In 1987, In 1987, I presented Fundamental Principles of GIS at AUTO-CARTO 8. I want to review the content of this paper, and update it with more recent research. First, the paper demonstrates that the GIS community has always been embedded in social issues. We have had our own little version of the Science Wars, and like most wars, both sides have lost more than they have gained. There are good reasons to ask probing questions about the human values of any technical system, and I hope we can ask probing questions about GIS.
On balance, the views in the 1987 article might be been asking good questions, but they seem a bit formulaic in the kinds of remedies presented. Research on "Society and GIS" has progressed. I will present some of the exciting new directions, some of them developed from a closer reading of the literature on the social studies of technology and science (STS). The most exciting one for me are the ones that are directly linked to the most seemingly technical details. I want to develop in particular the way that the current software industry seems intent on "configuring the user" - rather than developing new modes of interaction.
Returning to 1987
In 1987, I presented a paper at AUTO-CARTO 8 under the title Fundamental Principles of GIS (later published in Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing under the more descriptive but less punchy title: Design of GIS based on social and cultural goals (Chrisman 1987). I do not intend to indulge in some form of nostalgia, but rather to use the paper I wrote fourteen years ago as a lens to examine the current state of geographic information systems research.
First, let us return to that time period to set some of the scene. As before and after, the GIS community was marvelling at rapid expansion. In the autumn of 1986, the British hosted an unexpectedly overflowing AUTO-CARTO London (the surplus revenues from that event may have played a role in many graduate student bursaries ever since, and perhaps also played a role in founding the GISRUK). The first GIS textbook (Burrough 1986) appeared at that conference. As Director of the next AUTO-CARTO, I adjusted my deadline for abstracts to attract good papers from authors at the London event.
The state of the art in GIS in 1986/87 was (retrospectively) at a high point in the acceptance of topological principles to organize software. For example, Intergraph had developed TIGRIS (Herring 1987), an object-oriented system using a seamless topological data structure indexed using R-trees. Since this had been my original agenda at earlier AUTO-CARTOs, you might expect me to have been pleased. Actually, I had already turned towards a more decentralized model that I articulated more carefully in the Fundamental Principles paper.
As I sat down to write my own paper for AUTO-CARTO 8, I knew I did not want to write a narrow technical contribution. It was an opportunity to make a more comprehensive statement. It is important to remember how important these conferences were to the community at that time. The International Journal of GIS had just announced that it would begin in 1987, but we mostly relied on conference proceedings as the medium to express ideas publicly. While it may seem academically retrograde, a well-organized meeting can often accomplish much more than the most rigorous peer-reviewed journal can ever pull together.
The basic point of the paper (and the sentence most cited since) stated that GIS technology "must be accountable economically, but also politically, socially, and even ethically." (Chrisman 1987, p. 1367) Such a noble sentiment might seem somewhat non-controversial in the current epoch in which all undertakings are subject to careful questioning, but at the time this was somewhat novel, and even slightly shocking to those committed to the technical agenda. The paper proceeded to spend most of its energy on the design of databases. It started with an allusion to the earlier era of raster/vector debate as a dead issue, without much of an apology for the role I played in it. It tried to critique the reliance on user-needs studies because they tended to ratify the current status quo. It then tried to implicate the classical communications model as a source of the problem, and to present a culturally and historically embedded alternative. Probably nobody ever figured out the diagram that I offered to explain how institutions their data holdings are the historical result of the interactions of people and their environment. When I reviewed this diagram in 1992, I found it overly structuralist (Chrisman 1992). Any situation involving long-term organizations and the people acting within them will have to deal with the tension between structure and agency, though I did not articulate the connection to the social science literature on that subject originally. The article makes what would now appear to be a quaint foray into the lack of objectivity of geographic information. The framing of these ideas still needs to be worked out, it has only been in the past few years that I have begun to locate some ways to address these problems (see below).
If the paper had a positive suggestion, it was in the form of a fairly legalistic approach to requirements analysis through the analysis of mandates assigned to custodians. To some extent, the GIS coordination efforts of the past fourteen years have confirmed this approach. It is not too surprising that Wisconsin adopted this strategy nearly verbatim, but it also influenced the US Federal Geographic Data Committee and a number of other similar efforts. In most cases, the process was somewhat reversed. Instead of rethinking the content of databases from the start using the mandates as a guide, it seems that the existing agencies declared themselves custodians through the political process of turf battles, then designed databases that ratified the division of labor. In either case, the result is a more decentralized and collaborative framework of cooperation than was being advanced in that period (National Research Council 1983, for example). My voice was just one of many, and the idea of cooperation among contributors had many origins and many supporters. In any case, it took years to see these movements take root in the community. During these years many other forces interacted, so it is pointless to argue which elements started anything.
