Further Reading

Further reading links to supplement your studies.

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  • Qualitative GIS has become the primary text for the theory, method, and practice of alternative GIS. Operating both conceptually, to shift the imagination of GIS in society, and practically, to produce new techniques around geographic representation, this edited collection sets the stage for a renewed criticality in GIScience.
    Cope, M., and S.A. Elwood (eds)( 2009) Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach. London: Sage.
  • Crampton (2010) marks a coming-of-age of the critical cartography and critical GIS subfields. This text, targeted at students and faculty new to these ideas, presents the foundational concepts and origin stories for the practice of critical mapping scholarship. Here, Crampton brings the critical concepts of the GIS & Society agenda to bear on the emergence of the Geoweb.
    Crampton, J.W. (2010) Mapping: A critical introduction to cartography and GIS. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • New to cartographic design? Start with Making Maps, by John Krygier and Denis Wood (2005). Krygier and Wood bring levity to the design decisions of map-making, beginning with basic questions around intent and audience and ending with more complicated decisions around color, visual hierarchy, balance, and use of negative space.
    Krygier, J. and D. Wood (2005) Making Maps: A visual guide to map design for GIS. New York: Guilford Press.
  • If you are interested in learning more about the ‘GIS wars’ of the 1990s, the emerging GIS & Society agenda, and the perspective of GIScientists, then check out Schuurman (2004) GIS: A Short Introduction. Drawing forward her interventions in the field beginning in the late 1990s, Schuurman overviews the key concepts and techniques of GIScience in a way that appreciates a diverse audience of human geographers and social scientists more generally.
    Schuurman, N. (2004) GIS: A Short Introduction, Short introductions to geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  • Nathan Yau, the author of the www.FlowingData.com blog, pulled together Visualize This for a group of visualization enthusiasts who are increasingly looking to open-source, web-based technologies to present compelling graphics with ‘big data’. The text presumes a kind of hacker sensibility and offers an entire chapter on web-based mapping techniques, with example scripts to be copied and pasted for your mapping projects.
    Yau, N.C. (2011) Visualize This: The flowing data guide to design, visualization, and statistics. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Online resources