This essay seems to be somewhat misguided. Most of the essay is spent lamenting the fact that modern GIS software cannot adequately capture the intricacies of the information of value to humanists and that its Western, Euclidean reliance upon the gridded map is at odds with less geometric ideas of space, like those of Native Americans. This is not surprising. GIS is a tool developed, as the paper states, for climate, hydrology, and topology - all fields which are chiefly concerned with numbers.

Despite what I saw as a misplaced complaint about GIS at the beginning, the paper does have some interesting points. One notable part of the essay echoed Drucker’s comments on visualiztion. Bodenhamer writes that GIS “assume[s] an objective reality”, that it purports to display an image of the information in question in a way that is indisputable. For data like elevations and temperatures, this is a very reasonable assumption. However, for data in the humanities that necessarily require interpretation, a GIS-style visualization might present only one interpretation of the underlying information. Bodenhamer says that when humanists use GIS without considering this, they “run the risk of portraying the world uncritically, this time with a veneer of legitimacy that is more difficult to detect”. The GIS format can not only bias the audience’s opinions, but also make the presented interpretation seem more correct which is likely not a desired effect.

Bodenhamer’s best topic in the essay was “how do we as humanists make GIS do what it was not intended to do, namely, represent the world as culture and not simply mapped locations?”. This question acknowledges all of GIS’s flaws listed earlier in the essay and asks how to work around them. This is the important part of the paper - not the problems with GIS, but the proposed solution. Bodenhamer’s solution of the deep map is an interesing one. It reminds me a lot of Vannevar Bush’s memex: a multilayered linked set of documents that contribute to an idea. However the deep map sounds like a map covered in letters and photographs and other documents, so it might be better to forgo the map altogether and just have collection of the documents indexed by location.