In addition, Wolfgang Moschek and Alexander von Lünen have engaged GIS as a means to semiotically track and interpret the ruins of limes, ancient Roman border fortifications located in Britain, as signs of a cultural mentality inscribed on the landscape to delineate perceived “civilized” and “barbaric” spaces.40 Von Lünen argues that while positivists interpret such sources as open windows into the past, postmodernists perceive them as fences obstructing vision.41 Modeling semiotic data in GIS resembles the early stages of tracking, through which a postmodern detective (fictional or actual) identifies and interprets clues to understand how their sources speak.42 Once clues are assembled and parsed, GIS is engaged—not as a cartographical tool but rather as the intuitive scratchpad of a bricoleur—to encode scanned archival maps with clues that semiotically transform the signified source into an active and present historical signifier. Semiotic GIS techniques allow the practitioner to arrange and elicit signifier-signified meanings and intentions in human traces (records, documents, artifacts), rather than simply analyze established historical narratives.43
Last, Trevor Harris has created a visualization-gaming platform called The Cave, which immerses users in GIS-rendered landscapes, such as nineteenth-century Morgantown, West Virginia, to facilitate a phenomenological experience of a different environment, period, and place. Similar to the holodeck from Star Trek, this experiential form of GIS projects 3D models of townscapes and terrains—sourced from cartographical, archival, scientific, census, and literary data—on the walls, floor, and ceiling of an enclosed space. Individual users can then navigate the virtual environment to explore the fully rendered visualization from their own perspectives. To foster a user’s sensual embodiment of the streets of Morgantown two centuries ago, Harris integrates sound effects, such as a beating heart that quickens as one navigates near townscape locations identified by nineteenth-century writers and historians as places of perceived fear or danger.44 This type of immersive, experiential GIS environment also enables individuals and groups to create their own forms of visualization by interacting experimentally with virtualized spatial data.45
The preceding examples of humanities-based applications illustrate that GIS is not a fixed or singular identity but instead a technology that, with creativity and innovation, we can reconceptualize and retool to conduct more qualitative, lyrical, artistic, esoteric, and phenomenological forms of research.46 These examples also show how the strong influence of humanities disciplines on GIS innovation can provide a new and ontologically different reality to geography itself.47 Furthermore, these GIS models considered in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can provide a space of conjecture in which to reconcile the literary, artistic, and scientific roots of geography as well as provide a way to reimagine the potential of geospatial technology applications and research for humanities scholarship.
GIS and the space of conjecture
According to Deleuze and Guattari, both mapping and writing possess the power to anticipate and reimagine configurations of space, time, language, and culture, which have either been submerged by Cartesian space or yet to be perceived and represented. In their books, “one has the sense that there is only geography, nothing but geography: maps, planes, surfaces, strata, spaces, territories, transversals, etc.”48 Their conception of striated and smooth space links, respectively, to arborescent and rhizomatic forms of epistemology. Deleuze and Guattari use the first term to describe hierarchical, finite, and closed systems of thought and representation and invoke the rhizome as a curling, anarchic, subterranean plant root system to illustrate the interconnectivities that link society, writing, technology, and the human mind. Subsequently, a few creatively minded geographers have used this metaphor to manage the messiness of interactions and interconnections between human and physical systems.49
Pickles and Harley observed that cartography originally developed as a particularly controlling gaze, tied to certain forms of parametric space, geometry, and scale, which by the nineteenth century had developed into an empirical “scientific” practice anchored firmly by positivistic perspectives. However, Harley notes that the “steps in making a map—selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and ‘symbolization’—are inherently rhetorical.”50 With the advent of GIS technology, the infusion of humanities practices and discourses of postmodernism into the syntax of cartography has significantly changed the discipline to allow new concepts to develop. In this respect, GIS appears to function as a type of automated rhetorical tool. William Cartwright notes:
Clicking icons, rather than remembering long, alphanumeric strings revolutionized the way in which users interacted with a package. To properly understand each of the elements in a geographical information package, a number of metaphors may have to be used if the complex nature of the real world is to be presented in simplified, understandable ways.51
Spatial analysis in GIS is generally qualitative, visual, and intuitive, despite its technology being insistently pigeonholed as a tool for solely quantitative applications.52 In fact, a good portion of GIS attribute data is qualitative in nature—including names (such as owners of land parcels, businesses, and street addresses) and types or labels (such as roads, settlements, and soils). In most cases, this factor makes such types of attribute data unsuitable for quantitative analysis, so they are usually queried and logically manipulated by employing the SQL (structured query language) feature of GIS—a parsing tool closer to the study of philology than it is to physics. The performance of complex attribute queries in GIS requires more than just statistical or mathematical aptitude; it demands logical thinking and spatial imagination—skills the humanities can hone.53
However, quantitative skills are still important to the practice of GIS; its mastery relies on both literacy and numeracy. To fully harness a humanities GIS model to our research purposes, we must create new vocabularies of space to serve them. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari proposed such a vocabulary and coined new terms and phrases, such as assemblage, deterritorialization, lines of flight, nomadology, and rhizome/rhizomatics, to describe spatial relationships and the ways we conceive people and other objects moving in space.54 Observed in the context of the twenty-first-century digital revolution, an integrated, multidimensional GIS application compares to a standard cartographic map “as the internet [does] to a letter.”55 Online and desktop GIS provide unprecedented rhizomatic networking potential by employing the hyper-connectivity of the web to survey, chart, and navigate new and emerging configurations of space and time. As Umberto Eco observes, “the rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space.”56 Such a space can provide a way to consider and imagine how, in a humanities GIS model, the ancient literary, artistic, and scientific branches of Western geography, in tandem with