The final point of the paper was to argue that equity was a more important goal than the measures of efficiency that had dominated the technical arguments. "Geographic information systems should be developed on the primary principle that they will ensure fairer treatment of those affected by the use of the information" (Chrisman 1987, p. 1370). I turned this argument into a slight dig at the raster world by arguing that the system should retain the units of interest, not impose some external set of arbitrary units. I ended on a reflexive note, arguing that my earlier work (Chrisman 1975) proposing an integrated topological database "was flawed because it centralizes definitions" (Chrisman 1987, p. 1370). The argument was based on displacing authority to a technical elite that should be more accessible to the political and administrative process. The final sentences demonstrate the ringing polemic of the paper:
... the search for technical efficiency must not be allowed to overturn political choices without careful examination through the political process. The true challenge is to use the increased sophistication of our automated systems to promote equity and other social ends which will never fit into a benefit/cost reckoning. I am convinced that the future of geographic information systems will lie in placing our technical concerns in their proper place, as serious issues worthy of careful attention. These technical concerns must remain secondary to the social goals that they serve. (Chrisman 1987, p. 1370)
So What?
Perhaps it is somewhat soothing to know that conferences fourteen years ago, back in a dark ages of computing, could include such stirring sentiment. No doubt conference speakers have proclaimed equally lofty goals before and since. If my goal were simply to provide a bit of moral uplift after a few days of technical detail, I could simply repeat the main points I delivered in 1987. But, fair listeners, you will not be so easily rid of me. As I took apart my own work from 1974 and 1975 in the 1987 talk, I will now consider how my research direction has changed, and how the prospects for the future seem somewhat different. I will embark on this project with a lot more assistance than I had in the prior enterprise, in part due to an expanded group of GIS researchers who study "Society and GIS" in various forms, and in part because I have spent the last seven years reading heavily in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This work leads me to quite a different set of prescriptions from those advanced at AUTO-CARTO 8. In particular, I want to demonstrate one theme begun in the earlier paper: there are traces of the social in the deepest and most technical parts of a GIS. But first, I need to deal with the discovery of GIS by the rest of the geography research community and the Science Wars that spilled into our isolated world.
Science Wars: ships passing in the night in k-D space
Part of the value of returning to 1987 is that it is prior to the wave of criticism that followed. It is not that my paper was the first to connect technical details to social concerns (Bie 1984, for example precedes 1987), but that the nature of discourse changed radically.
At first, there was a kind of nervous criticism, most clearly articulated in the intemperate newsletter column of the President of the AAG (Jordan 1988). Professor Jordan, an historical geographer from the "exceptionalist school", worried that GIS might "swamp" the discipline and displace focus from the "theoretical core". Brian Harley (1989) brought in a post-modernist critique, mostly of maps, but with some mention of the GIS movement. GIS became the sticking point for geographers who wanted to complain about relationships of power and representation. Perhaps the most heated rhetoric (Taylor and Overton 1991; Smith 1992) was enflamed by the "best defense is a good offense" strategy of Stan Openshaw (1991). When Jerome Dobson had published his original "automated geography" (Dobson 1983), the commentary had been almost exclusively from cartographers and GIS insiders. When he renewed his vision after ten years (Dobson 1993), the commentary included a lot sharper criticism (Pickles 1993). Viewed from inside, it might seem that the GIS movement was being attacked for being successful, but the criticism was not simply a reaction to GIS, it is a small part of a much larger intellectual movement that swept across the humanities and social sciences. Just as GIS folk felt attacked, the science community reacted, in even more flamboyant ways than Openshaw (most notably the Sokal affair).
The publication of Ground Truth (Pickles 1995b) moved beyond an era of pure polemic and showed some attempt to include authors from inside GIS alongside the critics. Despite the effort, the insiders stuck to their scientism (Goodchild 1992; Goodchild 1995, in particular), and the critics to theirs (Pickles 1995a, talks about totalitarian tendencies). While this book was quite important, it did not serve to construct a new common ground, but more to demonstrate how divergent the views were. As the literature continued (Sheppard 1995; Curry 1998), the focus concentrated on the impacts (potential, imagined, observed) of GIS on society. Only a few talked about the reverse, that our current GIS might be conditioned by societal pressures, cultural presuppositions, and political choices (Chrisman 1992; Chrisman 1996).
Arguments about GIS technology often slip into a discourse of technological determinacy. GIS-proponents and critics alike assert, consciously or unconsciously, that technology is intrinsically independent from the social world. This perpetuates the two major tenets of technological determinism:
1) technology engages unilinear progress from less to more advanced systems;
2) technology is an imperative to which social institutions and people must adapt
(Bijker et al. 1987; Woolgar 1987; Bijker and Law 1992; Feenberg 1995). Technological determinism leads to the belief that the technology can be studied solely by itself, outside of the context of its construction or use. As a consequence, "implications" remain as the sole issue.
