Digital place-making: Insights from critical cartography and GIS

Abstract

History, including contemporary history, is as much about time as it is about space, place, and territory. Not accidentally, historians have long used paper maps as their data (maps made at different time periods) and as a form of analysis (e.g., historical atlases, maps of historic battles, etc.). Maps have always been an incredibly succinct and visually powerful way to tell a story. On the one hand, therefore, turning to digital mapping technologies is continuous with this tradition. On the other hand, geospatial technologies created new ways of analyzing and representing by connecting digital maps to data behind the map. In this way, they open new opportunities and pose new challenges to historians and other humanities scholars who engage with place and space on the crest of “spatial turn” and digital revolution. Geographers working in the fields of critical cartography and critical GIS have addressed these opportunities and challenges in a number of ways. This chapter will address some of these challenges and opportunities in relation to historical and contemporary mapping practices that contribute significantly to digital place-making, and include but are not limited to the web-based and neogeographical representations of place. In particular, how can digital place-making be understood in the context of such issues as maps as a medium of power, ontological power of maps and digital representations of place, authorship of maps, what gets to be represented and what is silenced, and what kind of information is conveyed and which is excluded? What are the implications of digital divide for digital place-making and online citizenship? I will examine the above questions drawing on a combination of critical social theory, feminism, post-structuralism, and postcolonial thought.