GIS, Cartography, and the “Third Culture”: Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age*

*I am grateful for Patricia Gober and Stanley Brunn's invitation to contribute to this special issue and for their extensive comments on the draft. I would like to thank (without implicating) Mike Goodchild, John Pickles, Barney Warf, Harvey Miller, Paul Longley, Jonathan Smith, Jeremy Crampton, Francis Harvey, Nadine Schuurman, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks are also due to David Woodward for sending me his paper on the two cultures in cartography.

Abstract

Geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography have traditionally been regarded as fields for the study of techniques. Yet the past ten years have witnessed geographers' increasing intellectual engagement with GIS and cartography. This essay recaps the recent intellectual discourses on GIS and cartography and speculates on possible development in the near future. Geocomputation, spatially integrated social sciences, social informatics, information ecology, and humanistic GIScience are identified as five areas of intensive new research, and it is argued that creative imaginations under the milieu of the “third culture” are urgently needed to address the challenging issues in this new technological era. Whether geography will become an intellectually more vibrant discipline hinges on the extent to which we can rekindle geographic imaginations in this computer age via GIScience to address issues of great societal concern.

Key Words:

• cartography
• geographical imaginations
• GIS
• third culture

Notes

¹ Tobler (1959) wrote the earliest refereed article on the potential applications of computers in cartography.

²The relationship between GIS and cartography has been quite ambivalent in recent years. In a special panel discussion on “Has GIS killed cartography?” organized by former AAG president Judy Olson in 1996, cartographers answered this question by saying “No, GIS has not killed cartography; cartography committed suicide instead” The answer provided by GIS practitioners was “No, GIS has not killed cartography; they got married” Social theorists answered this question in a more ironic tone, in the context of the O. J. Simpson trial: “Yes, GIS may have killed cartography—but the jury will never convict” In this essay, my bias is obvious: while acknowledging the importance of the visualization and mapping, I think GIS and cartography are still having a honeymoon.

Note that, throughout this paper, GIS stands for both geographic information systems and sciences unless otherwise explicitly spelled out.

³ Smith (1992) and Clarke (1992) provided ethical and technical discussions on the applications of GIS and mapping technologies during the first Gulf War. Monmonier (2002) reviews how to spy with maps and its implications for privacy.

⁴ Wheeler's (1999) motto, “IT from BIT,” succinctly summarizes his theory that the universe at the very basic level is composed, not of quarks, but of bits of information. This theory has interesting implications for the interrelationships among information, material, and energy flows. See Sui and Rejeski (2002) for details.

⁵I thank Paul Adams for suggesting this subtitle to me.

*I am grateful for Patricia Gober and Stanley Brunn's invitation to contribute to this special issue and for their extensive comments on the draft. I would like to thank (without implicating) Mike Goodchild, John Pickles, Barney Warf, Harvey Miller, Paul Longley, Jonathan Smith, Jeremy Crampton, Francis Harvey, Nadine Schuurman, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks are also due to David Woodward for sending me his paper on the two cultures in cartography.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Z. Sui

Professor of geography and holder