Proponents often acclaim geographic information technology as the means to make more efficient and socially equitable decisions. These proponents hope to clear away subjective issues and rationalize the process of establishing consensus, so that decisions can be made objectively (Dobson 1983; Openshaw 1991; Dobson 1993). Most of this literature aligns itself with a "March of Progress" metaphor, an attitude about history with limited utility to detect the choices and inconsistencies involved in technological change (Chrisman 1993). The idea of an automated geography implies that the technology is somehow independent of the people, operating on its own internal logic. Critics of GIS are quite justified in calling attention to flaws in the proponents' claims.
The heralds of progress create the impression that improvement is inexorable and assured. The GIS bandwagon suggests that jumping aboard is the way to success; technology can fulfill every demand, and bring you the world. Dobson places GIS technology on a clear rational path towards a better tomorrow, arguing that "GIS has become a sine qua non for geographic analysis and research ... the beginning stage of a technological, scientific, and intellectual revolution" (Dobson 1993, p. 431). The authors of Ground Truth made much of the claims of GIS proponents (Pickles 1995c) as well as the advertising of GIS vendors (Goss 1995; Roberts and Schein 1995). The more arrogant the claim, the better it seems to serve the critics.
The critics (Smith 1992 Curry, 1991 #48; Pickles 1995b; Sheppard 1995, for example) have also focused on the impacts of technology. They often portray the technology as a force out of social control, something external to the social discourse. They use a somewhat sophisticated form of C.P. Snow's (1959) "two cultures" argument, saying that technologists are not connected to the same literature and not engaged in the same bases of theory. The gap between two discourses does not mean that technology and technologists do not respond to their own versions of social forces. Both proponent and critic alike need to see where exactly the social comes into GIS. It may not be in the places they are watching.
Technological determinism, proclaimed by proponents or implied by critics, obscures the relationships between GIS technology and society largely by neglecting linkages. The contention between progress-believing technologists and humanistic-orientated social theorists omits the people involved with the technology and the complex interactions required to maintain it. GIS technology serves to extend human capabilities by other means, not a superorganic force in itself. The people who use GIS are not mere instruments of progress towards better information systems nor are they simply victims of its social consequences. The systems now in place reflect many layers of negotiation between social goals and technical capacity to respond. The simplistic metaphors must be replaced with more nuanced understanding of interactions between people and technology.
Rather than a vast superhuman realm, GIS technology is the result of localized social construction. This construction occurs when the technology is created, and continues as it is configured for each application. The march of progress myth must be replaced with a careful examination of the social divisions created and maintained by geographic information technologies. This paper will consider one example of these social divisions, after it presents some approaches to technology and society that move beyond technological determinism.
Studies of Science and Technology (STS)
In place of the technological determinism common in treating GIS, this paper draws specifically on recent theoretical insights from a number of interlocking literatures including the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), studies of technology and science (STS), history of technology and of science, philosophy of science and related fields. The twentieth century began with a fairly coherent expectation of the cumulative development of scientific knowledge (Carnap 1966). By midcentury, the logical positivists seem to have conquered all opposition, broadcasting a message of method as a path of coherent science. Kuhn (1970) introduced an observation that science in this period was by no means as linear as it was meant to have been. The development of relativity in physics, for example, required replacing the whole "paradigm", not just the incremental accumulation of adjustments to earlier schemes. Kuhn's approach left science (and thus technology) fairly independent from social concerns. Kuhn's work was so pervasive that the quantifiers in geography adopted the terminology of paradigms (Berry 1973, for example), a basically anti-positivist theory of knowledge. Some recent studies in the history of science (Galison 1997) demonstrate further refinements in understanding how science operates, extending the concept of paradigms to allow for greater ambiguity in the negotiations between theorists and instrumentalists. The assurance that a particular scientific method always works has been strongly questioned (Feyerabend 1993). Thus, the history and philosophy of science no longer provide support for the old mythology of inexorable progress.
Studies of science and technology (Barnes 1974; Bloor 1976; Latour and Woolgar 1986, for example) provide strong documentation of complex networks linking social organization, political structure, economic interaction, and cultural foundations to the development of a technology. The sociology of scientific knowledge developed a "strong program" of researchers (Bloor 1976; Collins 1981) who argued that social relationships underpin the development of science and technology. This strong program argues against the study of "impacts" from technology to society. The constructivist literature (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Bijker, Hughes et al. 1987; Latour 1987; 1988; Bijker and Law 1992; 1993), though inherently quite diverse and far from unambiguous, modified the unidirectional direction providing a more complex dynamic of mutual constitution. Latour (1993) argues that the division between "nature" — a realm of scientific enquiry — and "society" — a realm for human creation — obscures intricate interactions required to sustain the hybrid networks of current technology.
