Giscience 2005
20 years of progress: GIScience in 2010 (Goodchild)
I thought it was interesting how 2 out of the 3 participants Goodchild interviewed had an issue with the word “discovery” when asked about “the ten most important discoveries of GIScience to date” (7). On one hand Marc Armstrong replaces “discovery” with “transformations”, namely from one medium (paper) to another (computer) while Sara Fabrikant replaces the word with “rediscovery”; to her, GIScience is more about seeing the world from a new light. Further, these 2 participants both emphasize the idea that GIScience is the combination of many disciplines and its research is performed in “… a variety of scientific paradigms” (9). Both participants seem to value GIScience as a field that takes an amalgamation of knowledge we already know and applies it to spatial information to access new knowledge that we otherwise could not. They acknowledge GIScience not as a “new” science per se but as a new science born from previous fields of study.
At this point, Network Science springs to mind. Many things about the relatively recent development of network science are similar to that of GIScience. Network science, like GIScience, is interdisciplinary; it draws from and has relevance to many fields. Although scholars have studied networks long ago, they had few unifying theories to show to it, which motivated the formation of a Network Science. The National Research Council writes:
“Despite the tremendous variety of complex networks in the natural, physical, and social worlds, little is known scientifically about the common rules that underlie all networks. This is even truer for interacting networks. Ideas put forth by scientists, technologists, and researchers in a wide variety of fields have been coalescing over the past decade, creating a new field of thinking—the science of networks…
Does a science of networks exist? Opinions differ” (p. 7).
Perhaps these developments in Network and GI Science support the idea mentioned by Wright et al. of a change in the understanding of what constitute as “science” in the modern world.
National Research Council. (2005). Network Science. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005.
-Ally_Nash
Tags: GIS, goodchild, network, science
Abstracts are invited for a session held by the GIScience Research Group (GIScRG) at the Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers International Conference 2012. The conference runs between 3rd – 5th July 2012.
More about the session:
In December 2011 The Portas Review put forward 28 recommendations to the UK government regarding the future of ‘our’ high street. Within the report and surrounding media there is a sense of ‘crisis’ associated with such spaces and by implication with the ‘moral values’ of ‘community’, ‘localism’ and ‘sense of belonging’ associated with high street. Such approaches show that attention needs to be paid the spaces of the everyday such as the UK high street to further understand what these spaces do in an economic, social and cultural sense and how changes in such spaces affect not only economic stability but orderings and understandings of such ideas as ‘local’ ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘identity’.
With approaches within the social sciences from authors such as Ingold (2007) and Massey (2005) the role of materiality and spatial practices in everyday social life is receiving increasing attention. Within this the role of the physical configuration of the built environment and its relationship to the social organisation of everyday life, much potential exists to either advance current understandings or develop new critical understandings of the role of the spaces of the built environment in social relations.
We invite proposals for papers that present critical work on change or continuity of the ‘public spaces of the everyday’, such as the suburban high street through collaborative and mixed methods approaches across a range of disciplines including GIS, architecture, anthropology and sociology. We welcome proposals that work across disciplines and in particular combine quantitative and qualitative approaches. Preference is for work that combines historical perspectives to the suburban realm and high street although we welcome submissions of critical investigation of the relationship between shifting patterns of economic, social and cultural land uses and the types of socio-spatial relations they engender in other ‘spaces’.
The GIScRG will provide one bursary for this session, sponsored by the GIScRG for a paper (co-)authored by a postgraduate student; priority will be given to postgraduate students also delivering the paper. The bursary will cover the reduced conference fee for the student for the duration of the conference. It is a requirement that the student is an RGS-IBG Postgraduate Fellow at the time the bursary is awarded [Annual membership costs from £27 (with no joining fee)].
Participants are asked to use an innovative style of presentation; to prepare a presentation with full-slide images, with a maximum of ten words per slide. We intend to accept only four presentations to allow for discussion time. The abstracts will be circulated to presenters and they will be asked to prepare responses to key ideas from all the abstracts in order to enable a useful discussion at the end of the session. Titles and abstracts (up to 500 words) for this session should be sent to both David Jeevendrampillai (david.jeevendrampillai.10[AT]ucl.ac.uk) and Ashley Dhanani (ashley.dhanani[AT]ucl.ac.uk) by Monday 9th January 2012. The session conveners (David Jeevendrampillai, Ashley Dhanani, Mordechai (Muki) Haklay and Laura Vaughan) are members of the Adaptable Suburbs project team at UCL.
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