Wikipedia lets the geo-tagging in

Once I was already writing about geo-socializing as telling your location for everyone, for a reason of creating like virtual community out of internet users with similar interests. Anyways I still would believe that "Man is by nature a social animal" as Aristotel stated.

But maybe it isn't just that anymore? Maybe now we really are approaching or comming into a cyborg stage? Forget the interests, connect to new broadband and catch the feeling of being important an known! Tell the whole world about yourself. 

Now one can do that even through a WIKI!

Have you ever wondered if there are Wikipedia articles about things near you? Well, wonder no more! Today, we present the GeoData extension for MediaWiki, which now provides a structured way to store geo-coordinates for articles, as well as an API to make queries around this information (wiki blog).

 Yes, it is experimental, and it's mostly just for seeing near-by articles. But would such aim remain in this open sphere? I wonder how will this function emerge or 'mutate'  when people will start playing with coordinates and geo-tagging in this Encyclopedia.

overlay as a core GIS concept is not so strong in humanities GIS

The overlay of different information was one of the very first concepts of GIS. Like the core function, the corner stone, the first brick <...> that engaged the development of GIS on which all GIS users stand now. And it remains one of the most popularly used method for data analysis.

This concept is explained in every basic GIS cookbook, more objectively I haven't encountered any book that would not talk about overlay presenting it as a concept, technique, procedure, method. It's always presented in a very simple way by visualizing or explaining boolean operations. What else could be said? Apart from scale, resolution, data uncertainty problematics probably not much more, until we look into the GIS for Humanities (as Standford coins) and GIS concepts start to sway..

GIS concept suitability for social or humanitarian research is well presented in a book "The Spatial Humanities" writen by geographers, historians at the same time having the informatics education. The introduction starts with pointing that "the power of GIS for the humanities lies in its ability to integrate information from a a common location, regardless of format, and to visualize the results in combinations of transparent layers on a map of the geography share by data" and sadly adding that the existing GIS software was created for environmental planning questions and now it "requires humanists fit their questions, data, and methods to the rigid parameters of the software"  which makes it challenging in the extreme fussing GIS with humanities. 

I have personally experienced that while working on cultural areas visualization. And nothing else was as hard as to find a way to visualize just because the concepts themselves were not suitable for my task!

is there a space in cyberspace for geography ?

Searching and searching for everything and anything we still haven't found and if already found then searching how to reconstruct and reinvent. Like the new urban image the WIFI-scape or Urban terrain as the Norvegian YOUrban group calls it.

That's who we want to be - the Inventors.

LightPainting WIFI from YOUrban group (http://yourban.no/)

And so we need more 'space' for Inventions, and so we expand it! Expanding spaces, realities, cognition.. 

Does this expansion affect us as individuals, as society? Does it also expands our research raising new questions, opening new fields or even forming new sub-sciences or indeed it just let us create new terms and subjects to manipulate about the the same things like spaces?

Such questions grew up after reading an article about the Geography and Cyberspace by M. Graham. Indeed an interesting and easy to go article well presenting the background or the 'hi-/-story' of a cyberspace. What the most interests me is the relation of cyberspace with geography. As it's clear geographers don't seem interested in this topic (no big research done) at all, but as the author tries to prove they should be, because the cyberspace as itself is a sort of space and therefore it should also be reviewed from geographical perspective.

At that point it seems for me that the article is written in as much serious as with a slight ironic mood

digging out the edge of the hill

Recently I had a possibility and time to look practically at the boundary questions, the ones I always like to philosophy about...  I got a simple task: to calculate the volume of a small heap (much smaller then hill) having an image with elevation values (DEM) and so I just needed to automatize and to simplify the steps that were already determined by others, mostly some routine work with ArcGIS (ESRI) tools, so just a bit of patience learning to geoprocess with python.

Digging the boundary  of a heap

But before starting the calculations I had to find out where is this heap and where it's not anymore. I had to draw clear boundaries in order to start some calculations at all. Apparently there was no tool for a heap determination founded where I work, till now all was done manually, by digitizing: zooming out and in, searching out that boundary where the heap starts or ends and going around.
The human brain is great, fast recognizing the pattern it searches for. Maybe recognizing just approximately, but nicely and unconsciously ignoring all other: small depressions, pikes or elevation model noise due to calculated heights of some bushes or some artificial constructions  or photogrametrical noise...
But the problem is that when having a huge images with a great resolution it takes hours and hours to load it and while zooming back and forward trying to draw a line in order to determine "exactly" where the heap starts or/and ends. Besides, when you start looking at a greater and greater resolution the picture of  all the image disappears and for our brain it becomes hard to process just various tones of colours in pixels in front. So, I needed to find how to automatize this first step in order I could work on the calculations. And just looking rather at a simple task or indeed at the DEM (it's prety nice!),  I fastly ran into a dark dark forest searching the way how to determine where this heap finishes or starts in order to be able to define it and build the script.

examining boundaries with example of archeological culture

Do exist cultural boundaries? Do cultures bound itself or just scientists draw it?

Social scientists are so much focused on the concept of boundaries, that there is no question it exists. It's long time it's proved people always have some concept of 'us' and of 'them' in their mind, it means socially they make distinctions. And so social scientists are interested in social phenomenas emerging due to such differentiation. There is a whole study of boundaries done. But the boundary concept is not full - it's just social boundary concept, concept mostly defined by self identification which might define or identify ethnos, but not whole ethnical culture and NEITHER archaeological culture. Archeologists define archeological cultures, which may be ethincal cultures, cultures identifying themselves as one, but it is never a rule. All if far from geographical boundaries as well as the culture and it's spread is understood differentially. Geographers try to unite all possible aspects, drawing and presenting the boundaries of cultural regions.

Let's look at some archaeological boundary of Lithuanian archaeological culture drawn.

media socialization with crowdsourcing and GIS

The idea of media transforming socially and spatially is flowing for the past decade already. In 2001 great GIS scientists M. Goodchild and D. Sui has published a short remark "GIS as media?" on International Journal of GIS. Over-viewing the latest developments in GIS then, authors have felt the need for fresh conceptualizations for what GIS actually is and will become in the near future. Observing growing relationship between GIS and society authors had proposed that new concept: GIS as new media.

Some time before I was scribbling in my post about media and geography, how journalists 'found' geography. But it was just a quote from Economist, not knowing about this concept existing between scientists. So, let's have look further.

GIS for Everyone from Transmap

boundary cognition from satellite images

Satellites are swapping around the Earth since 1957 - the launch of Sputnik. Already having a couple of thousands, the number is fast growing nowadays.


Just during the last week reading my rss, I got to know that China has launched Yaogan XII, Vietnam is buying Japanese satellites, Turkish  recently launched satellite RASAT is already transmitting images, Russia is about to launch 4 more GLONASS satellites to existing 28 ones, and so on an so on.. Europe, yes Europe as well, finally launched 2 GALILEO satellites last month. Future, talking about the number of satellites, is amazing..
I am glad we still can see the sky over them.