Bodenhamer neatly summarizes the shortcomings, advantages, and history of the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in humanities work. In doing so, he touches on the work of Foucault, Certau, and Said, and the interaction between physical space and cultural space. These same ideas are eloquently analyzed by Marc Augé in his works Non-places and The Future.

In Non-places, Augé – a “classically trained” anthropologist, of the particularly French variety – begins with a summary of the state of the field of anthropology, which at the time of writing was less than satisfactory. Our quickly modernizing world was leaving fewer and fewer societies and cultures untouched. This was destroying the long-held conception that a society could be defined as an isolated unit, without physical or cultural contamination by other societies. Cultures and communities could no longer be defined by their physical geography. And, too, as information and people began to transfer between cultures more easily and rapidly than ever, so did the touchstones of their cultural spaces begin to break down.

Bodenhamer neatly touches on a few of the ideas at play in this analysis. First, that geographic space can affect the way people think:

conceptions of natural geography played a central role in how American imagined themselves from the earliest settlements to the last decades of the twentieth century.

Second, that imagined space is as important, if not more so, than the physical:

Although the Annales school, most notably Ferdinand Braudel, its chief practitioner, had urged scholars since the 1930S to pay attention to geohistoire, the linkage of geography and history, most humanists paid much less attention to the environmental context for human behavior and much more to the actions, associations, and attitudes that made a space particular, in short, a place. These places could even exist in imagined space or in memory.

And in doing so, offers one of the strongest critiques against the use of GIS in humanistic work: it cannot accomodate that which does not have a physical coordinate. By reducing our analyses to that which can be represented on a “real” map, we are once again putting our feet back into the pool of Comte’s positivism. As “real” as our analysis then becomes, as far does it miss the point – human studies require us to analyze the unreal, the imagined, the cultural.

In The Future, Augé describes how different conceptions of past and future interfere with thought about the present. If we view the future as a continuation of the past, then we are stuck within the frame of tradition. If we view the future as the creation of something new, then we are firmly in the state of freedom. These two are at odds, and push our actions in the present in different directions: towards conservatism, or exploration; towards safety, or risk. Ever at odds.

Bodenhamer seems to have read these texts, for he advocates the creation of “deep maps” that take advantage of all of our technological and human abilities to create “virtual worlds embodying what we know about space and place.” Only by escaping the limitations of GIS – Cartesian coordinates, government-provided datasets – can we accurately represent human connection to worlds both real and imagined.

My point of view is certainly that of Bodenhamer. GIS are useful for a variety of tasks, but for conveying the depth of the human experience we will need more than a finite number of layers on top of a supposedly “real” representation of our world. .