Creative Geovisualization
Creative geovisualization is many things: a process, a method, an output, a field, an art form, and a collaborative practice. It includes critical GIS as well as other geospatial forms of digital art-creation. As Jin-Kyu Jung (2020: 520) writes,
Creative GIS and geovisualization are situated at the intersection of critical, qualitative, and affective forms of GIS, geography, arts, and digital humanities with a particular emphasis on visualization and mapping. Creative geovisualization presents innovative ways not only to describe geometric space, but also to imagine and create personal, qualitative, artistic, and humanistic experiential, interpretive, and expressive visual representation.
Creative geovisualization might therefore be considered a form of deep mapping (Bodenhamer et al., 2013), not only preserving and representing, but also generatingmore nuanced and contextual meanings of place (Jung, 2020). The affective, performative characteristics of geovisualization highlight the “more-than-representational” possibilities of art-creation (Lorimer, 2005); that is, the ability for creative geovisualization to not only represent spatial relationships but to actively evoke and create space in an ongoing process of (re-)building.
Of course, all GIS incorporate artistic elements and reflect the creativity of users, but an arts-based approach involves more explicitly welcoming emotional and affective elements into the research design from the outset. Indeed, the uptake of “emotional mapping” as critical geospatial arts practice shows yet another example of the creative expansion of GIS and geovisualization over the past two decades (Jung, 2020). Critical and cultural turns within the spatial humanities has inspired critical-historical GIS projects that are increasingly embracing the creative, the playful, the experimental, the uncertain, and the imaginative. These turns have marked a shift toward subjective, qualitative, and embodied knowledges of place (Jung, 2020).
Although we focus more on “more-than-visual” projects of geospatial art-creation in this module, one example of creative geovisualization coming out of Nipissing University can be found in the “Vantages of Bermuda” layer of the Empire Trees Climate storymapping project (led by Kirsten Greer and designed by Megan Prescott Jee). Jee used HGIS storymapping apps to not only display visual art (such as watercolour paintings from 1830s) but also to georeference it, and to use art as a launching point for understanding different geographical “vantages” that could help reconstruct the past. Working with the research team to locate and digitize historical maps and watercolour landscape paintings, Jee obtained satellite imagery which contained geocoordinates, using all of these materials to georeference and then geotag notable points on the map (Fig. 1).
The Vantages of Bermuda layers highlight the generative potential of creative geovisualization. In this case, artistic