Chrisman, Nicholas (1950–)

Nicholas R. Chrisman is a professor at the Université Laval, Canada, and scientific director of GEOIDE, a network that funds research spanning 30 universities across Canada. Over a 30-year period, Chrisman has contributed considerably to the development of GIS and the nascent scientific discussion of its potential and pitfalls, including data structure development, consideration of error, and engagement with sociotechnological dimensions of the use, creation, and consequences of geographic information technologies. Besides his current positions, he has also held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Washington.

Some of his early contributions were as part of the research group working at the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in the 1970s on data structures and on programming the first GIS capable of working with vector data in a robust manner. With Tom Peucker (later Poiker), Chrisman coauthored an influential paper titled “Cartographic Data Structures” (1975), which presented a conceptual overview of the issues in developing topological data structures. Connected to programming and application projects while at the Harvard lab, he was part of the group that included James Dougenik, Denis White, Scott Morehouse, Allan Schmidt, and Geoff Dutton, which developed the first GIS capable of overlaying vector data in a robust manner, ODYSSEY, a precursor to the Environmental Systems Research Institute's ARC/Info.

Diverse activities at the Harvard Lab and the many interactions with the nascent field through conferences were important for the next phase of Chrisman's professional career, when he returned to academia to work on his PhD dissertation on error in categorical maps, which he completed in 1982 at the University of Bristol. This work on the origins and handling of error also led to publications on the role of time in geographic information and measurement theory.

Parallel to this work, and accompanying a move to his first academic position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Chrisman began a long-lasting engagement with the sociotechnological dimensions of the use, creation, and consequences of geographic information technologies. The 1997 book Exploring Geographic Information Systems situates the complicated interactions between society and its technologies as nested rings, inextricably linked. The work in this area has become influential in GIScience as well as science and technology studies.