New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map

199 Pages·2017·2.757 MB·English

by  Matthew W. Wilson

NEW LINES
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New Lines
CRITICAL GIS AND THE TROUBLE OF THE MAP
Matthew W. Wilson
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
An earlier version of the Introduction was published as “New Lines? Enacting
a Social History of GIS,” Canadian Geographer 59, no. 1 (2015): 29– 34;
copyright 2014 by Canadian Association of Geographers / L’Assoc iation
canadienne des géographes; reprinted courtesy of John Wiley and Sons,
Inc. An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “OXAV,” in Ali Fard
and Taraneh Meshkani, eds., New Geographies 07 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2015), 174–7 7. An earlier version of chapter 4
was published as “Paying Attention, Digital Media, and Community-B ased
Critical GIS,” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 1 (2015): 177–9 1; copyright
2015 by SAGE Publications. doi:10.1177/1474474014539249
Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Wilson, Matthew W., 1981– author.
Title: New lines : critical GIS and the troub le of the map / Matthew W. Wilson.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017001744 (print) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9852-3 (hc) | ISBN
978-0-8166-9853-0 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Geographic information systems—S ocial aspects. | Digital
mapping. | Digital maps. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / H uman Geography. |
TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Cartography. | TECHNOLOGY &
ENGINEERING / Social Aspects.
Classification: LCC G70.212 .W55 2017 (print) | DDC 910.285—d c23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2017001744
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction: But Do You Actually Do GIS? 1
1 Criticality: The Urgency of Drawing and Tracing 25
2 Digitality: Origins, or the Stories We Tell Ourselves 47
3 Movement: Strange Concepts and the Essentially Subjective 69
4 Attention: Memory Support and the Care of Community 95
5 Quantification: Counting on Location- Aware Futures 115
6 A Single Point Does Not Form a Line 135
Acknowledgments 143
Notes 145
Index 179
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PREFACE
Cartography is perhaps the chief tool-m etaphor of technoscience.
—DONNA HARAWAY, MODEST_WITNESS@SECOND_MILLENNIUM
Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and inside.
—BRUNO LATOUR, “WHY HAS CRITIQUE RUN OUT OF STEAM?”
Geographic information systems are more than what GIS users and devel-
opers tell us they are. This advice extends a position held by Brian Harley
in 1989 regarding the field of cartography1 — and this is precisely the kind of
suspicious attention that propels much so- called critical thought toward
technology today. Do not trust that technicians might actually understand
their social situation and conditions. There is more to their stories. Is this
not always the case? Harleian suspicion belies a dangerous implication —
that the use of GIS runs counter to reasonable, situated, and radical knowl-
edges. To call into question those stories told by users and developers of
GIS effectively establishes an inside and an outside of critique, a war of
either/or. But it is not productive to insist that you are either with us or
against us.2 Other paths are and have been possible. The purpose of what
follows is to walk the path between practice and theory. The point is to
trouble all too easy distinctions, not to resolve them, but to live them, to stay
with the trouble, as Donna Haraway would insist:3 cartography and GIS
are made, not made up. Or to invoke Deleuze and Guattari, we must trust
the conjunctive force of the rhizome: “and . . . and . . . and . . .”: always
addition, never subtraction.4
Mapping technologies occupy a curious status in society. Profoundly,
they are objects of publicity, to translate the real world and our being
viii Preface
within it — from the earliest TO maps and mappa mundi to the release
of Google Earth in the web browser. At the same time, they are objective,
the products of technicians, expertise, science. I prepared my thoughts
for this preface while walking the labyrinth of the Gothic Quarter in
Barcelona, Spain. Here, wanderers are reminded of the power of a most
basic technocultural phenomenon: the reading of a map.5 Captured
within its medieval streets, visitors unfold paper maps in absence of their
digital counterparts. GPS is highly undependable here, with narrow,
winding paths and several- story stone buildings closing in what intimate
public space exists. Visitors contort the map and their bodies to orient
