Spatial Representation and Power

The Authority of Maps

  • Maps are read as authorities; they are difficult to create and mapmakers have technical skill; people trust what they see in maps
  • But mapmaking is not objective; many choices must be made. What to map and how to map it are choices
  • Culture is embedded in maps, such as ideas about the nature of land and human society
  • Propaganda（宣传；鼓吹） maps are extreme examples

Land Areas and Epistemoloty

  • We see maps as evidence of physical world
  • The appearance of land area on a map will be distorted in some way
  • The widespread use of the Mercator projection in Western countries distorts our idea of continental size

Maps as Propaganda

  • Linking national boundaries and evocative imagery is used pre-war and during wartime to stir up nationalist sentiment

Spatial Knowledge Over Time

Age of Exploration 15th & 16th C.

  • Navigation: sustained use of astronomy
  • Ships: merging maneuverability and strength
  • Cartography: from mappa mundi to practical maps
  • World coastlines were mapped
  • oceans became the means and paths to discovery
  • The growth and Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires

Enlightenment - 16th & 17th C.

  • Cultural thirst for new maps and descriptions of faraway places
  • The growing authority of maps
  • Intellectual shift: acceptance of the scientific method and physical reality of sources of true knowledge rather than received authority

Age of Discovery - 18th & 19th C.

  • Scientific Travel - Voyages to chart the natural world, with political ambitions to expand empire and catalogue resources
    • 1768 Transit of Venus expeditions
    • Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-06)
    • Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin’s exploratory voyage)
  • Scientific, commercial, and military linkages
  • The 18th and 19th centuries were era of cataloguing knowledge
  • Local history and geology
  • Colonial resources

Geography and Imperialism - 19th & 20th C.

  • Linking of race, climate, and imperialist arguments
  • Americans used maps and state laws for registration of land titles to shift land titles to shift land possession and/or ownership from Native Americans and Mexicans to new Americans

Spatial Knowledge - 20th C.

  • Technical advances
    • 1st half of the C.: photography, air travel, and navigation
    • 2st half of the C.: radar, satellites, geolocation, computers, internet, GIS, …
  • Global military and commercial competition spurred the advances
    • First and second world wars
    • Cold war
    • Colonial empires replaced by commercial linkages

Spatial Knowledge - 21th C.

  • Technological Advances
    • GIS
    • Satellites and GNSS
    • Remote Sensing
    • LBS-enabled devices
    • Mobile apps employing LBS
  • Cultural shift
    • Widespread smartphone ownership
    • Sharing of data

The Power of Maps and Spatial Data

  • Power of spatial data - detailed knowledge about a place
    • Can exert power over space, extract value from a place
    • Gain knowledge/power of inhabitants
  • Power of maps - spatial information with visualization
    • Archives of spatial information
    • Communicators of spatial information - draw on visual to enhance spatial knowledge
    • Visual imagery - propaganda/cultural knowledge
    • Spatial data and maps are complicated and difficult to collect/archive/create

Critical GIS

GIS & Society Debates

  • In the 1990s scholars noted a problematic contradiction underlying the growth of GIS:
    • Spatial data and its analysis was growing in importance, but
    • The data was largely out of public reach
    • The tools were largely out of public reach, and
    • The analytical methods were not being taught