Abstract:
A surprising trend in recent research in geographical information science (GISci) is a growing body of work attempting to combine various types of ‘critical’ human geography with methods and techniques reliant on geographic information systems (GIS). Such work implicitly received early endorsement from Mike Goodchild in an interview with Nadine Schuurman in 1998, when he said, ‘If I were advising a new graduate student on how to succeed in geography these days, my advice would be to try to straddle that fence’ (Schuurman, 1999a: 4), the ‘fence’ in question being that between human geography and GIS. Schuurman’s own work is perhaps the foremost example of work that successfully straddles the fence, and was further endorsed by Goodchild’s foreword to the publication of Schuurman’s thesis as a monograph by the journal Cartographica (Schuurman, 1999b). ...