to this place. They trace with their fingers the path traveled. They gaze
upward, past the gargoyles and bell towers, attempting to sort north
from south, east from west, mountain from sea, largely in vain. In this
moment, one can feel the pervasiveness of the location-a ware society.
The absence of digital devices can leave us feeling peculiarly vulnerable.
For some, being lost has become a more acute sensation. How did we
arrive here, now? What are the implications for these devices and prac-
tices that swaddle society in location- rich media, for these new lines that
draw us in?
There are many entry points into this conversation: the mid-t wentieth-
century history of computing, the technological and financial speculation
of the early 2000s, the devolvement of the state under neoliberal governance,
and the rise of technolibertarians and post-9 - 11 security assemblages. How-
ever, the story I intend to weave encircles an ongoing discussion around
digital mapping and GIS — the definitions of which have been sources of
great indigestion. In 1999 Nick Chrisman sought to settle a definition of
general acceptance for GIS. Synthesizing previous attempts, he arrived
with concision at the following definition:
Geographic Information System (GIS) — Organized activity by which
people measure and represent geographic phenomena then transform
these representations into other forms while interacting with social
structures.6
Largely similar to earlier definitions (indeed, he was being synthetic!),
Chrisman introduces a key departure — p lacing GIS in relation to social
structures.7 His new definition is particularly motivated by a commonly held
earlier alternative from 1989:
A system of hardware, software, data, people, organizations and
institutional arrangements for collecting, storing, analyzing and
disseminating information about areas of the earth.8
Preface ix
This earlier definition served to constitute the technology in atomistic ways.
People and institutions were users and developers of this technology — part
of the overall system, with discrete inputs, outputs, and relations. And while
GIScientists no doubt believed that the technology was changing society,
understanding that change fell outside the remit of their field, into the void
of “cultural” inquiry. These changes could not possibly impact tool devel-
opment and use.
Despite these beliefs, society changed. New technocultural relationships
were forged, and the field of GIScience scrambled to figure out what was
happening. Journal publications and conference sessions on “web GIS”
were abundant just as GIScientists stood in line at Apple stores to get
the first iPhone and to experience using digital maps in situ. More than a
disconnect, this seemed to be a chasm. We were ill equipped. I was in the
middle of my graduate studies when this occurred seemingly overnight.
Outside graduate seminars, my colleagues turned toward those few geog-
raphers writing on critical approaches to technology, including Rob
Kitchin, Stephen Graham, and Sarah Elwood. There was more to the story
than was offered within the mainstream of GIScience scholarship, pedagogy,
and funding streams. The methods to investigate these changes required a
productive confrontation of the epistemology of GIScience — a hard look
in the mirror, so to speak. What emerged were hybrid fields that worked
to make use of these new infrastructures, technologies, and data to under-
stand socio spatial phenomena while also investigating the implications of
this emergent technoscience.
The problem was not necessarily that GIS needed a new definition, to
incorporate these emerging areas of inquiry into the social life of GIS and
geospatial data, but that the process of defining itself should become an
object of inquiry. Who benefits? What becomes internal and external to the
development process? Under these pressures, GIScience became positioned
as a realm of technoscientific development that ignored technocultural
relationships at the risk of becoming irrelevant: How would we work with
our geospatial databases on the iPhone?
Therefore, rather than identifying what is and is not GIS, I suggest a
continuum of technologies, to include desktop software for the collection,
storage, analysis, and representation of geographic phenomena and vari-
ous ubiquitous and pervasive systems that extend these capacities onto the
body and the landscape, enabling the governmental ordering of the neigh-
borhood, the city, the state, and the planet. Shifts in the technical capacities
of these devices and software also parallel shifts in society: the privatiza-
tion of publicly funded scholarship, the reorganization of academic dis-
ciplines under neoliberal governance, and a general malaise that drapes