Geographical Information Systems

Geographical Information Systems is probably the most important and influential methodological development to have occurred in geography in the past two decades, helping to unify human and physical geography and allowing geographers to map space in ways more sophisticated and more complex than dreamed of before. And yet GIS is not without its critics, who argue that it glorifies technology over theory, reducing geography to a "gee whiz" level of description that - while visually engaging -- provides no substantive analysis. This paper defines GIS, looks at its limitations as well as its strengths, and seeks to predict what the future of GIS may be.

While a definition of what constitutes GIS is central to discussing its role within geography, such a definition is in fact difficult to produce since the term is used so variably by different people, some using it to refer to a single system while others use it to designate a system of barely related subsystems (Pickles, in Pickles, 1995, p. 3).

Pickles (1995) states that all geographic information systems have two central defining characteristics: They involve the use of digital electronic data and the production of electronic spatial representations (p. 3). Parker (in Castle, 1993, p. xvii) goes even further in simplifying the defining aspect of GIS as being nothing more than "spatial data handling" from which any mention of geography per se can easily be dropped. Such a bare-bones definition of GIS lends it an appearance of ne

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rt of the geographic enterprise.) If one can map both people and the world along with human relationships, then has one not fulfilled the desires of all branches of geography? To put it another way, since GIS can do all these things, how can one imagine a future for the discipline of geography that does not have GIS at its center? The answer to that lies in the recognition that GIS, like many other geographic tools before it, is both colonialist and inherently conservative in its likeliest applications (Pickles, in Pickles, 1995, p. 16). Perhaps the most radical critiques of traditional geography have come from feminist theoreticians who have insisted that the desire to capture things by looking at them is an act not at all divorced from the desire to own and have control over them. Moreover, the traditional geographic concentration on the physical, non-social elements of space has tended to diminish the importance of those parts of the world in which women do exercise some power, such as the home. Geographers have tended to stand with their backs to their own lands, ignoring the settled and the domestic, and in looking to the unknown have lost the importance of human and especially female connection to place. They have, to put it

Category: Science - G