Geographic information systems as a conceptual and dialogic instrument in the world of social sciences

Abstract

Although there has been a technical practice of cartography for centuries, it is also true that most of its production has been encouraged from power, whose process has been inherent in strategies applied to the conquest of spaces and territorial domination. One of the great inheritances of modern thought has been precisely the cartographic construction, invention and reinvention of the orb in all its micro and macro spatial dimensions, under an expansive design of the modern hegemonic nation-states. At the same time, we have a paradigmatic dynamic that interprets the space-time relationship from a global perspective, which forces us to observe geographic and socioeconomic phenomena from an interconnection between relatively distant spaces. Nowadays it is difficult to explain a social fact that produces a geographical event if total economic, social, cultural and political elements are not incorporated that are gestated in a temporal and spatial process.