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La Cartoteca points to two GIS manuals from the Pragmatic Programmers: Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers: Adding “Where” to your Web Applications, which came out last October; and the forthcoming (an online beta is available) Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools, by Gary E. Sherman.
Jeff Thurston reviews Analyzing Urban Poverty: GIS for the Developing World, by Rosario Giusti de P?rez and Ram?n P?rez and published by ESRI Press.
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Tags: Books
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Imaginary Coordinates, a controversial exhibition that juxtaposed contemporary Israeli and Palestinian art with antique maps of the region, has been closed prematurely by the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, which had been putting on the show as part of Chicago’s Festival of Maps. It had originally been scheduled through September, and has already been closed and reopened to change the lighting and the language of some labels. Critics charged that parts of the show were anti-Israel, which put the Jewish museum in an uncomfortable spot.
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The problem with the ABC News article entitled “Will GPS Make Us Dumb?” is that it makes a false juxtaposition: map-reading skills with navigation devices’ turn-by-turn directions:
“One effect of an increased dependence on GPS will be that peoples’ ability to read maps will further decay,” [Middlebury College geography professor Anne] Knowles said. “Americans are generally poor map readers. Some cannot read maps at all because it’s not part of our education.
“But what will grow, instead, will be better geographic imagination and awareness. People will see the connections between places more clearly — not quite as accurately — but will better imagine how to get from one place to another because of this technology.”
People have been giving one another directions — verbally, written out turn-by-turn, or in crude hand-drawn maps — for approximately forever; a GPS navigation system is not exactly a new paradigm. It simply allows for geographical awareness without cartographic literacy — in that sense, the analogy with spell-checking is apt, but not in the way that the article’s author expects: spell-checking doesn’t make you less literate; it removes the requirement for you to be more literate. Ditto here: GPS isn’t making us dumb; it’s making it easier for us to stay dumb.
Via GeoCarta.
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Tags: GPS
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- MetaCarta has a blog. “As you can tell by its name, this is a corporate sponsored blog. That said, the goal of the blog is to open up discussion on a wide-range of geography-related issues — not to be a PR mouthpiece for MetaCarta.” Via GeoCarta.
- Y! Geo is a new blog about Yahoo’s geo technologies; it replaces the mapping side of the now-defunct Yahoo Local and Maps blog. (Foolish to nuke the previous blog and all its archives, though.) See also James.
- Her Majesty of Maps abdicates.
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Tags: Blog
