[Ppgis] Monday's class

Deepsea Dawn dawn at dusk.geo.orst.edu 
Sun Nov 18 17:16:21 PST 2007

Greetings PPGISers,

I attach some of my notes below as a springboard for brief discussion  
on Monday, before we break up into the groups again.

Cheers,

Dawn
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Sara Elwood - Critical GIS and PPGIS - Nov. 14, 2007

critical GIS -
(1) what is possible and what is not possible with knowledge
(2) then turning that around to help empower people
GIS capacity to handle multiple knowledge (from multiple cultures,  
even genders)

Weiner and Harris - critique of cartographic spatial knowledge -  
research design oriented toward self-representation, trying to  
incorporate some traditionally non-cartographic forms

Wilson 2005 - social impacts through communication, but we also need  
to pay attention to ways that GIS might create social impact through  
representation

Schuurman focuses on metadata --> ontology (how words translate  
across different meanings, synonyms, thesauri)

critical GIS informing PPGIS and hence a definition of sorts for PPGIS
- should lead to a community decision
- should deal with issues of representation, power, who is the  
community, who gets to make the decisions

goal is to gain influence over local political changes that affect  
the community - public health and public ed, zoning, e.g. (so the  
maps be presented in different ways - fudging of data?)

GIS information is granting greater authority and legitimacy (the  
"expert" power of GIS)
PAR = participatory action research - rooted in the notion that  
socially transformative knowledge and practice are achieved when the  
research subjects or participants are actually involved in the  
research design, questions, data collection, data analysis, the use  
of tools in the data collection.
- very challenging, still very easy to disempower, disenfranchise

notion of "GIS expertise" - acquiring and preparing digital data in  
GIS, using GIS software to carry out spatial analysis - but a  
different understanding of GIS expertise is needed (constructing  
meaning in gaining political advantage but not the same as just being  
a power user of GIS)
geoviz is traditionally an exploratory knowledge process - PPGIS is  
an outward process of understanding and explaining meaning


 
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Dawn Wright | Professor | Department of Geosciences
Oregon State University | Corvallis, OR 97331-5506
http://dusk.geo.orst.edu | 541-737-1229 phone | 541-737-1200 fax