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Critiquing GIS
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GIS and Society
Alternative spatial realities
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Data availability and analysis

GIS and Society: Developing a Critique of the Technology
The revolution in geographic information over the past three decades has fundamentally altered both the academic field of geography and the planning profession. A cursory glance at the website of the main producer of GIS software, ESRI, shows that GIS is being applied in fields as diverse as banking, defense, education, and archeology. (1) The potential for GIS technology to expand is also great. It is estimated that up to 85% of all data have a spatial component, meaning that they can be mapped using GIS. (2) As one GIS optimist noted at the beginning of the 1990s, “it is not fanciful to suggest that by the end of the century GIS will be used everyday by everyone in the developed world for routine operations.” (3) Although this prediction was perhaps overly optimistic, it is clear that the application of GIS technology for data storage and spatial analysis is vast.

The rapid expansion of GIS, however, has not given rise to a corresponding critical academic discourse. The GIS literature has been characterized by unrelenting positivism, a emphasis on boosterism, technical possibility and future advances. (4) It is only within the last decade that a small group of geographers and social theorists have begun to examine the social, political, and ethical impact of digital geographic information on society. Like Sheppard, they argue that:

Technologies not only are rooted in society but have social consequences. At one level, there are subtle but fundamental shifts in how we think about knowledge and action as these are altered to fit better with the form of thinking captured in the technological tools we use in everyday life. (5)

GIS is more than simply a new tool that increases the efficiency of analyzing old problems. It has consequences for how spatial data are collected, analyzed, and used. When spatial models are used to make planning decisions, the structure of GIS has the potential to influence those outcomes — in effect, to influence society.

While the GIS and Society debate has largely been confined to academic geographers, many of the themes of the debate are significant in a discussion of sense of place and open space planning in South Kingstown as well as the larger issue of GIS data in Rhode Island.

Alternative spatial realities
GIS posits a singular reality; as Sheppard writes, "a particular epistemology for studying the world." (6) Much of this critique focuses on the kinds of knowledge captured in GIS and the types of analyses or conclusions drawn from the knowledge. Traditional GIS architecture far more easily handles alphanumeric data and reproduces information in two-dimensional representations. (7) In practice, this results in a clear bias against both qualitative and multimedia data. Narrative, history, and images simply do not fit within the database architecture of GIS. And yet, as Harris and Weiner point out, "Linking narratives, oral histories, photographs, moving images, and animation, to GIS provides enormous capability to increase not only the richness and diversity of the information available but more closely parallels the ways in which communities know or conceive their space." (8)

The second part of this critique centers on data analysis. If GIS privileges certain ways of knowing in data collection — empirical, positivist, scientific — over others — local, personal, qualitative — then the analyses performed on this data will also tend to favor the solutions and realities represented. In many GIS analyses, including open space planning, data themes are overlaid to examine where resources co-occur. This is an arbitrary approach that does not take into account the relative importance of different data. Charlestown at Buildout and the Charlestown Openspace Prioritization Project, two recent studies at Brown University, have attempted to address this bias by introducing relative weighting scales derived from public input.

Public participation and access to technology
The complexity and cost of GIS technology has meant that both data production and analysis are confined to a relatively small group of trained researchers and technicians. Public creation of spatial data sets has been almost nonexistent. This makes it all the more likely that new GIS data will reflect the priorities and agendas of those producing it — government agencies and universities. Even among state agencies in Rhode Island, GIS capability is unevenly distributed, allowing some departments, like the DEM, extensive GIS access while shutting others, like the Historic Preservation Commission, out of the GIS picture.

Although the ability of participatory GIS to engage residents, build support for planning decisions, and address historical inequality has been demonstrated, the digitization of village boundaries by the South Kingstown Planning Department may be the only publicly created GIS data layer in Rhode Island. (9)

Data availability and analysis
As Sheppard points out, the ability of modern GIS to manipulate data and display it elegantly can mean that data availability is driving geographical analysis. (10) The high cost of developing GIS data layers will certainly always mean that there is "not enough data." Nonetheless, analysis that relies on GIS is dependent on the availability of data and thereby "implies a neglect of themes not included in the data." (11)

This observation is hardly limited to GIS analysis. In general, data that can be easily measured are given disproportionate weight. However, several factors increase the likelihood and danger of this process with GIS:

• The visual appeal of maps. Displaying data in the form of maps significantly increases their perceived validity. (12)
• The high barrier-nature of GIS technology. Access to GIS is becoming more democratic, but for the last thirty years, software and the ability to perform sophisticated analyses has been limited to a select number of highly trained professionals. In practice, this has made challenging conclusions drawn from GIS a difficult proposition.
• GIS's claim to objectivity. Even recent GIS texts perpetuate notion that GIS produces a singular answer:
  
  GIS is an excellent tool for ensuring that decisions are made on a basis of facts rather than for political or emotional reasons. For example, in siting undesirable land uses, GIS can efficiently include every single parcel in the analysis to prove that the final selection is truly the optimal site...(emphasis added, 13)

In Washington County, the South County Greenspace Protection Project is beginning its public participation workshops with base maps containing RIGIS data layers despite the existence of important non-GIS data sources. (14) Other GIS models like Critical Lands are limited to statewide GIS data, which for certain resource types, are woefully incomplete. Since these projects synthesize large and complex data sets, they become the defacto decision-making tools for policy makers.

Next section: Multimedia GIS