Amateurs and Professionals Unite

The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.

Andrew Keen - Cult of The Amateur

I was led to that quote in a round about manor via Jame's Fee's blog to an entry by Sean Gorman. There is an interesting discussion on the tensions between the Geoweb and the GIS industry (ESRI, MapInfo). In short, the GIS industry apparently considers GIS is what professionals do and the Geoweb is for amateurs. I don't really agree with this, but don't see too much of a problem with the terms used. I do agree that the Geoweb is not GIS, at least not at this point. I see a little danger with people who do not understand fundamentals about maps creating maps, but you get this even with so-called "professionals." Plus, the people, generally speaking, who build the Geoweb do have an understanding. I see GIS and the Geoweb on the same spectrum supplying different services around spatial data, they aren't the same but aren't too different. People who do Geoweb are professionals at Geoweb, and I'm definitely an amateur. I'd like to think of myself as a professional at GIS, and a person who does Geoweb probably would be an amateur at it. Everybody is a little defensive (me too) about their industry, and a little protectionist, for example just tell a Geoweb zealot that it isn't GIS. When I say it, it isn't meant to be an insult. There's just a lot of capabilities that I have in a GIS that isn't there in the Geoweb, just like there is a lot of capabilities that isn't in a GIS. The problem with ESRI is that they want their software to do everything. It's not practical or possible. I agree with James Fee's sentiment about all getting along, after all we are all under the same Geography hat. Sean Gorman had a link to the Cult of The Amateur book which had an excerpt you could read. I found the bits that I read of this book interesting. I don't agree with his points entirely. In the end the web is a bit of a quasi-market, and the users gravitate to the best sites, best blogs, best news organizations that meet their criteria. If a film review blog is filled with boring analysis and misspellings, then it is not going to be popular and not overshadow someone like Roger Ebert. This blog is proof positive that people avoid crap (except for 7-10 people one of which is my Mom). Even Wikipedia has had to tone down their encyclopedia for everyone to edit and now use "experts" to do the writing or monitoring. I do think the inclusion of a comments section on news articles is ridiculous, and although it is sometimes entertaining, they are usually filled with vulgar bigoted remarks. I forgot who's axiom it was about Usenets/newsgroups but if they go on for long enough eventually someone will start to call someone else Hitler or a Nazi. That is perhaps where the Web's greatest enemy lies is the anonymity. Which makes it difficult to tell where certain information comes from, but unlike Keen I'm pretty sure Web 2.0 users can tell that a blog is going to be a form of an OpEd piece, and if you visit the Ford blog you can expect propaganda. I think perhaps the greatest flaw in Keen's argument is that the "quality of public civil discourse" has been declining since before Web 2.0. Personally I point the finger at the political pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coultour, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and on and on; who leave little room for "civil discourse" and bifurcate an already bifurcated system. Anyway, that's way off topic and probably not the type of info you would read a GIS blog for. So I apologize, but I've typed it and it would take too much effort to remove it.

Projections!!!

There are so many great new cool projects on the web it is hard to keep up. They probably aren't even new, but I just found out about them. Here is an example. But why, with all the new innovations and ideas do people still create these maps using latitude and longitude? The Social Explorer presents this distorted lat and long thematic map, when they should really be using a projection that preserves area. I know technology like Mapserver, and Sharpmap possess the capability to project into a multitude of projections (I believe using PROJ4).

I see with Google Maps why it is necessary to use Lat and Long, because it just makes it easier for Google if people conform to a standard Latitude and Longitude. Projections or the lack there of can greatly influence people's perceptions of the world. Look at the Mercator projection and Greenland. I think this is related to Dr. Parks' talk as well. She says people don't have an understanding of satellites, but they also don't have any understanding of projections.

I can't tell if Google Earth is a culprit of this as well, because I'm not sure if it uses a Geoid or some other "true" representation of the Earth.

New Media

I've noticed this topic in a few blogs recently, sparked by a presentation given at Where 2.0 this year by Dr. Lisa Parks. I did not attend this conference or see the presentation, so all my information is second hand. I think this is an interesting topic, repositioning GIS as not a tool but as media, or a form of communication. Her topic revolved much more around Satellites and the lack of public knowledge or information about satellites (metadata). Here is a transcript and notes on the presentation. There has been varied reactions, some quite critical. Personally, I think the criticisms are coming from the pragmatic or post-positivist stance so commonly found in the GIS as tool perspective. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but my interpretation of her presentation is that the GIS (Geospatial, neogeography, etc...) community needs to recognize that satellites are not impersonal objective eyes in the world. They serve a purpose, their lens' are not focused arbitrarily on the world, but pointed at places, for profit in most cases. I think this is a perfectly ok stance to take. I think that it is good to leave aside the notion that GIS is an objective tool and recognize it as a communication devise that serves a purpose. Not only that, but that the information stored in a database is inherently unobjective as well. We have the notion that raw data is objective, but regardless that data is stored in a format that was "invented" and the structure of the data "invented." Right off the bat, there is a western bias to the structure of the data, because it revolves around western thinking. The primitive geometric structures of a GIS are western biased and evolved from the western cartographic tradition. I'm not criticizing the formats, just recognizing the problem.

Obviously, communication can be twisted (see How to Lie with Maps). I think it is even easier to lie with satellite imagery. If a satellite image is shown in a presentation and you are told it is of a certain location at a certain time, you just have to accept or not accept that as the truth.

The link above was mostly critical of her critique of the Darfur project. Again, following my explanation, then the point is that the unbiased imagery begins to serve a biased purpose (or second biased purpose if you count the original acquisition), that of stopping the Darfur crisis. I'm not arguing against or criticizing the Darfur project, but recognizing that there is a goal behind showing the geographic information...

Anyway, when it comes to working in GIS, I use it as a tool, and I'm very much a pragmatic post-positivist (if I may mix epistemologies). I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more conversations like this popping up, especially with more and more geographic information becoming readily available, and programs like Google Earth gaining in popularity...