This lab helped me to understand Sieber’s argument for a second iteration of GIS in the world of geography. I can understand her reservations towards GIS because of the ways that it can be used by the government for survelliance and other projects that are consistant with geography’s darker past. However, this lab also opened me to thinking about how even simple graphs or maps of rent data could be vastly useful for city planning. When modeling any data that uses direction as one of the parameters, a spatial representation in the form of a map or a polar plot is the best option. I can see how the same data could also be used to model different factors like the percent Latinx population in a census tract against the median gross rent. This kind of analysis could have many beneficial uses. I also want to acknowledge though that the same data can be used for disgenuious reasons, but perhaps that is the nature of Open Source. While there may be many people doing right with the data we have, there will always be those that will use it for different reasons and that is just a trade off that comes with open source.

St. Martin and Wing discuss in their article an illusion of a “GIS”, “Non-GIS” bianary within geography that divides the field. I am under the impression that no such bianary should exist in the field of geography. In their analysis they discussed the issue of GIS as universalist. This issue can be tackled by combining humanistic geographic study with the practice of GIS. The geographer’s job as the interpretor of data is to look for nuances in the problem and locate the areas that GIS anaylsis may not be able to tell the whole story. For this reason, geographic theory remains integral to GIS study as it functions in field of geography. Likewise, humanist geographers can strengthen their analysis through the use of GIS. Quantitative data that can be modeled in a graph or map provides a different visualization of a problem that can appeal to different observers and can reinforce arguments.

links to articles: https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/carto.42.3.235 https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/T6U8-171M-452W-516R