How could one avoid being just a technical end-user and late-adopter of Geographical Information Systems – that’s geodata or spatial data in other lingo : Does anyone have truly theoretical and methodological innovations in areas such as GIS for visualization of local and of community issues, locative and mobile media applications, GIS-amateur sketch map interfaces and cognitive mapping methods, or use of maps in a range of disciplines.
One example is Proboscis artist group’s mapping – or is that unmapping? – of community issues. The way they transform radio-controlled cars and other toys into ‘feral robots’ equipped with eg. air quality sensors to allow schoolchildren to playfully gather data which is then posted up on interactive maps of their community.
Are we at at the beginning of a paradigm-shift in the use of GIS because these technologies have come off of the desktop onto portable devices. Consider GPS devices, smart phones – almost ubiquitous in some industries. What is the research agenda?
This is uniquely urban but the spill-over into touristic areas is already evident (take a drive through the Loire Valley with a GPS enabled smart phone).
Are there examples of revitalizing old geodata (geodata for Edmonton goes back to 1963 but is in inaccessible formats) by making it available in museums, in exhibits or to the public for use in the form of downloadable and /or interactive maps? Are their other projects such as Andre Lemos, Marilei Fiorelli and my locative art of drawing on Google Maps with a GPS logger?
How do we get from desktop/supercomputer style GIS to the scampering world of geotagging, geocaching and interactivedata accessed on the go (Google Earth on my mobile)?
-Rob
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Thanks for this post Rob! Indeed, there are so many emerging practices surrounding new geographic information technologies. And these practices should bring geographers to finally heed Cosgrove’s (ed. 1999) and Pickles’s (2004) call to focus on ‘mappings’ — on the various institutions, corporations, agencies, actors, nonhumans, humans, bits and bytes that intersect around the practices of mapping. Geographers have shown interest in these new technological practices, under the umbrella of neogeographies (Turner 2006) and volunteered geographic information (Elwood 2008). Goodchild (2007) has also called attention to the subjects of these new practices: citizen censors. However, I imagine that more research needs to address the larger implications for these kinds of mappings and the subjects that they constitute, and perhaps that’s what you’re getting at by flagging a potential paradigm shift. Additionally, I’m interested in how these practices intersect in the classroom; and how these new mappings potentially necessitate a different cartographic pedagogy?