The art is in the knowing...
I frequent used book stores and well-curated library book sales — I am talking to you Mill Valley. The heart knows what it wants and I am a sucker for maps, reference books and Roland Barthes.
A recent reader I picked up at Columbia University bookstore contains this gem by Barthes from his inaugural lecture at the College de France.
Barthes spoke not of developing a literary semiology or of extending knowledge but of forgetting, “I undertake to let myself be borne on by that force of any living life, forgetting.”
He later speaks of first order or first principle thinking. I imagine this as being confronted with second order thinking and tasked with forgetting the “myth” or obfuscation and distilling down to something real and singular—the first principle.
…he appropriated the Latin term for wisdom, sapient, giving it his own definition: “Sapientia: no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavor as possible.”
These thoughts were fresh in my mind at Geography 2050 when a colleague blurted out “…problem with geospatial analysis is GIS. GIS simply needs to get out of the way.”
Well he isn’t wrong. We often admire our tools to the detriment of where our gaze and skills are needed. Are we hesitating when we should be spicing things up? Geospatial conflates and refuses to identify rivalrous dynamics. Being all-in on sustainability and climate change while ignoring the subsidized fossil fuel industry. Imagining electric cars as a solution to pollution and the neglected transportation infrastructure while mining cobalt in the DNC locating the harms as far as possible from our self righteous piety to the auto industry.
I think we have a perception problem. In data science we toil away at problems but usually from the perspective of our frequentist or Bayesian brains. We don’t even know what is outside of our periphery. Location is indeed the missing element. You can align spatial knowledge to perspective. Not only what is directly in front of me but what about other questions and yes, perspectives.
There is a spatial awareness built into the application of a perspective. Perception is only what I know, I think, or I imagine.
When we build perspective the views of other objects matter.
Here is an example.
What comes first, the data or the story? The easy answer would be— the data. But hold on. I would argue it is the story. Driven by a data question we should begin with story. Only then, do we search for data. If data is missing, remember that missing data is normative. The fact that it remains missing or uncollected alerts us that we expected it to be there in the first place.
After all, the stories are in the spaces.
