MAPPING THE ANTHROPOGENIC OCEAN: A CRITICAL GIS APPROACH

ABSTRACT Bringing together research on human impacts on marine environments, cultural representation, and geographic information systems (GIS), we explore new approaches to digitally representing the anthropogenic ocean. Marine environments present vexing subjects to capture digitally. Complex physical and biological oceanography, invisible boundaries, ambiguous legal controls, conflicts between multiple stakeholders over subsistence and commercial marine resources, and cultural variations in core ocean epistemologies complicate our ability to model historical and contemporary human interactions with the marine environment. Academic focus on the concept of the Anthropocene within geography, together with critical GIS studies, open new possibilities to transcend division between natural and social sciences. We propose an object-oriented, multiscalar framework for a database of anthropogenic ocean layers that represent human-ocean interactions. We outline strategies for digitally representing human experiences of maritime space and introduce a prototype GIS data structure for its delivery.