Check out my xciting pages for Making Maps: A
Visual Guide to Map Design for Geographic Information Systems
by John Krygier and Denis Wood (Guilford Publications, 2005).
Also peek out the page for a series of sessions at the March 2006 meeting of the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Chicago called, alluringly, Experiments with Territories: Post Cartographic Map Design.
My research focuses on the relations between geography and geographic
methods - mapping, visualization, and GIS. Particular research projects
are described below...
The last decade has seen explosive growth in the development and use of
geographic information systems (GIS). As GIS develops and plays an
expanding role in the way we manage, analyze, and understand spatial
phenomena, the societal consequences of GIS come to the forefront of
research in GIS. Research on GIS and Society is important not only as a
means of understanding the impact of existing technologies on society,
but in also imagining and engineering new technologies, for scientists,
researchers, and the diverse public who increasingly have access to GIS
and its analytical capabilities. A developing area of research in GIS
is what is being called Participatory GIS.
An Overview of Participatory GIS,
Community Mapping, and GIS was prepared for a presentation at Middlebury
College in January of 2004 and at Ohio Wesleyan in March of 2004. This overview
is being expanded into a presentation entitled Mapping Campus-Community Collaborations:
Integrating Partnerships, Service-Learning, Mapping and GIS for the 2004
National Meeting of the National Institute for
Technology and Liberal Education, called Voyage to Ithaka: Technology,
Collaboration, and the Future of Liberal Arts Colleges November 7-9,
2004. This presentation in turn is being expanded into a book chapter in the
book GIS for Learning and Engagement in Diverse Disciplines edited
by Diana Sinton and Jenni Lund.
Since 2000 my Ohio Wesleyan GIS course (Geog 355) has been working with Delaware (OH) community members and city planners in a collaborative project focused on developing a recreational trails plan for the City of Delaware. Basic details and images are included in a project overview: Delaware Ohio Recreational Trails GIS Collaboration.
Tim Hawthorne (an Ohio Wesleyan student) and I presented a paper entitled Mapping Linear Geographies at the 2003 AAG meeting in New Orleans. This paper was expanded into a paper entitled Mapping Ambivalence: Participatory GIS Methods, Qualitative Data, and Rails-to-Trails Development in a Changing Human Landscape. This research grew out of the Delaware Ohio Recreational Trails GIS Collaboration. LaDonna Knigge, Trevor Harris and I also organized a panel discussion for AAG 2003 entitled GIS and Society: Past, Present, and Future.
In May of 2004 I hosted a conference at Ohio Wesleyan called Mapping Campus-Community Collaborations: Integrating Partnerships, Service-Learning, Mapping and GIS. This conference was inspired by our work in Delaware, and funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation via the Midwest Instructional Technology Center. The conference brought together teams of faculty, students, and community members with experts in mapping, GIS, service-learning, and community partnerships. Teams attended from Ohio Wesleyan, Otterbein, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Carleton, Wooster, Grinnel, Monmouth, Macalester, and Ripon Colleges. Each campus-community team arrived with a project idea that met an identified community need. Projects were iteratively developed over the course of the conference, resulting in a workable plan for action. Each project uses mapping and GIS, among other tools, to solve civic problems of shared concern to colleges and communities. Project updates will be added to the Mapping Campus-Community Collaborations WWW pages in the future.
An overview of Participatory GIS in the Liberal Arts will be presented at a meeting entitled Technology, Collaboration, and the Future of Liberal Arts Colleges in Chicago on November 7-9, 2004. A book chapter based on this presentation will appear in a book entitled GIS for Learning and Engagement in Diverse Disciplines edited by Diana Sinton.
From some of my older research on PGIS: Participatory GIS (PGIS) have been conceived broadly as an integrative and inclusive process-based set of methods and technologies amenable to public participation, multiple viewpoints, and diverse forms of information. A praxis or theorized practice of PGIS consists of an explicit awareness of the concepts and theories of information, its representation, of people, social relations, power, and how these shape and are shaped by socially-infused technologies such as PGIS. Simultaneously, such awareness must be brought to bear on real applications used by real people. A focus on only the practical (technical, software, hardware) or the conceptual (social, information, or cognitive theories) may limit the development of actual PPGIS and PPVis technologies in ways that substantially benefit real people in real communities. My past work on PGIS is documented here as Public Participation Visualization: Conceptual and Applied Research Issues. A summary of this work was published as A Praxis of Public Participation GIS and Visualization (published in 2002 in W. Craig, T. Harris, and D. Weiner, eds. Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems. New York: Taylor and Francis. pp. 330-345).
Geographic "visualization" is conceptualized as an expansion of the more traditional communication-oriented approach to cartography. Mapping | Geography | Landscape is an excerpt from my dissertation research which melds geographic visualization with research on landscape geography. An early theoretical and applied examination of visualization focused on the role of time in representing geographic information. Animation and the Role of Map Design in Scientific Visualization (published in 1992 in Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 19:4. pp. 201-214) grew out of a seminar at Penn State and was co-authored with David DiBiase, Alan MacEachren, and Catherine Reeves. Another examination of visualization in the context of scientific research explored methods for the visual representation of multivariate data, and was published as Multivariate Display of Geographic Data: Applications for Earth System Sciences (published in 1994 in A. MacEachren and D. Taylor, eds. Visualization in Modern Cartography. New York: Pergamon Press. pp. 287-312). Visual representations are not the only means of representing geographic information, and I have examined the role of sound in a paper called Sound and Geographic Visualization.
