This month has seen the publication of my review of “Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory”, editted by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins, in Environment and Planning B.

The review begins thus:

For more see the full review. Sorry if you aren’t a subscriber to the journal, I suspect I can’t post the full text though.

A proof of the first chapter, courtesy of Martin Dodge, is available here.

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.

Figure 1: Backcover of Qualitative GIS, delineated into 3 sections: a, b & c.

Perhaps it is uncommon to use an image of the backcover of a book in a review, as opposed to the front, however in this case it is fruitful. I have split the backcover of ‘Qualitative GIS’ into 3 sections (figure 1) each of which says something important about what it is the book does, or why it was written. The first section, a, is a comment from Eric Sheppard in which he describes the book as ‘definitive’, fundamentally he is right and I’ll discuss why he is right at the end. Section c deals with who the book is aimed at, and I’ll give my interpretation of this after we deal with section b.

Section b gives an indication of what the reader is to expect in this book, and surely the weight of expectation for such an ambitious publication is high. The broad strokes of the title – qualitative GIS- mean we have to ask, is this the critical GIS manifesto? Is this finally GIS reconsidered and emerging from the shadow of ‘Ground Truth’ (Pickles, 1995)? And, in light of numerous recent papers on critical GIS, qualitative GIS and non-quantitative GIS; is this the defining text-book? Well, no, not exactly. If anything this book constitutes a progress report, because fundamentally we haven’t yet arrived at a ‘qualitative GIS’. As noted in the introduction by Elwood and Cope this book should be seen as a framework, and as a spur for research going forward. Thus section b which subsets the book into: representations; analytical interventions and innovations; and conceptual engagements; is no less a structure than a suggestion- at most a research agenda.

It is with this approach that we can best understand this book, no section is intended to exhibit completeness, rather each contributed paper is an experiment in (re)making, engaging with, or retooling GIS qualitatively. The first section, dealing with representation, is perhaps the most surprising, there is no direct challenge to pre-existing methods of representation in GIS, rather the discussion of representation deals with imbuing existing structures with multiplicities. Such an approach constitutes what Elwood describes as ‘representational flexibility’ and the ability to see data structures and methods differently rather than recode them. This approach is evident in Schuurman’s chapter looking to integrate qualitative data into metadata, as well as Corbett and Rambaldi’s, and Elwood’s chapters which highlight the role of communities and local production of cartographic or geographic knowledge. This is a pleasing perspective from my point of view; I never really bought into the need to develop a new GIS₂ (Curry, 1998) or GIS/2 (Sieber, 2004).

The next section, entitled ‘analytical interventions and innovations’ follows on from the idea of representational flexibility, discussing recent approaches in analysing or experiencing GIS outputs, as well as modifications that allow for richer forms of data to enter a GIS. Knigge and Cope present what for me is the book’s best example of mixed-methods/qualitative GIS in their chapter on grounded visualisation and scale. This is a very effective demonstration of GIS being used as an analytical tool in a way which embraces its quantitative and qualitative strengths. In terms of the back cover content (fig. 1 b) however, the 2 chapters in this section do not really cover a range of methods of analysis, and the chapter from Jin-Kyu Jung is not as strong as other contributions in this book. The final section of the book, ‘conceptual engagements’, features content that is implicitly driving the work of the previous sections. Aitken and Craine present an excellent discussion of representation and non-representation through image and affect which is reminiscent of Mei-Po Kwan’s work (i.e. Kwan, 2007; Kwan, 2002), the most significant figure in critical GIS to be missing from this book.

In summary, Cope and Elwood have been successful in seeding a ‘qualitative GIS’ for future debate. This is not a complete book, but that’s the point and it’s why Eric Sheppard (fig. 1 section a) is spot on when saying ‘Qualititative GIS is coming of age’, suggesting development, or movement towards, rather than attainment of such a status. I hope this will cause GIS researchers to think harder about what they do, and whilst I do not think we’ll find a mass movement to ‘qualititative GIS researchers’, I hope it will result in new techniques emerging in GIS research and a greater consideration of multiple perspectives and representations. Not all the chapters are classic, Nadine Schuurman for instance is almost boring in her discussion of metadata, and many of the chapters are available in some form as journal articles, however this is a great collection, particularly as noted (in fig. 1 c) for ‘upper-level students and researchers’. As GIS becomes increasingly pervasive in the social sciences I think this book will prove an excellent signpost for more qualitatively orientated researchers who wish to integrate mapping and spatial interpretations with their work. I look forward to an expanded and progressive second edition!

References

Curry, M.R., 1998. Digital Places: Living With Geographical Information Technologies, London: Routledge.

Kwan, M., 2002. Feminist Visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 645-661.

Kwan, M., 2007. Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion*. The Professional Geographer, 59, 22-34.

Pickles, J., 1995. Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, London: Guilford Press.

