7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
GIS: A Short Introduction, August 9, 2005
This review is from: GIS: A Short Introduction (Short Introductions to Geography) (Paperback)
I started my foray into the book by reading the back cover blurb. A seemingly undelivered promise comes up immediately. The back cover states "A final chapter provides an inventory of tools and information related to GIS, covering web-based resources, current texts, and theoretical approaches and critiques of GIS". I was not able to find such a chapter and the accompanying website had only colour figures when I checked.
Next, I turned to the font cover and focused my attention to the graphic. Usually a graphic or sign is intended to convey some meaning, information, or message (semiotics). The graphic on the book's font cover is a blurred collage of seemingly unrelated images. The pasting together of the images shows clearly at the middle of the cover where there is an overlapping image join. In a postmodern world, image is paramount and the font and back cover misses begin to cast doubts about the attention to detail that one can expect in the book's contents. Thumbing through the book and finding little by way of intricate arguments, I decided to gave chapter 2 a detailed read. Here is what I found:
p.24
"Mark Monmonier's book 'How to lie with maps', had tackled precisely the same issues, illustrating that maps are a means to exercise and enforce relations of power".
- The use of this reference to illustrate power relations is weak. 'How to lie with maps' is an excellent book that focuses on documenting how maps can and has been modified to communicate diverse and competing messages, and stops short of discussing power relations in detail. The lesser known book - Denis Wood's (The power of maps) - would have been a more convincing choice.
p.27
Figure 2.1 gives the impression that the time order of occurence of the paradigms are social constructivism, positivism, and realism. That implicit time order may not be correct. Also, positivism, realism, etc are referred to as epistemologies (this is the source of much confusion in the GIS ontology literature); these are philosophical paradigms that differ on ontologies, epistemologies and praxis.
p.28
"... conduct analysis in an attempt to prove the null hypothesis false"
- This statement misrepresents the logic of hypothesis testing. A hypothesis is never proved - i.e. we cannot determine its essential truth. The best we can do is accumulate enough evidence that would either confirm or reject the null hypothesis.
p.29
"Moreover, very little GIS research is conducted under the assumption of positivist scientific method"
- There seems to be no recognition about the differences between fundamental/theoretical and applied research. In fundamental/theoretical GIS research, positivist methods are used sparingly. However, in applied GIS research, positivist methods are used extensively. Even exploratory data analysis can be taken as a positivist approach as its purpose is in pattern analysis and hypothesis formation.
p.34
Figure 2.3 shows all the points as (X,Y)
- Using (X1,Y1) and (X2,Y2) to clearly distinguish the data points would be an improvement. As the figure stands, all the points are mathematically the same, which conveys the wrong message. Relate this to p.137 where figure 5.1 is referred to as a histogram when it is more of a bar graph.
I would hesitate to recommend this book to readers exploring GIS for the first time. It may be suitable for seasoned GIS readers who would better able to nagivate the oversights that appear subtly in the paths across the 5 chapters.
There are some good aspects of the book especially in the philosophical foundations of GIScience, but the technical and conceptual oversights cast a dark shadow over them. Any of the following books would do a more systematic job at informing the uninitiated GIS user and learner:
DeMers, Michael N. 2003. Fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems, 2nd. ed. (update edition), John Wiley and Sons, Toronto.
Ian Heywood, Sarah Cornelius, and Steve Carver (2002), An introduction to geographical information systems, New York: Prentice Hall, 2002
C.P. Lo and Albert K.W. Yeung, (2002), Concepts and techniques of geographic information systems, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent book on the intellectual territory of GIS, March 25, 2004
This review is from: GIS: A Short Introduction (Short Introductions to Geography) (Paperback)
I like this book and I think it needs to be widely read. But, I believe that the title is misleading. There are many people who will read the title and think it is a simple or light introduction to GIS. It may be short, but it is neither simple nor light reading. Make no mistake, this is not "GIS for Dummies."
This book is a highly intelligent discussion of some of the philosophical underpinnings of GIS. For anyone interested in or concerned about the social consequences of using geographic technologies to inform decisions that affect public welfare, this book is the place to start, whether they come from the GIS or human geography community.
Chapter 1 does a fine job of introducing the context and content of GIS. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the epistemology and ontologies of GIS. While this is an excellent overview of these topics, it is not for everyone. There are many in the GIS community who will not want to be introduced to the ontologies of space, no matter how important some of us feel it is. Chapter 3 introduces some of the problems with geographic and is one of the best discussion of GIS that I have read. Chapter 4 introduces the reader to what I feel is the heart of GIS, spatial analysis. This is an area that deserves several hundred pages, but the coverage here appropriate given the scope of the book. The last chapter discusses training and research. I would have preferred more emphasis on spatial literacy, but it does make the point of the importance of geographic science education. Software training is simply an inadequate basis for intelligent use of GIS.
I recommend this book for all students in GIS degree programs. Also, it is an excellent beginning for those in the field of human geography or social theory who are interested in the applications of this new technology. Of course, anyone teaching GIS needs to have a clear understanding of the concepts presented in this book.
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