In “The Potential of Spatial Humanities,” GIS is shown to be a very powerful tool that is able to visualize data within a spatial context. It is able to very accurately create a statistical analysis from quantitative data in ways that humanistic research methods cannot. However, by doing this, GIS falls behind in representing the world as more than just mapped locations. As stated in the reading, “It assumes that objects exist independently of the observer.” The world that GIS maps does not represent the community community of the location it is mapping, making it much less desirable for humanistic researchers.

This reading reminds me of an article I read (https://design.google/library/exploring-color-google-maps/) about a Google Maps project to minimize its color palette. A large struggle of theirs was found in trying to maintain the identity of the objects they were mapping even while making more objets look like one another because regions in certain places don’t look the same everywhere and have different emotional values to different communities.