GIScience 2016 notes

The bi-annual Geographic Information Science conference is one of the focal point on the field. This year, it was held in Montreal. You can find my talk in a long and separate post. Here are some notes of talks that I took during the meeting.

The conference started with reasons for the location, and a tribute to Roger Tomlinson

Monica Wachwicz, which open the conference with the first keynote, explored her experience in managing a complex set of projects that deal with sensing the environment using geospatial technologies. She summarised her insights:

She aslo described the challenges of recruiting computer scientists, mathematicians, & social scientists to multidisciplinary team.

In the poster session, the work of Daniel Bégin stood out (and he later won an award for it)

Dennis Hlynsky gave the keynote on the second day. As an artist, he is using digital technologies to see the world around him, focusing on the individual and the group. We live in worlds and there are other ‘worlds’ around us – some of too fast, some too slow, some you can’t sense – from gravity to chemistry. He views the creative process as something that is based on guidelines (e.g. Warhol daily procedures), opportunity, being a resident (living in a place and taking it in). Making a playful mess. Critique (is it working, is it not? What my artwork communicate? does it need more or less?). Make sense (we are sense making creatures, telling stories, making sense of things we don’t understand). However, many times he does not know what he is doing and explore things. To witness in a place, what you are witnessing and conveying is important: verbal storytelling, narrative, science and experiments, drawing and painting, photography and film, text, maps, data analysis. We’ve tried to mechanise witness – for example perspective, which force understanding the world from a single point of view. Photography is also a form of mechanisation. There is also the issue of mechanisation in emphasising efficiency which part of industrialisation. The technology changes in photography is important. Until the 1970s, the cost of photographic equipment was limited the opportunity of what is recorded. Since then, the acceleration of sharing photos and evidence change things, with the affordability of cameras in phones. The process of taking photos with phones (which are cameras) make the recording of moments in life much more common, but also the need to switch them off in order to be at the moment. There are many opportunities to do creativity with cameras – for example, providing them to all the students in class, and created a system that allow people to share images, but explicit human intuition to link things, not an automatic tags analysis. There are subsets of the world that communicate with each other, even if they can’t understand it fully.  Interestingly, YouTube is focusing on data driven relationships, while Vimeo is about human led curation. There are different was of organising and understanding the world. The claim that an image is worth a thousand words can be turned on its head – you need to understand the context and meaning of the world, and this is not possible without it.

Helen Couclelis talked about ‘Encyclopedia Gallica of (improbable) event and the why GIScience is not like physics’. The informational standpoint, events, processes, endurance, non-event, do not have a user independent definition. Road networks look different from a perspective of a tourist and biologist, so we need to find a way to create information that support their use. Events are more complex: flood – flood can be an event, process to those in charge of evacuation, occurrences for disaster statistics, noise to everyone else. As metascience – GISCience is a framework for optimising the relation between the interests of information seekers and data in any spatio-temporal domain. She suggest a user-centred GIS with the notion of R-Events to help in search process. The empirical and informational aspects in information systems as distinct epistemic layers.

Genevieve Reid & Renee Sieber compared indigenous ontologies of time. It provide a case for inclusive semantic interoperability, and ensure representation and accessibility for indigenous knowledge. SNAP/SPAN frameworks for ontologies have a very basic notion of time in a Newtonian way and as always progressing and unilinear. In contrast, in TEK, time can be spiral, branch, triangle, cyclical, or double spiral – future that incorporate the future (in Maori culture). Eastern Cree culture see part and present leading to the future. In TEK time is not temporal but social. There are no fix – creation stories include notions of creating a river through a specific story. Time also has an agency. On the basis of these different concepts, she progress to suggest an inclusive model of relationship trough ontological representation. Time is not a simple model but into spatial temporal relations. GIScience can’t ignore the different social constructions of time – excluding indigenous concepts is ontological violence and risk of loss of indigenous knowledge.

Lex Comber et al. talked about “A Moan, a Discursion into the Visualisation of Very Large Spatial Data and Some Rubrics for Identifying Big Questions”, while looking at trends in anti-depressant. Databating meaning manipulation of database. There is an increasing amount of data, and demands (experiences of changing title from GIScience to Data Analytics, create challenges). There is a lack of asking serious questions or knowing what is it for, and ‘letting the data talk for itself’. There is opening of data – for example, GP practice prescription: the practice, the drug, the postcode of the patient. The Postcode can be linked to geography. Demonstrate that it’s possible to producing stupid results by only going data fishing. If we have a plan, on the other hand, we can see urban/rural areas. Need to use: view, refine, and zoom. If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, then making the stack bigger is not making it easier.

Jim Tatcher et al. (delivered by David O’Sullivan) ‘Searching for a common ground (again). Mentioning Golledge et al. 1988 A ground for Common Research. Need to identify common terms and how they are used.  The model of seeing the world as layer cake, is still significant. Harvey Miller mentioned it in 2003 that Euclidean space can be problematic, and it is associated with the quantitative geography. However, in old books that are all sort of representations that look different. From Bunge to Haggett, there are representations that are not Euclidean. The paradigm of GIS caused the adoption of this model. Tobler’s first law actually appeared as ‘throwaway remark’ and travelled through geography in different ways. Need to consider why Euclidean is accepted for granted when in earlier period there were many experimentation.