Sieber, R., 2004. Rewiring for a GIS/2. Cartographica, 39, 25-39

Michel Foucault introduces the idea of ‘heterotopias’ in his essay ‘of other spaces‘. In this work he first establishes that the present epoch will be the epoch of space: of simultaneity, juxtaposition, near and far, side by side and dispersed.

This pronouncement bodes well for geography as a discipline, but perhaps not for GIS. Foucault, as with other authors who could be thought to be ‘poststructuralist’, is against a determistic views of time and space; a view most evident in GIS where order in space is established through data structures and explicit object hierarchies. However, he also notes that the current understanding of places as ‘sites’ is linked to contemporary technologies.

Sites themselves don’t constitute space or place however, space and place are constructed by the relationships between sites. Thus GIS may have the capability to manage sites- which deal with the relationships and proximity between different objects as defined by structures (series, trees or grids) as well as the demographic issue of placing and attributing things within a site, i.e. siting- but not space and place itself.

Foucault defines heterotopias as sites which relate to all other sites, but suspect, neutralise and invert the relations that they have- basically a site which is linked ot all others but inherently contradict them. Foucault gives examples of heterotopias as sites such as hospitals, schools, cemetaries etc – sites in which societal norms are replaced by another norm which has the effect of challenging and inverting the societal norm and creates instead an ‘unreal space’. Another way of thinking of a heterotopia is as a reflection in a mirror- the image you see is a real place, but reflected to a virtual location and thus inverted.

From this, it is clear to see that we can think of GIS as heterotopias. Any given GIS, depending on the work that it is being used for, contains a set of sites that exist in the real world, but which, within the GIS, are reflections. These reflections are not real places, but abstractions and generalisations of real places projected in an absolute, virtual, space.

Foucault goes onto define some of the properties of heterotopias, most of which apply to GIS. Most heterotopias are heterotopias of deviation, this can be seen to be the case in GIS where norms of societies are replaced by mathematical and geometrical norms, similarly (as discussed in Pavlovskaya, 2006 and 2009 in a previous post) heterotopias are remade by societies as they change, as indeed are GIS. A heterotopia, like a GIS, is often linked to slices in time, taking everything up to a certain point, or simply taking a moment; it is this charactersitic in GIS that means that it has trouble handling temporal data. Heterotopias have rights of entry and are not freely accessible, perhaps this is also true of GIS which require a different way of conceptualising space to the norm. Perhaps the most important aspect though is the following: a heterotopia is a space which is ‘other’, it can be seen as the mirrored ‘perfect’ space- as well ordered as our real space is disordered. Thus the GIS cements its position as a tool for interpreting the conceptual model of our world, in doing this it is the ‘heterotopia of compensation’.

postscript: I’ve recently been reading Generation A by Douglas Coupland, the novel really dovetails together the ideas of unreality in things like maps and earth-observation images and the challenging of societal norms. The insight is similar and conguent with viewing GIS as a heterotopia.

The American artist Jasper Johns once claimed the following:

“My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing” – Jasper Johns, 1965

Jasper Johns focussed a lot of his work on everyday objects, emphasising that we do not often see the everyday object, we merely look at it. Johns was interested in getting beyond the surface interpretation of objects; similarly he conducted a series of paintings using numbers as the subject, aiming to strip away their quantitative exactitude and submit them to the same artistic processes as other more qualitative subjects, such as landscape or the human body.

In a geographical forum, Johns is perhaps best known for his ‘map’ of the United States of America (of which there are several versions) which I had the fortune to see hanging in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York:

Figure 1: Jasper Johns. Map. 1961 source: http://www.moma.org

Johns is doing the same thing with the bounded, containerised, territories of the USA as he did with numbers. He is using new representations to challenge pre-existing ones. In this work the representation of the US loses its clarity, it becomes fuzzier and de-federalises. Thus the importance of this map is not that it is accurate, but that it tells a story that is deeper than the surface of the map, I’m hoping to get some work out on this kind of thing soon.

I’ve been reading through a recent book entitled “Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach” by Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood, hopefully I’ll post a full review it soon. In the meantime however, I want to think about one of the sections in it by Marianna Pavlovskaya, specifically her discussion of whether or not GIS is inherently a quantitative tool. I tend to agree with Marianna on one front – rarely do most GIS users directly engage with the quantitative aspects of GIS, use of GIS becomes about spatial reasoning with overlays and logical tesselations of geometry and the impact of visual depiction. On the other hand though I offer a photo of books currently on my desk:

Figure 1: Some books on my shelf

I think there is a serious point here; GIS is a tool- people are happy to use tools to get the jobs they need doing done, I trust an allen key to undo parts of my bicycle without breaking them, and tighten them to a safe level. I don’t however need to know exactly how the tool is made, I just trust I know how to use it. The same is true of GIS, functions such as overlays are tools (in fact this is the exact terminology that ESRI use in ArcGIS), you use tools to analyse maps in a non quantitative way, because you reason and understand their usage; I don’t specifically need to know how the overlay works in a mechanical sense, just that it does. It is generally that case that such tools, even simple tools have a basis in quantitative fields, often mathematics; an overlay is a topological operator deriving from that branch of mathematics.

