New Horizons for the Social Sciences: Geographic Information Systems

Introduction Geographic information systems (GIS) are not exactly new to the social sciences—the UK's Economic and Social Research Council funded a network of GIS-based laboratories at UK universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the U.S. National Science Foundation's Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences funded the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis to promote GIS-based research from 1988 to 1996 (both GIS organizations continue to exist). But there are nevertheless good reasons to include GIS in a discussion of the future of the social sciences. The use of GIS has now spread very widely among the sciences, and it is now an accepted tool among all of the disciplines that deal with the surface of the Earth and its human population. Moreover the concept of GIS has evolved substantially, and I propose in this paper to take a deliberately broad view of the term's meaning. GIS also claims to be an integrating technology, spanning disciplines and blurring the distinctions between them, both important prerequisites for any broadly useful research infrastructure. Finally, the use of GIS has prompted interest in a number of fundamental issues that are collectively identified as geographic information science.