Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
perception of what they can do. There are clear signs that geographic visualization will be
seen as simply one of many available 'on demand' Web or portal services to the general
public and integrated or 'mashed-up' within a multitude of other applications. As geo-
graphic visualization becomes more flexible and much more accessible, it is also, in some
respects, granted a less reified status than the printed artefacts of the past. Visualizations
will increasingly be treated as transitory information resources, created in the moment and
discarded immediately after use. In some senses, this devalues the geographic visualization
as it becomes just another form of ephemeral media, one of the multitude of screen images
that barrage people everyday. Geospatial data itself is just another informational commodity
to be bought and sold, repackaged and endlessly circulated.
4
The production of geospatial information has always been dependent, to a large degree,
on the available methods of data collection. These are being greatly augmented in the
digital transition. The widespread importance of new digital measurement was noted by US
National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell (2004, p. 704): 'new tools of vision are
opening our eyes to frontiers at scales large and small, from quarks to the cosmos'. Geographic
visualization's ability to 'capture' the world has been transformed by digital photogrammetry,
remote sensing, GPS-based tracking and distributed sensor network. Cartography can not
only 'see' the world in greater depth (Pickles, 2004), but it can also 'see' new things (including
virtual spaces), and with new temporalities.
Vast digital geospatial databases underlie many powerful geographic visualizations, such
as the Ordnance Survey's Digital National Framework, comprising over 400 million fea-
tures.
5
These are growing as part of the 'exponential world', being fed in particular by
high-resolution imagery from commercial satellites. In the future, much of this growth will
come from people gathering geospatial data as they go about their daily activity, automat-
ically captured by location-aware devices that they will carry and use (see Chapter 16).
From this kind of emergent mobile spatial data capture, it will be possible to 'hack' together
new types of geographic visualization rather than be dependent on the products formally
published by governments or commercial firms. Such individually made, 'amateur' map-
ping may be imperfect in many respects (not meeting the positional accuracy standards or
adhering to the TOPO-96 surveying specifications, for example), but could well be better
fit-for-purpose than professionally produced, generic visualization applications. There is
also exciting scope for using locative media to annotate individual geographic visualization
with ephemeral things, personal memories and messages for friends, which are beyond the
remit of government agencies or commercial geospatial industry (Kwan, 2007).
1.5 The politics of visualization
The process of geographic visualization is also engendered because the objects are often
visually appealing in their own right. The aesthetics of well-designed cartographic maps or
4
However, the emergence of open-source cartography, as exemplified by the OpenStreetMap project, has
the potential to challenge the commercial dominance over geospatial data by developing a 'bottom-up'
capture infrastructure that is premised on a volunteerist philosophy.
5
Source: www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/media/news/2001/sept/masterchallenge.html.
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