Stories of an Information Society have rattled around the public consciousness in various forms. Sixty years ago, it was a cybernetic vision; more recently the public has marvelled at perhaps one of the largest investment bubbles of all time, dwarfing the South Seas Bubble in fiscal insensibility as well as in the level of hype dished out by the bystanders. We all think we are saturated with stories about information technology.
When examined more closely, the information society is rather different from the version presented by press stories. The more impressive story concerns the long-term, not the instant hit of a web site. It is a story of infrastructure, therefore seemingly boring. People have been lying with maps for far longer than they have been lying with statistics. Recently, some specific groups have developed new ways to manage their maps, and these groups have been quite successful in having the public pay for a massive conversion in the technology. Only the most superficial part of this story has made it into public view. Most of the story happens in small ways, piecemeal, in humdrum offices.
I want to tell a part of this story in a way that will bring some of the missing pieces into clearer view. I propose a relatively staid medium for this process, a book. I have specific reasons why this choice might be more effective than any other method at my disposal. I think I have the motive, the opportunity, the means and the persistence to make this a reality in a short period of time.
A book involves a number of actors, not the least of them the intermediary - the publisher - but this proposal will concentrate on the two ends of the process, the writer and the readers. This section will describe me, the first-person author, then describe the audience, the ultimate jury for a successful book. The audience comes in a variety of different disciplinary bundles, so each group is treated separately.
I intend to write this book in the first person, so it makes some sense to describe what I have to offer. I started using GIS in 1971 when I made maps of the segregated housing of Boston for one of the parties involved in the school-busing controversy of that year. This was a situation where I tried to bring spatial information - maps - into an issue of heated public debate. The fact that it was a computer-generated map got some play in the press at the time (full-page spread in the Boston Herald Traveller).
For the past thirty years I have been involved with Geographic Information Systems technology in various forms: as a software developer, as a user, as a proponent, and as a critic. I have worked for three universities: Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and for the past fourteen years, University of Washington in Seattle. Despite this entirely academic career, I have worked closely with various levels of government, and with the private sector. I have had the luxury and good fortune to be able to observe this particular subfield as it has grown from perhaps 50 people worldwide when I joined in to the huge presence it now has.
I am a founder, in some senses, of a technology, or I was around when the founding had just recently occurred. I wrote software that was on the cutting edge, and espoused controversial technical solutions in esoteric meetings. I became something of a figure (being awarded a Jack-in-the-Box for always asking questions at AUTO-CARTO London 1986, for example). Perhaps I have "mellowed" from my status as enfant terrible, but I have not remained stuck on the same old issues over the whole period. In fact, I routinely get up at meetings to dispute the message that I had delivered in the past. I am not a neutral observer, and I don't pretend to be one. I don't even think founders have any particular insight, unless they reflect carefully.
Recently, the technological world of GIS has come to the attention of a group of critics within geography, and I am one of the GIS folk who took the challenge as a positive event. Of course I don't share all the opinions of the critics, but I didn't have the knee-jerk reaction of some of the old timers. I sought some assistance from a broader field of science and technology studies (STS) in ways that the critics have not yet ventured.
I also have experience with books. In 1997, Exploring GIS was published by John Wiley after an exhausting process (four cycles of peer review). This title has done reasonably well, since Wiley had me produce a Second Edition, dated 2001. I do not plan to write a general introduction to the technology this time; I have got that out of my system. But going through the textbook production process has given me some sense of how a book gets produced.
As an academic, I write, and I have the requisite list of publications stretching back 27 years. But more than many academics, I try to do more than simply staple together the pat phrases. It is for others to judge, but I think I can do something a bit more daring than the average scholarly book.
I think I have something to contribute to four communities: GIS, critical theory in geography, STS, and methodology to address these issues. Competition? I am not aware of any other book that attempts this combination. Ground Truth (Pickles ed. 1995, Guilford) is to some extent the closest competitive book. I will be looking for a publisher that can help make my arguments to each of these communities as effectively as possible. Some times that involves putting the message and the book ahead of my personality.
The primary subject matter of this book is GIS, a buzz-word grown into an industry and a way of life. Publishers who work anywhere close to this field will know that GIS has become one of the hot fields related to geography. It is a part of the Information Society, but it is a particular one. I do not pretend to pontificate on all information systems, but I can tell convincing stories about how GIS technology changed the prevailing ways of thinking about maps.
In my textbook (Chrisman 2001), I define GIS as:
"The organized activity by which people
These activities reflect the larger context (institutions and cultures) in which these people carry out their work. In turn, the GIS may influence these structures." (p. 13)
The textbook allocated the first 9 chapters to the four bullets with two chapters in Part 3 to deal with the social and institutional context. This book will concentrate on the last two sentences, the connection between the technology and society (in both directions: implications of technology for society, and influences of context on technology). Yet, it will not turn its back on the technical detail. I think the clearest evidence for social connections must be traced in the technical detail, not divorced from it at some meta-level. I have been arguing for integrating a social and cultural perspective with GIS technology for a long time (Chrisman 1987).
