Humanistic GIScience

Humanistic GIScience aims to integrate knowledge derived from the humanistic tradition with key issues related to spatial data representation, analysis, and visualization in the context of GIScience. Rather than attempting to maximize accuracy by minimizing or even eliminating uncertainty, humanistic GIScience incorporates the human subjective and even imaginative dimensions of experience in the process of spatial data handling.

Recent developments in ubiquitous computing have made almost everything computable with explicit geotagging. The goal of humanistic GIScience is to build dialogues with the humanistic tradition to understand human life in the context of social or human-centered computing. Recent works on the integration of indigenous knowledge, feminist perspectives, public participation GIS, collaborative GIS, and GIS-based art practices into the conventional GIS modeling processes are examples of humanistic GIScience in practice.

The search for a new means of analysis and modeling via computers has been increasingly entwined with a persistent search for the deeper meaning of such activities. As the aesthetic and humanistic traditions within GIScience expand, artists’ renditions of reality in novels, poems, paintings, movies, music, and songs can be rich sources of inspiration for GIScientists to explore alternative conceptualizations of space, place, time, environment, region, and scale. In addition to representations of space framed by Euclidean geometry, humanistic GIScience attempts to find novel ways to handle the textures of place as articulated in the humanistic tradition. Furthermore, the development of humanistic GIScience is transforming geospatial technologies into a locative media for affective practices through self-expression and storytelling. For example, practitioners of feminist GIS such as Mei-Po Kwan have developed GIS that incorporate the geography of women's fear into their representations of urban landscapes. Others have attempted to combine GIS with local ethnographies that incorporate indigenous forms of environmental knowledge. Yet others develop neogeographic, Web-based “mash-ups” that rely on volunteered data to map various phenomena, including local place perceptions.

In many ways similar to the development of humanistic geography, humanistic GIScience also aims to put people back at the center of spatial analysis. Along with critical GIScience, humanistic GIScience has significantly broadened and enriched the theoretical foundations of GIScience. The pluralistic theoretical approaches have precipitated diverse GIS practices in the age of Web 2.0, in which we can document and record individual experiences and share them instantaneously with a global audience.

The development of Web 2.0 technologies in general, and especially user-generated content in the form of volunteered geographic information (VGI), has shifted the focus of GIScience from handling geospatial information to handling information geospatially. The Web offers a brave new world of geotagged information unprecedented in human history, in a variety of multimedia forms from text (blogs), to photos, videos, and traditional geospatial data, to social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogs such as Twitter. These developments constitute a very rich data source on human subjectivity and behavior, which may further expand the development of humanistic GIScience and affective geospatial practices.

In addition to the vast multimedia data available, recent breakthroughs in mapping and visualization technologies offer additional resources for the development of humanistic GIScience. The launching of Google Earth and Google Map StreetView, for example, has shifted the predominant orthogonal view to an oblique view, which is more natural and intimate to most people. For most GIS users, the dominant orthogonal view has promoted the kind of geography that is [Page 1479]quantitative, objective, and analytical, whereas the oblique view will retrieve the kind of geography that is more qualitative, subjective, and interpretative. This means that GIScience will need not only the part of geography that is rooted in the tradition of spatial analysis (means of analysis) but also the part of geography that is anchored in the tradition of hermeneutic interrogation (meanings of analysis). Recent works in emotional mapping best embody the spirit of the emerging humanstic GIScience practices.

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