The Newest Road to Fame and Fortune Is Mapping the Road

By Lee Gomes
The Wall Street Journal, B1
Monday, July 14th , 2003

You can taunt physicists or make fun of chemists, but don’t mess around with geographers. Just ask Barbra Streisand. Or Saddam Hussein.

The unstoppable star and the unlocatable dictator have each learned the hard way about the power of a new kind of computer-assisted geography that has been storming onto the technology scene, putting a spring into the collective step of the world’s underappreciated geographers.

Ms. Streisand made news in May when she sued a conservation-oriented Web site displaying thousands of sequential aerial photographs of the entire California coastline, linked together by computer. She complained that the photo taken above her Malibu estate was an invasion of her privacy.

Mr. Hussein saw much of his army decimated by geographically aware “smart” weapons, while 3D topographical animation chronicled the rout for the world’s television viewers.

Both episodes are examples of GIS, or “geographic information systems,” the PC-enabled smart maps that are doing for any number of fields what spreadsheets did long ago for numbers. These days, you can’t study migration patterns or predict a town’s water usage or reapportion a legislative district without sitting down at a terminal and practicing GIS.

The field has been around for years, but it got a huge PR boost during the Iraq war, which put it on the, ahem, map as far as the general population is concerned.

Global Positioning Satellites are the best known of the GIS tools, but they are just one part of this revolution in “spatial awareness.” Other technologies include lidar, an optical version of radar that allows low-flying airplanes to digitize the terrain beneath them. GIS software ties all these systems together, creating maps overlaid with any sort of data you have on hand.

During the 1980s and 1990s, some students of cartography began to look at the history of maps through the lens of postmodern criticism. They didn’t see the familiar chronicles of stout-hearted explorers. Rather, they began viewing maps as ruling-class tools designed for “reifying power, reinforcing the status quo, and freezing social interactions within charted lines,” as one writer put it.

Today, those critics would have less to complain about, as the new breed of GIS maps is turning those old cartographic power dynamics upside-down. Rather than celebrating colonialism, maps today are often created to stir up social change.

That evolution was clear throughout the displays last week at a San Diego conference sponsored by ESRI Inc., the biggest GIS software maker. Maps showed rare big-leaf mahogany trees in South America, endangered chimpanzees in West Africa and rush-hour traffic in Yakima, Wash. If you are a social problem, or are otherwise endangered, marginalized or dispossessed, someone is probably using GIS on a PC right now to map you.

So much is happening in GIS that Jerry Dobson, a University of Kansas professor who is president of the American Geographical Society, says that the tools of geographers are changing society today as much as the tools of physicists did at the time of the atomic bomb.

And so geography students are walking taller. At last week’s conference, Marson Klein, who teaches at American River College in Sacramento, Calif., was passing out “Geography Is Bad A—” stickers made by one of her students. After years of suffering jokes about memorizing state capitals, geographers ought to be forgiven if they are a bit intoxicated by the sudden air of respectability-especially in a country with such a famously map-challenged population.

Steven Dague and Paul Billock, who are now pursuing GIS graduate degrees at the University of Redlands near Los Angeles, laugh about the sexy, crime-fighting geographers suddenly in the movies and on TV.

In the film “K-Pax,” for example, someone hunting for a murderer, but having only a few scraps of information, asks a GIS computer to display every slaughterhouse near a river in the 505 area code. A map is instantly drawn and the crime all but solves itself. (In real life, of course, GIS, like everything else involving computers, is never that easy. But that’s another story.)

Mr. Dague’s work involves helping a local municipality use GIS to keep tabs on its sewer system. It may not be as glamorous as fighting crime, but it’s that rarity for many in technology these days: a job.

It’s hard to argue against improving information about social problems, but one hopes the new army of GIS warriors will guard against the siren songs of PCs that lure people into endless tinkering of data, past the point of useful analytical returns.

Nor should they forget that not all knowledge spews forth from the font of a microprocessor. The aforementioned traffic map of Yakima, for instance, showed a regular afternoon jam along South 40th Ave. One can hear the town’s residents complaining, “They needed a computer to tell them that?”

Article reproduced with permission from author.