The GIS community has finally taken up the challenge of publishing books. There are many competing textbooks. Mine is considered to be at the high end, though it is far from the most technical or rarefied. I am not trying to write for an instructional marketplace this time. There have been a few books about the History of GIS. The Foresman (1997) edited volume from Taylor & Francis is written mostly by participants, like myself, but without much critical perspective. Most chapters seem to adopt the viewpoint of retired older revolutionaries, writing a rather Whig history in which the choices all seem reasonable and inevitable. I wrote my chapter for that book (Chrisman 1997) eleven years ago (yes, it wandered the halls of publishers looking for a way to get printed), and I would be more critical now. There have been a few more books about GIS and Society, mostly written from outside the GIS community, from the perspective of critical social theory (Pickles 1995 most notably but also; Curry 1998 and others). Inside the GIS community, the issue of GIS and Society has become a subject of a few meetings and a few special issues of journals, but not yet given full-length book treatment.
I intend to write this book for GIS research scholars and for GIS practitioners. I want to address the technical issues of the day, and show how a social perspective helps in deciding how the technology should be developed. I want to give the sense that technical choices are not neutral, that there are ways to have different kinds of impacts on society. I want to show this audience that GIS is not done in a vacuum, that it is not a unitary technical vision implemented the same way everywhere. However, I don't want to write this book just for this GIS audience. I also want to open up the GIS audience to other perspectives, and I want to use the GIS story in larger debates.
The second audience consists of geographers, planners, and other social scientists who have adopted critical social theory as the basis for their work. This movement, under various titles, has a decidedly sceptical opinion about the GIS phenomenon. A few social theorists have picked out GIS as their target of opportunity (Pickles 1995; Curry 1998, for example). In my estimation, there is a significant hint of "technological determinism" in this body of work. These authors are worried about technology as a force that has implications for society. While I share some of their concerns, I want to demonstrate that technology is not a simple outside force with an inexorable agenda; it is also conditioned and constantly restructured by the social arena. This audience is a smaller group than the GIS professionals, but more engaged in scholarly activities, so it will figure at least as importantly as an audience.
This group needs to be taken through the technical details of a GIS in a bit more detail than they normally venture. I will try to construct the book to ground theoretical arguments in observable examples. This group has also adopted their social criticism without much reading of the literature on science and technology studies (STS). I intend to confront the theoretical issues raised by the critics directly, but with a somewhat different approach.
Although I have been a GIS professional and geographer for 30 years, this book will be written to fit inside the discourse of the science and technology studies (STS) interdisciplinary arena. I want to show how GIS provides a case study to address some of the interesting questions about how technology works, and how scientists interact with larger forces. GIS involves both science, in the disciplinary backgrounds of the practitioners who put data into a system, and technology, in the workings of the software toolkit. Typically studies in STS are either primarily science-oriented or technology-oriented. In some disciplines, like history, the studies of technology are rather distinct from the studies of science, though in some of the theoretical work, the two are thought to be inseparable. My book will give evidence of just how inseparable these two aspects are.
The nearest model for my book is Aramis or the Love of Technology by Bruno Latour (1996) [published by Harvard University Press as are most of the english-language products of this prolific and controversial author]. Aramis is the story of a failed project to develop a radically new transportation system for Paris. Latour starts the book in the style of a murder mystery, with a fictional student sent by an enigmatic professor to find who had killed Aramis (the acronym for the project). The student comes up with a series of the usual suspects, but the professor can always see through the easy explanation to more complex situations. It is a book that tried to be a novel, though the academic citations creep back in to the second half. Now, I am fully aware that I do not have the cult status of Bruno Latour, and I will write a more overtly scholarly book than Aramis. I do want to capture the immediacy he achieved by relating historically accurate case studies and by giving a sense of how the technology operates in specific detail.
The STS community, as an interdiscipline, does not have a coherent or unitary research agenda. It eschews grand theory, since it is predicated on various interpretations of situated knowledge. In spite of this, there are some common themes of current interest. I plan to address some of these issues in the sequence of the book. I think GIS science and technology provide a clearer example for some these arguments than the eternal return to the altars of high-energy physics, for example.
The STS literature is not just a theoretical basis for my work, but also a source of method to conduct these kinds of studies. Since I am writing in part for researchers outside the STS world (audiences 1 and 2), I will pay substantial attention to the methodology of STS. The GIS community has only the most rudimentary concept of case study technique, borrowed from planning literature mostly. The idea of ethnography is fairly radical in the numbers-oriented world of GIS scholarship. But, equally, the STS world has had very little contact with geographic research, and they will need to be given a bit more detail about geographic evidence and explanation. Thus, I will present the issues of methodology as a distinct thread in the book.
To summarize, I plan to engage four threads: GIS, critical theory in geography, STS, and methodology. I think each group should be presented with the arguments made to the others, so that they can see how the various arguments support each other.
I propose to write this book in eight chapters with a total budget
between 200 and 240 pages.
1 Introduction: presenting a GIS in practice, breaking open
the black boxes to expose the negotiations embedded in the data
and the software.
2 Origins: How did GIS arise? Multiple origins and the irrelevance
of the origins game.
3 Hazy fun-house mirrors: How does a GIS (or a map) represent?
4 Making information: How a GIS constructs new information from
spatial and attribute relationships.
5 Dreams of neutral, transparent decision support: How does a
GIS help make decisions? Why do public groups adopt a GIS strategy?
6 Reversing the arrow of progress: Technical decisions are not
always cast in stone; old arguments can be revisited and decisions
overturned.
7 Geographies of Geographic Information: Local implementations
of GIS vary around the world, and why.
8 Closing some circles: conclusions
Originally written in February 2002; posted to web April
2003