GIScience III: Slow GIS and intelligent automation

Abstract

GeoAI’s rapid expansion makes renewed attention to slowness in GIScience necessary. Situating GeoAI within GIScience’s longer history of automation, this progress report revisits fast and slow geographic knowledge production and develops slow GIS as a critical orientation to intelligent automation. Drawing on critical, feminist, Indigenous, participatory, disability, and minor GISciences, I propose four commitments—relevance, reflexivity, relationality, and responsibility—that guide attention to moments that should not be automated too quickly, from framing problems and assembling data to interpreting results, mobilizing knowledge, and tracing consequences. I conclude by considering systemic changes needed to sustain slow GIS within contemporary research systems.