Now, in a GIS such tools are formed from solving challenges in ‘computational geometry’, and I agree with Pavlovskaya again in that ‘computerisation is not quantification’, except that in this case; that is exactly what it is. There are numerous instances in GIS, shown through point pattern analyses, topological functions and distance decay in which it is clear that GIS is a quantitative tool with a quantitative development.

So is Pavlovskaya wrong then? Well, no. There are different kinds of users in GIS and for the most part users aren’t looking ‘under the bonnet’, to them a GIS is a set of tools, the use of which causes them to construct (make) GIS as a non-quantitative thing. What seems strange is that in looking for opening for non-quantitative GIS in this perspective, the current way of constructing GIS quantitatively had to be challenged, or seen to be wrong and somehow misguided. In my eyes the interesting thing that comes out of this discussion is the idea of abstraction.

In a sense quantitative, or technical, ways of seeing are increasingly being abstracted: bundled and enclosed into something you can think of as a ‘black box’. This encourages engagement as the most common user experience is a qualitative one, as qualitiative experiences for most are more intuitive – generally we have the appropriate skills to deal with such experiences, but may need to learn the skills to engage quantitatively in a complex system such as GIS. Software such as GIS packages have the effect of making previosuly difficult quantitative functions much more accessible, even a measure of straightline distance is a quantitiative function – the Pythagorean theorum, and this can be done in Google Earth and Google Maps which are probably the most accessed GIS in the world (if not also the most accessible). I think the question we have to ask is: what are the tradeoffs in making quantitative functions more accessible, in having them reconstructed as qualitative tools? The obvious answer to this is that when things are conceived as ‘black boxes’ they are exactly that: we have no idea of what is going on inside them. Thus, qualitatively, we have to decide whether or not that is important; in fact for qualitative GIS is may not be that important, as the world is reseen with ‘fuzzy’ characteristics.

References

Cope, M. and Elwood, S. (2009) Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach. Sage, London

(much of Pavlovskaya’s chapter also appears in the following paper)

Pavlovskaya, M. (2006) ‘Theorizing with GIS: A Tool for Critical Geographies?’ Environment and Planning A 38(11) 2003-20

Addendum

Muki Haklay often blogs about usability and critical GIS, amongst numerous other things of interest at his blog here.

I’ve been thinking about populations recently, perhaps unsurprisingly after the recent PopFest conference, nevertheless I tend to justify the presence of certain groups as characteristics of particular neighbourhoods or communities. In itself this seems entirely valid, certainly no population is perfectly homogeneous, they exist along a spectrum of heterogeneity. We can see simply from our own experience of the world that some areas exhibit spectacular diversity of inhabitants, particularly urban areas, my case study area of Southwark, London springs to mind. Situated in central London, south of the River Thames it contains a population that spans the inequality divide from the wealthy, young, City workers resident along the redeveloping ‘Bankside’ and the older, settled familied of the leafier southern part of Southwark, to the poorer, often non-white, communties in central Southwark living in social housing, to the poorer, older white residents historically attached to the docklands to the north-east of Southwark. Notably rural areas tend toward greater homogeneity, but still exhibit some diversity in some characteristics even if others, particularly ethnicity are constant.

This is, however, not the point, the real issue is the difference between neighbourhoods and communities. Both are very difficult to define clearly, my snap judgement is that communities realte to people and neighbourhoods to the territories that people inhabit. However some deeper research will show cracks in this simplistic approach, sure neighbourhood usually relates to a metric space, things that are near to, or contiguous to something else, however creating neighbourhoods for individuals seems like an approach to constructing communities for those individuals, likewise geodemographic classifications are increasingly being conflated with indicating something signifcant about the underlying communities. Similarly, communities occupy particular areas, the practice of mapping communities which come from government requirements seeks to territorialise community and new pratcices in public service causes further confusion: community policing for safer neighbourhoods?

The main rule that I have been able to extract from much of this is the propensity for communties to represent a ‘softer’, perhaps more public facing approach and conversely, by neighbourhoods a ‘harder’, more quantified method is often implied. There are notable splits within the disipline of geography between those who are willing to engage ‘communities’, which are intangible, temporally variable, socially realised relationships (perhaps) and come with the baggage of uncertainty and those that would rather deal with the geographically discrete entity of the neighbourhood, safe in the knowledge that the implied precision of areal units are not widely questioned. Even within GIS there has been a diversification of approach, from the mainstream GISci enforcing a ‘spatial science’-style approach that has persisted since the quantitative revolution (at least), to the public participation GIS discourse which actively engages communities and individuals, and by extension critical GIS which for a time has critiqued territorially bounded ‘descriptions’ of community. Finally consider the governmental binary of ‘neighbourhood statistics’ and ‘community cohesion’, many councils use neighbourhood statistics to ‘measure’ community cohesion!