SLIS Faculty News

"…research on the societal aspects of geographic information science and technology has maintained, and indeed intensified, its vitality." [Introduction]

SLIS faculty member Hamid Ekbia and colleague Nadine Schuurman, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada were Co-Guest Editors for a Special Issue of The Information Society (Volume 25, Issue 5, October 2009 - published by Taylor & Francis.) The title of the Special Issue is Geographies of Information Society. Excerpts from article abstracts by Dr. Ekbia are included below:

1) Hamid R. Ekbia; Nadine Schuurman (Guest Editors): Introduction to the Special Issue on Geographies of Information Society

In 1997 the National Science Foundation launched the Varenius Project with the aim of advancing geographic information science (Goodchild et al., 1999). Varenius incorporated three components: computational, cognitive, and societal. In a review paper titled “Geographies of Information Society,” Sheppard et al. (1999) explored the third (societal) component with the aim of introducing the key research initiatives and also to set “a benchmark by which to assess, a few years from now, the specific contributions of the Varenius project to that increasingly vital research area” (p. 798). This special issue revisits that benchmark and initiative 10 years after its publication. Judging by the diversity of topics and the scope of literature of the last few years, one could safely argue that research on the societal aspects of geographic information science and technology has maintained, and indeed intensified, its vitality.

2) Hamid R. Ekbia; Tom P. Evans. Regimes of Information: Land Use, Management, and Policy (pages 328-343) — [note: Tom Evans is with the Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington]

Socio-ecological systems are inherently complex. One source of complexity is the uncertainties involved in the decisions and behaviors of human actors that determine how landholdings are managed. Land management decisions are often influenced by diverse factors and considerations. Particularly significant among these are (1) the sources of information land managers utilize with their perceived quality, reliability, and accessibility; (2) the social networks of the decision maker with their pertinent history, appeal, and authority; and (3) the interests, resources, and prior experiences of individual decision makers. This degree of diversity and uncertainty gives rise to behaviors that cannot be entirely explained in terms of rational choice or any variation thereof. How can we best understand and explain these behaviors, as spatial but also social and informational, in land-use decision making? This article presents the case of land management in a county in the Midwest United States to develop a conceptual model of decision making of environmental resources in socio-ecological systems. This model conceives environmental decision making as a multivalent process that operates on the basis of different “regimes of worth,” incorporating not only the economic value of outcomes but also other personal and social values within different worlds or polities. These worlds, in turn, incorporate particular “regimes of information” based on particular higher principles that they uphold. The article examines these regimes, provides examples of what constitutes information in each regimes, and explores the management and policy implications of this framework.

3) Hamid R. Ekbia. An Interview With Eric Sheppard: Uneven Spatialities - The Material, Virtual, and Cognitive (pages 364-369) — [note: Boston, Massachusetts, USA, April 16, 2008]

Eric Sheppard is a prominent geographer at the University of Minnesota. As represented in his numerous books—The Capitalist Space Economy (with T. J. Barnes), A Companion to Economic Geography (with T. J. Barnes), A World of Difference (with Philip W. Porter), Scale and Geographic Inquiry (with R. B. McMaster), Reading Economic Geography and Politics and Practice in Economic Geography (with T. J. Barnes, J. Peck, and A. Tickell), Contesting Neoliberalism (with H. Leitner and J. Peck)— and other writings, he has a broad range of interests that span traditional dichotomies such as physical-human or quantitative-critical geography. In the late 1990s, after catalyzing collaboration between social theorists and geographic information systems (GIS) scholars around “GIS and society,” as part of the Varenius Project, Sheppard led the APEX initiative to explore the societal aspects of geographic information science. The outcome of that initiative was a paper (Sheppard et al., 1999), the title of which inspired the title of this special issue. As mentioned in the introduction essay of this special issue, that paper was intended to serve as a benchmark for evaluating the current state of research.

In this interview, I inquire into Sheppard’s perspective on the development of the field a decade after Varenius, as well as more recent developments that were unforeseeable at that point in time—e.g., public contribution to the practices of geographers that has come to be known as neogeography. We also discuss some of the topics that have theoretical significance for geography, information studies, and social science in general.

Posted Oct. 22, 2009