Geographic Information Systems as Media and Society: Does GIS Wear a White or Black Stetson?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been much debate over the last 10 to 15 years focused on whether GIS are objective neutral tools or serve as agents of corporate or state interests. Despite the arguments, there has been no clear and decisive outcome, leading some scholars to seek different ways of contextualizing GIS development, use, and research; Daniel Sui and Michael Goodchild are two such scholars. They claim that GIS are media and that, therefore, investigations of GIS can be informed by Marshall McLuhan's theories of media. Their findings are compelling at the macro scale. This paper builds upon their work by applying this concept at the micro level in two case studies: one in India and the other in Minneapolis. The results of this analysis support those of Sui and Goodchild. Therefore, using the GIS as media tetrad (a) underscores the growing importance of GIS as modern forms of communication or media; (b) illustrates to developers, users, and critics of GIS that GIS-based decisions can and do affect specific people in both positive and negative ways; and (c) reminds society and the GIS community of the “reversals” that are possible from unquestioned adoption of GIS and GIS technologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".