Editorial / Editorial
What is alt.gis?
Nadine Schuurman
Editor, The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien
Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University
When critical GIScience first emerged as a phenomenon during the 1990s, the purview of GIScience was
generally understood. Today, GIScience is no longer
a discreet sub-discipline of Geography that, despite
indefinite boundaries, means more or less the same
thing to geographers around the world. Instead, it is
closely linked to a turn in world history brought
about via the web. GIScience has expanded to
unofficially encompass neogeography, mash-ups,
big (spatial) data analytics, location-based services,
volunteered geographic information, and many
other spawns of web 2.0. As GIScience morphed,
critical GIS became a more nebulous entity. Thus
when I organized a workshop in Santa Barbara,
California in the spring of 2013 to revisit critical
GIScience, I conceived of it as alt.gis.
The designation alt.gis denotes a certain defiance
of tradition or convention. For instance, alt.country
music is a new form of country music, a sub-genre
that has moved left on the political spectrum and
includes notes from other music sensibilities such
as folk and rock. alt.gis seems a more encompassing
category, one that hints at subtle changes to GIS that
have not hardened into well-defined technologies
and capacities. It allowed our group of 12 scholars to
consider fast proliferating variation of GIScience as
part of their scope. There are three broad trends that
emerged across the alt.gis workshop—which are
evident in this special issue.
The first is that there is no neat category anymore
for GIScience. It has been radically reshaped by
web 2.0 and the myriad capacities to manipulate
spatial data and underlying questions that web
2.0 begets (see Cinnamon 2015; Wilson 2015). In
1990, Michael Goodchild gave a talk in Zurich in
which he identified GIScience (as opposed to
GISystems) as a unique science that enables us to
frame spatial questions that were never previously
possible. Published as a landmark paper in 1991,
this vision of GIScience has guided the development of GIS ever since (Goodchild 1991). It is no
less relevant today; it’s just bigger and broader,
and ever inclusive of web-based mapping, analysis,
and prediction. As GIScience gets bigger, the scope
and aims of critical GIScience need to be interrogated: alt.gis is a placeholder for an emergent
phenomenon.
The second theme is that many of the old cultural
chestnuts remain. Leszczynski and Elwood’s paper
(2015) demonstrates that, even as we extend into
cyberspace, the same cultural constraints hold us
back. In their case, they discuss the importance
of paying attention to gender. One could add
bullying, harassment, racism, and other deplorable
behaviours that flourish online. A laissez faire
“let the haters hate” attitude is not sufficient. Donna
Haraway was ever so prescient in 1984 when she
wrote that women have to become engaged with the
cyborg or it will not reflect their values (Haraway
1991). Likewise, our democratic right to privacy is
confounded by emerging technologies. We are in a
struggle with dark forces.
The third theme that emerges is that there are
worlds beyond worlds that we could not imagine
before—that have become entwined with GIScience.
We can bypass traditional software altogether using
Open Source web-based programs, new ontologies
can be discerned through word clouds, and engaged
users can generate reams of data (see Jung 2015; Lin
2015). Each of these slight changes to the status quo
has profound effects on institutions, corporations,
government agencies, and the public at large.
Changes in GIScience, as Michael Goodchild points
out in this issue (2015), have the potential to
decrease (or increase) the digital divide, affect
privacy, and alter power relations. None of us knows
where these new digital paths will lead us. This
special issue on alt.gis is an effort to bring together
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 2015, xx(xx): 1–2
DOI: 10.1111/cag.12163
© 2015 Canadian Association of Geographers / L’ Association canadienne des géographes
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Editorial / Editorial
early predications, warnings, and signposts pointing to the way ahead.
The two papers that follow the alt.gis themed
papers are both unique and important to Canadian
geography. The first deals with the emerging issue
of food security and health; the second explores the
intersection between land use categories and ecosystems. Good reading all around.
References
Cinnamon, J. 2015. Deconstructing the binaries of spatial data
production: Towards hybridity. The Canadian Geographer
59(1). DOI: 10.1111/cag.12119
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 2015, xx(xx): 1–2
Goodchild, M. F. 1991. Geographic information systems. Progress
in Human Geography 15:194––200.
——. 2015. Two decades on: Critical GIScience since 1993. The
Canadian Geographer 59(1). DOI: 10.1111/cag.12117
Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention
of nature. New York: Routledge.
Jung, J.-K. 2015. Code clouds: Qualitative geovisualization of
geotweets. The Canadian Geographer 59(1). DOI: 10.1111/
cag.12133
Leszczynski, A., and S. Elwood. 2015. Feminist geographies of
new spatial media. The Canadian Geographer 59(1). DOI:
10.1111/cag.12093
Lin, W. 2015. Revealing the making of OpenStreetMap: A limited
account. The Canadian Geographer 59(1). DOI: 10.1111/
cag.12137
Wilson, M. 2015. New lines? Enacting a social history of GIS. The
Canadian Geographer 59(1). DOI: 10.1111/cag.12118