Rethinking GIS

GIS – what’s in a name? I’ve been involved in GIS all my professional life since graduating from a cartography degree just as GIS was killing cartography as a career. But what does GIS actually mean to me at this point in time? It’s something I’ve been pondering recently, and I think we’re missing a trick.

For many (most?), GIS is the acronym for Geographic Information System which integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. That is the classic definition. Of course, people are also part of this, and that leads to us thinking of GIS as a framework. A framework for what though? A framework for doing GIS – that’s Geographic Information Science; the discipline that studies the techniques involved in Geographic Information Systems. Argh!

Geographic Information System was coined by Roger Tomlinson in the early 1960s with the development of his Canada GIS. Geographic Information Science was defined by Michael Goodchild in the 1990s. Of course, there are plenty more ways in which we can think of this such as Geographic Data Science, Geographic Information Science and Technology, or Geospatial science. And there’s plenty of blurred overlaps in how we think of, and frame GIS. GIScience might be thought of as the research field for what we apply using a GISystem.

At its core, though, is geography, and whether you are more interested in a higher proportion of computer or data science, or geomatics, or cartography, or visual analytics, it’s all pretty much just geography of some sort or another. I quite like Charles Gritzner’s 2002 definition of geography as “what is where, why there, and why care?” which focuses on the where but also introduces the idea that through investigating where, and why a phenomenon exists, we should somehow care about what has been found, understood, and what it means in their natural, social, economic, and cultural contexts. It’s just that GIS came along to re-frame geography and many now use GIS in whatever guise to perform their work.

In thinking about these definitions I began wondering why it is that people seem to shy away from describing what they do as GIS, and prefer to pigeon-hole work and activities using definitions that don’t actually use the acronym GIS. You rarely hear people say they ‘do’ GIS. Am I a GIS cartographer for example? Nope. I’m a cartographer who happens to predominantly use GIS to create maps. To my mind there’s no such thing as GIS cartography. You don’t hear people say they’re an Adobe cartographer, or a code cartographer. Yet somehow, when work is framed around being GIS-based it forms a tribal distinction between how others perform similar work using different approaches. The same is true in the analytical realm – Is GIS analysis really that different to someone who performs geovisual analytics in a non-GIS environment? I don’t think so, but it often creates unnecessary division. And before I go off on a tangent I’m not even going to venture into the ‘this GIS vs that GIS’ debate which is even more tribal and divisive.

So, what’s in a name? I’d like to propose a new kind of GIS – a Geographic Information Society. A coming together of the broad church of any and all of us involved in geography, whatever part of that we’re interested and practiced in, and however we carry out our work. We’re all part of a larger GISociety, a community that shapes more than just our small subset. I’d advocate moving away from all these definitions that shift and morph, and which mean different things to different people, and which have proven problematic. We work in a GISociety, and I think that’s what GIS should stand for going forward.

PS. Whatever your take, please never call it a GIS system (Geographic Information System system).