What the World Points To
About this episode
The episode explores the intersection of geographic information science and the analysis of complex world events.
Hello Interactors, It’s been a while. Traveling for family, and a bit flooded by the relentless sneaker waves of unsavory world events — the kind that usually inspire me to write but lately threaten to pull me under. Spring in the northern hemisphere means Interplace turns to geographic information science and spatial analysis. How might we look at the complex unfolding of world events through this lens — and what happens when we push it further than emergence alone can carry it? That’s what I attempt to explore here. PATTERNS PRECEDING PHYSICAL PLACES Geographic information science is a relatively recent field. It emerged from mid-20th-century cartography and land-use planning. Computer cartography and quantitative geography of the 1960s is often considered the first true digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It became a science (GIScience or GISc) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Michael Goodchild questioned if there was a genuine scientific discipline lurking within the software. His answer was yes. He built an institutional home for that argument at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my…
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