This literature argues that science and technology are constructed from a multiplicity of viewpoints, and that this construction is distinctly local, not universal. Multiple social forces interact in the process of developing a complex technology such as GIS. Implementation of any technology depends on the specific local environment that strongly constrains how actors interact with the artifacts they construct. This literature digs deeper than the argument of ‘inherent logic’; any logic in a technology was put there by developers through some process and adopted by users for another set of reasons.
It is increasingly difficult to separate technology from science, an argument that surely applies to the tight enmeshing of GIS with the disciplines that use GIS tools. Social constructivist approaches provide a theoretical framework for examining and understanding the tight linkages between the actions of people and the technology they create and use. The web of technology and society consists of many complex relationships between artifacts and people, institutions and data, software and researchers. Mack (1990) recounts the interactions that led to the Landsat sensing system, a result by no means determined by inexorable forces. Martin (Martin 2000) has applied this actor-network approach to demonstrate how different GIS organizations interact in Ecuador. The GIS literature has recognized for a long time that institutional factors intervene in making one system fail while another prospers, but there have been very few concrete markers that can predict these different outcomes. The stability of the network offers a useful way to assess the viability of a GIS organization.
Mediation of diverse interests occurs in the construction of artifacts; negotiations are necessary to create coherent operations. Star, Greisemer (1989) and Fujimura (1992) develop the relationships between multiple actors and artifacts through what they call boundary objects. Boundary objects mediate between different groups; they don’t provide a common understanding or consensus between participants. Instead, they serve a dual function: at the same time they serve to distinguish differences, they also supply common points of reference (Harvey and Chrisman 1998). Institutions and disciplines play a crucial role in formulating boundary objects that allow for stable translations between different perspectives on the same phenomenon. Galison (1997) provides a further development of these boundary concepts that may apply more directly to the interdisciplinary nature of GIS practice. He argues that translation implies too much mutual comprehension; he uses the linguistic metaphor of a pidgin dialect operating in a "trading zone". This concept offers an important insight for the design of GIS technology.
In GIS, every data sharing arrangement requires boundary objects. These could be physical structures, concepts, or standardized approaches. The layers in the multi-purpose cadastre come to mind as an example for boundary objects: each agency populates a layer that remains in their jurisdiction, but is tied together through a common coordinate system with the products of other groups. Not merely an instrument or toolbox, each particular GIS presents a unique collection of artifacts that enable multiple social groups, with divergent, or even contradictory values, to mediate these differences and construct more technological artifacts that multiple groups can share. At best, the social construction of technological objects is only stable for a specific moment and subject to constant renegotiation.
Configuring the user
As a specific resource for this paper, I am borrowing the phrase "configure the user" from a paper written by Steven Woolgar (1991), a British sociologist of technology and science. In the days when the IBM XT was the dominant PC, he observed how a microcomputer manufacturing organization decided how to design their next model. He argues that the group did not configure a machine to suit a specific body of users, but rather that they built the machine that they could and attempted to configure the users to suit the machine. He was contributing to a literature about the role of technical artifacts (Latour and Woolgar 1986; 1987, for example). This theme has recently been extended (in a more interactive form) to the study of software developments (Mackay et al. 2000). I only have space to introduce a few examples here.
In an earlier paper written for a conference on error analysis (Chrisman 1999), I examined the category of "blunders" in photogrammetry specifically as applied in the GIS operation to register a digitized source to a coordinate system. The choice of least-squares estimation is not as straight-forward as it might seem. It is only optimal under some very special conditions, ones that are unlikely in routine use (Unwin and Mather 1998). The technical details are important, but my point here is that the software designer isn't just choosing what mathematical model to apply, but who does what kind of work. In this case, the user is meant to weed out blunders, even though the software provides very limited tools to detect and remove them.
In a broader sense, the organization of data in a GIS serves to decide what kind of administrative arrangements belong in a GIS. The layer-cake design (that I did much to promote at Harvard and at Wisconsin) reflects a particular expectation of cooperating agencies each with their independent coverage. There were alternatives in our past, such as the integrated terrain unit techniques promoted by the Australians (Mabbutt 1968) and adopted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO 1976). The layer based design is not neutral, it makes certain kinds of arms-length custodian approaches easier. While I can contend that these are more likely to succeed and perhaps more likely to contribute to equity, such a decision should not be furtive. Rather than configuring the user, we do need to ensure that the software is not out of control.
The 1987 paper argued that the fundamental principles of GIS were to be found in the social goals that a GIS serves. While this may still be a grand objective, the situation seems a bit more complex in the light of understanding the criticism of GIS from inside and outside. Society and GIS are no longer the simple categories that remain distinct. Software and databases are integrally implicated in social relationships at all levels. This should be no surprise, rather it should focus each of us on communicating all the choices to all affected parties.
Partially supported by a grant from National Science Foundation (USA) Grant SBR 98-10075. AGI provided funding to attend GISRUK 2001.
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