Humanistic GIScience

Humanistic geographic information science (GIScience) aims to integrate all human knowledge derived from the humanistic tradition with key issues related to spatial data representation, analysis, and visualization in the context of GIScience. Instead of 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 nearly everything computable and at the same time have sharpened our focus on the fundamental limits of computation. The goal of a humanistic GIScience is to build dialogues with a variety of different scholarly traditions to develop a better understanding of the complexities of reality (Table 1). It will be necessary to continue to pixelize the social and at the same time socialize the pixels. Recent works on the integration of naive geography, indigenous knowledge, feminist perspective, and public participation theory into the conventional geographic information systems (GIS) modeling processes are essentially examples of humanistic GIScience in practice. At the interface of computing technologies with humanistic scholarship, we can expect exciting groundbreaking development in the near future.

Because the quest for new means of analysis and modeling via computers has been increasingly entwined with a persistent search for the deeper meaning of such activities, we should expect to witness a revitalization of the aesthetic and humanistic traditions within GIS and cartography. Artists' renditions of reality in novels, poems, paintings, movies, music, and songs can be very rich sources of inspiration for geographers to explore alternative conceptualizations of space, place, time, environment, region, and scale. [Page 236]With the infusion of aesthetic traditions into GIS, we can anticipate that humanistic GIScience will flourish in the near future. In addition to representations of space framed by Euclidean geometry, humanistic GIScience attempts to find novel ways in which to handle the textures of place as articulated in the humanistic tradition as well as the structures of space.

Although the development of GIScience was concomitant with the development of GIS, GIScience no longer is reliant on the tools to exist and have meaning. With the development of a humanistic component, GIScience became more than a computational science in search of new algorithms. In fact, GIScience is also emerging as a humanistic science in search of meanings for its computations and an area for speculating about what lies beyond the limits of computation—GIScience's new terrae incognitae.