Transcending the cube: translating GIScience time and space perspectives in a humanities GIS

Abstract

This paper discusses a Humanities Geographical Information Systems timespace modeling project, which does not reject the ‘space-time’ cube model but rather incorporates, translates and metonymically focuses GIScience methodologies through the epistemological prisms of the arts and humanities. The arts and humanities may offer insights which GIScience can consider in order to conceptualise and model timespaces. Employing the Euclidian framing of conventional GIS approaches, it attempts to artistically, metaphorically and metonymically engage the ‘space-time’ cube concept as a means to suggest a non-linear and fragmented perspective of space and time. The case study presented in this paper triangulates in GIS ‘soft’ data from a modernist novel depicting postmodern perspectives, empirical data sourced from fieldwork guided by the urban mapping strategies of Guy Debord and the Situationists Internationale and Giambattista Vico’s cyclical view of history with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s literary motif of the chronotope as techniques to model contiguous perspectives of linear and cyclical timespace. The paper hopes to encourage ways to reflect upon a rapprochement between humanistic and scientific approaches to modelling space and time with GIS.

Keywords:

• Humanities GIS
• space and time
• literary tools
• Bakhtin
• Vico