A Beast in the Field: The Google Maps Mashup as GIS/2

TLDR

GIS has become a powerful tool across many disciplines, prompting scholarship that questioned its nature and led to models of GIS/2, an amalgam of GIS power and grassroots democratic activity. The article finds existing GIS/2 models to be vapourware, and argues that the Google Maps mashup—created by two Austin 20‑somethings—represents the most progressive real‑world candidate for GIS/2, though still not fully mature.

Abstract

Over the last decade or more, geographic information systems (GIS) have proved themselves nimble and potent tools in myriad academic, civic, and political disciplines. A body of scholarship followed GIS on its rise to wider acceptance and adoption, however, that questioned its nature and the way its power was wielded. This scholarship ultimately produced various models for “GIS/2,” an amalgam of GIS's power and the grassroots democratic activity that might have been fostered by it but largely was not. This article revisits going models of GIS/2 and finds them to be so much vapourware compared to recent developments in online geospatial applications. The article argues that for all of the well-intentioned effort put into GIS/2 theory, the most progressive real-world candidate for GIS/2 has been produced only recently, by another rare combination indeed: two Austin, Texas, 20-somethings and the online search monolith Google. The Google Maps mashup, a very twenty-first-century beast born of code from disparate Web applications, exhibits great potential to be a real live GIS/2. Moreover, there is one mashup in particular that, while perhaps not quite mature enough to realistically match 15 years of GIS/2 scholarship, is still possibly the finest working example yet of the ideas and concepts posited therein.