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Some scenes from Planet GIS: geography's accidental success?

Some scenes from Planet GIS: geography's accidental success?. David Unwin Birkbeck & University Colleges University of London d.unwin@wun.ac.uk. Synopsis. Scene 1: Academic Geography and GIS(c) Scenes 2-6: The GIS phenomenon Concerns 1-6. Scene 1: Academic geography in the early 1960s.

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Some scenes from Planet GIS: geography's accidental success?

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  1. Some scenes from Planet GIS: geography's accidental success? David Unwin Birkbeck & University Colleges University of London d.unwin@wun.ac.uk

  2. Synopsis • Scene 1: Academic Geography and GIS(c) • Scenes 2-6: The GIS phenomenon • Concerns 1-6

  3. Scene 1: Academic geography in the early 1960s Undergraduate Geography, 1962-1965? ‘Traditional’ curriculum: • Surveying • Map projections • ‘Map appreciation’ Some basic statistics added later

  4. Preparation for life? • Forty years on, this was a far better grounding for work in GIS and GISc than would nowadays be obtained from a course in academic geography in UK • Or anywhere else? • My concern is for teaching and research in GISc (‘geographic information science’) in UK

  5. UK Geography & GISc: punching well above our weight? • Research: Rhind, Fotheringham, Martin, Brunsdon, Openshaw, Raper, etc., etc. • Teaching: MSc ‘conversion’ courses (Edinburgh, Nottingham, Leicester, BBk/UCL, etc.) about 200/year; Undergraduate option at most HEI, maybe 1000 per year; • Teaching: schools (National Curriculum?) and FE?

  6. Celebrate success? Not on your life!

  7. Scene 2: Planet CAG (Contemporary Academic Geography in UK) • Introversion • The ‘cultural turn’ • Disowning both GIS and GI Science …

  8. Something nasty in the woodsheds on CAG? See: • Chris Hamnett (2003) Contemporary human geography: fiddling while Rome burns, Geoforum, 34: 1-3 • Johnston et al. (2003) Contemporary fiddling in human geography while Rome burns: has quantitative analysis been largely abandoned – and should it be? Geoforum, 34: 157-161

  9. Readings of the G-word? • Academic geography = Geography; • Shorthand to mean ‘location in space’ = “geography”; The great success of my title is the spread of geographical (spatial) analysis into many other disciplines, and many walks of life, 1980-present: • A distribution of spaces and places = just plain geography.

  10. Is this ‘fair’ and should we worry about it?

  11. Meanwhile on Planet GIS …

  12. Scene 2: ‘Accidental geographers’? • On Planet GIS GISc isGeography; • The vast majority of the ‘accidental geographers' on Planet GIS discovered geography through “geography” in a GIS ; • Many (?most) have no contact, formal or otherwise, with Geography.; • The technology and concepts of GISc seen as unproblematic; • GIS use is only slightly more complex than using, a conventional database or spreadsheet.

  13. … there are a lot of them! Planet GIS is bigger than Planet CAG

  14. Scene 3: Using GIS A lot depends on definitions, but according to at least one informed source, on Planet GIS there are around 2m users of GIS in a client server environment, over a million who use it on their desktop computer, and perhaps a further million in other sectors, including software developers. This makes about 4m GIS users, spread over around 2m sites (see Longley et al., 2005, Chapter 17).

  15. Scene 4: Talking about GIS In August 2004, 12,500 people gathered in San Diego for the annual user conference of ESRI, supplier of one of the major commercial GIS. In the four days of the meeting, 830 papers were delivered, and the popular ‘map gallery’ had a further 945 poster presentations. In addition, ESRI staff delivered over 300 workshops. Around 750 of the attendees had academic affiliations. Longley et al. (2005 page 423) Figure 18.11, attendance has quadrupled since 1993.

  16. Scene 5: Teaching GIS(c) According to Michael Phoenix: • In USA in any one year there are between 75,000 and 100,000 students following some sort of course in GIS; • World-wide over 5,500 higher education institutions have licences to run his company’s software; • A decade ago, the majority of this educational effort was located in Departments of Geography, whereas today it’s somewhere in the range 20-30%; • There are 5,000 to 10,000 students doing certificates that are either in GIS or include a significant amount of GIS; • There are around 500 students working on Masters degrees in GIS; • A total of 280,000 people have registered to take a course on the ESRI Virtual Campus, with about 5,000 to 10,000 active at any one time.

  17. Scene 6: Researching GIS(c) • In UK groups of 4 or 5 at three or four universities; • In USA, ESRI alone has over 90 PhDs on its staff of whom a majority are in Geography, making the area around New York Street, Redlands, CA by far the highest density of such qualified people on any planet;

  18. Concerns (1) : Worlds in Collision?

  19. Concerns (2): Academic Geography and the other sciences OR is the genie out of the bottle? Openshaw (1993) : '... a large and growing number of enthusiastic users in a GIS market place characterised by high growth rates. Seemingly, the conditions are ripe for GIS disasters as a large, and increasingly large, band of enthusiastic amateurs apply GISs to many different applied problem areas, whilst equipped with a possibly inadequate understanding of GIS technology and related spatial science issues. All this is occurring at a time when there is no established GIS profession, no certification of GIS skills, and seemingly few standards or guidelines related to use, and little or no interest in GIS abuse questions'. COMPARE academic statistics, circa 1965!

  20. Concerns (3): writing and supporting the code? • The development of appropriate software tools and how geography is represented in our GIS; • In software, the idea of user friendliness is usually equated with interface design, but the concept should also be used in relation to how well the tools provided map into the user's perceptions and expectations of what needs to be done with them; • Danger that existing tools will be mapped uncritically and without modification into practices developed in areas with no appreciation of the geographical issues that are involved. (Very poor use of the mapping tools provided by most GIS is an obvious example that a walk around almost any GIS trade exhibition will illustrate); • There is a very real danger that the accidental geographers on Planet GIS ask for, and therefore get, tools that implement a bastard geography that even further distances them from Geography.

  21. Concerns (4): developing the science • A deeper danger concerns the future development of GIS and Geography’s part in it. Much of what we see in today's systems draws on spatial analytical and database theory developed in the 1960; • The danger is that as UK Geography disengages, this source will either dry up, or be replaced by other disciplines whose appreciations of the realities of geography are less well articulated

  22. Concerns (5): providing the data • Developing a spatially literate population also needs useable geographic data; • Contrast Google Earth over UK with almost anywhere else on Planet Earth!

  23. Concerns (6): serving the labour market? • To an extent, the demand for spatially literate geographers has been met on Planet GIS by the development of Masters level courses that blend software training with education in GI science theory; • Hasn’t penetrated sufficiently deeply into the undergraduate curriculum; • In the schools in UK, geography is in decline, at precisely the same time as in USA it is undergoing a GIS-fuelled renaissance; • Attempts to create a GI ‘profession’ have by and large failed (AGI, then RGS/IBG)

  24. Is the US different from UK? Some differences that might matter: • State of academic geography? • Environment and its management? • FoI vs. Ordnance Survey? • Governance?

  25. What, if anything, can or should be done about it? • This is a matter for debate! • Questions?

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