It is important to consider that visualization has both a history and a social context. A session at the 2000 Association of American Geographers meeting in Pittsburgh PA is entitled Visualization: Human, Social, and Historical Issues with Denis Cosgrove as a discussant and papers by Nik Huffman, Matthew Kuehl, Matt McCourt, and John Krygier. Envisioning the American West examines the manner in which text, images, maps, and panoramic views served as a means of representing the American West in the mid-19th century. As already noted, my dissertation research, Geography, Visualization, and Landscape, discusses the historical and social context of visualization, and develops and extended application of visualization in the realm of landscape and historical geography.
Recent research links visualization to GIS and the WWW - what I am calling Public Participation Visualization.
A draft paper entitled Cartographic Multimedia and Praxis in Human Geography and the Social Sciences was revised as a chapter in the book Multimedia Cartography edited by William Cartwright, Michael Peterson, and Georg Gartner published in 1999.
If blasphemy is the finest complement, then see The Science of Success in Cartography.
What are "marginal" landscapes and geographies? In order to examine such landscapes and the people who inhabit them I examined the story of Project Ketch in Pennsylvania. Ketch entailed a plan to explode a 24kt atomic bomb under central Pennsylvania to create a cavern for natural gas storage. Ketch was part of the Atomic Energy Commission's Project Plowshare which sought "peaceful" applications of atomic explosions. The paper on Ketch, Plowshare, and its relation to landscape, is entitled Spectacular Ideas in Marginal Landscapes: Project Plowshare in Pennsylvania. I am interested in the different ways marginality - in landscapes and humans - is constructed and utilized. A collection of images of "Marginal" Pennsylvania illustrate some curious "marginal landscapes." Another research interest concerns marginalized places and groups and the WWW. A paper entitled Community Networks, the Internet, and WWW in "Marginal" Places: The Case of Clinton County, Pennsylvania was presented at the 1997 Association of American Geographers meeting. The relations between marginal places and community networks, and in particular their role to mapping, GIS, and visualization are explored in an ongoing project called Public Participation Visualization: Conceptual and Applied Research Issues, the title of a presentation and poster presented at the 1998 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting.
Project
Peale: comprises an ongoing project to document, map,
interpret, and memorialize a ghost company town in Pennsylvania. Contributions
to the site have been made by people around the US and Europe.
The role of design in cartography and visualization seems to have diminished at the very moment it is needed most - during the explosion of computer-aided visualization and geographic information systems. The relationship between "art" and "science" in the context of cartography is critiqued in a paper called Cartography as an Art and a Science published in 1995 in the Cartographic Journal. This paper attempts to deal with some of the problematical ways cartographic design is thought about by cartographers. An examination of the relations between Geography and Cartographic Design is based on some early ideas from my dissertation research, and was published in C. Wood and C.P. Keller (eds.) Cartographic Design: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996). If I can get my rear in gear, a book tentatively titled Making Maps on map design might eventually get published.
Research on Project Ketch and Project Plowshare, Spectacular Ideas in Marginal Landscapes: Project Plowshare in Pennsylvania examines the multiple and often contradictory understandings and representations of natural and human environments that emerge in environmental conflicts. Envisioning the American West examines the manner in which text, images, maps, and panoramic views served as a means of representing the environment of the American West in the mid-19th century. Both of these research projects reflect my interest in the discourses (visual, textual, spoken, in historical and contemporary settings) which underpin the manner in which we understand and act upon the environment.
A short essay entitled Place Taste and the Taste of Place documents Centralia Pennsylvania in text and images. Centralia is a coal mining town that has been the victim of a mine fire for more than 30 years.
The role of visualization, hypermedia, the WWW, and multimedia in education is of increasing importance to geographers. A paper about the use of multimedia in geography and earth science education, entitled Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Multimedia Resources for Geography and Earth Science Education, describes the process of conceptualizing, designing, and producing a series of geography and earth science teaching resources. I have also made contributions to the Virtual Geography Department, an attempt to consolidate and coordinate geographic education materials on the WWW. The application of Information Literacy concepts to my Power of Maps and GIS course (Geography 222) is documented in a chapter by Deborah Carter Peoples (Ohio Wesleyan Science Librarian) and myself, called Geographic Information Literacy in a book edited by Michael Peterson, Maps and the Internet.
The WWW provides an interesting challenge to cartographers and information designers. Some of these challenges are cultural and social: a new research interest concerns marginalized places and groups and the WWW. A paper entitled Community Networks, the Internet, and WWW in "Marginal" Places: The Case of Clinton County, Pennsylvania was presented at the 1997 Association of American Geographers meeting, and the development of a series of issues which I am calling Public Participation Visualization. I have a simple Visual Guide to HTML (I am sure something like this exists somewhere but I couldn't find it). Jeremy Crampton (George Mason) and myself provided the general design and content for the web site for a new human geography textbook by Paul Knox and Sallie Marsden entitled Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context.
E-mail: jbkrygier@owu.edu