GIS and Society Workshop

Executive Summary of Specialist Meeting

The Initiative 19 specialist meeting was structured as a workshop and organized to allow maximum discussion and debate on the broad conceptual issues of ‘GIS and Society’. Subsequently, workshop participants sought to identify critical research topics and specific projects. In this way, a research agenda was identified and steps were taken toward the design and implementation of a number of specific research projects.

The workshop brought together researchers and graduate students from the US and Europe and represented a spectrum of the Geography discipline. Deliberations began in an opening plenary session where the steering committee identified three core I-19 conceptual issues: 1) epistemologies of GIS; 2) GIS, spatial data institutions, and access to information; and 3) developing alternative GISs. Subsequent small group and plenary discussions generated the following seven research focus areas:

• GIS 2 and virtual geographies
• GIS social practice and intellectual history
• Environmental justice and political ecology
• GIS in the community: local knowledge and multiple realities
• Data access, privacy and geodemographics
• Gender and representation
• Geographic Information (and Systems) and the human dimensions of global environmental change

An agenda for research was identified for each of these seven focus areas and specific research perspectives and projects began to emerge. To date, the following four group projects initiated at the workshop are underway:

• The Social History of GIS
• The Ethics of Spatio-Visual Representation: Towards a New Mode
• A Regional and Community GIS-based Risk Analysis
• Local Knowledge, Multiple Realities and the Production of Geographic Information: A Case Study of the Kanawha Valley, West Virginia

Proposal writing for additional funding support for these four projects is underway. A proposal for a related GIS and Society research project in South Africa has successfully obtained NSF funding and that research will begin on January 1, 1997.

Another immediate outcome of the I-19 workshop has been the Public Participation GIS Workshop held at the NCGIA site at Orono, Maine (July 10-13, 1996). This workshop explored further the social and technical limits of GIS production and use. Other I-19 workshop outcomes include: organization of several conference special sessions and paper presentations; maintenance of the I-19 WWW page; expansion of research networking and collaboration; and commitment to revise the NCGIA GIS curriculum regarding Society issues. The I-19 steering committee is also collaborating with the University Consortium of GIS (UCGIS). The peer review publication of research results is ongoing.

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