Qualitative GIS: To Mediate, Not Dominate

Abstract

As Michael Goodchild reminds us1, the Seventeenth-Century geographer, Bernard Varenius, produced a treatise focused on two views of geography. One, clearly related to the work of Newton, covered general geography (dealing with a general set of principles) and the other dealt with ideographic geography (having to do with the special character of places). Varenius’ (1650) two-fold approach affirms what our society has forgotten, but what is in agreement with Newton himself: we need to conceive of — there is — both absolute and relative space. The former is assumed by physicists in the course of their abstractions and the latter is experienced by ordinary people in the course of making their way in the world. However, today, the powerful realm of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for all its potential for human understanding and good, does substantial violence by requiring that all our transactions and uses translate (radically convert) our experiential realms into the coded terms of GIS as based on data provided and available only in Euclidean geometrical terms for Newtonian space.