and more broadly as a suite of cultural practices.

Work Relating to Maps as Propositions. Source: Krygier J and Wood D (2009) "Ce n'est pas le monde (This is not the world)" in Dodge M, Kitchin R and Perkins C (Eds) "Rethinking Maps: New frontiers in cartographic theory" Routledge, London. Available as full-text pdf: http://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/ce_n_est_pas_le_monde.pdf

Critical GIS has a very similar remit to Critical Cartography, using critical theory to investigate the use of GIS. The work that sparked most interest in the discipline was John Pickles’ “Ground Truth: The Social implications of Geographic Information Systems” which was both conceived in conjunction with, and later dedicated to, the late J. Brian Harley.

Already is is clear that this two disciplines are not exactly distinct, the same man having played a significant role in work that could be recognised a precursors to the academic development of each. A loose distinction that works for me in identifying the notional difference between the two disciplinary areas is that critical cartography is dealing with in a sense a complete map, the maps is thus deconstructed or viewed in terms of the practices used in its creation, fundamentally however a map is a composition, notionally an image which is pre-constituted. In comparison a GIS is about layers, in a sense it is the ‘exploded-view’ of a map, whereas a map is ‘coherent’ as a single layer of image, a GIS may be incoherent in a number of ways, most significantly by: the layers that are included in a GIS visualisation; and the extent of the view chosen for any particular data set (often the data in a GIS actually ‘goes of the edge’ of a map). Such a view is only partial however, mapping practices, particularly those that embrace the movement towards crowd-sourced data and web mapping 2.0, are dynamic and so the boundaries between such a view of cartography and GIS are greatly blurred. Certainly it is true that in a vast majority of applications cartography is the output of a process started by GIS, thus the two are closely coupled, even in situations where a GIS may not have led to the creation of a map the practices may echo those used in a GIS.

Looking at the broader strokes of how the two disciplinary areas give shape to their discourse it is evident that there exist some generalisations that could be seen as distinct, Critical Cartography seems to align itself with the ‘everyday’ and the visual, whereas Critical GIS is concerned, as Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) is, with ‘local knowledge’ and the ‘community’. The differences between such elements are largely unremarkable however, and I suggest that the practice of choosing to define a criticism of either GIS or Cartography is largely reaching a middle ground in which researchers are more than happy to contribute to a broader critique of mappings and geospatial technologies unfettered by arbitrary sub-disciplinary definition. Such authors, including, but not limited to: Jeremy Crampton, Stuart Aitken, Martin Dodge, Meghan Cope and Mei-Po Kwan are to be lauded for such an approach.