PRACTICING SPATIAL EPISTEMOLOGY WITH IMMANUEL KANT'S 'PHYSICAL' CLASSIFICATION

摘要

Practicing cultural geography in a web-based digital medium has led to the possibility of resurrecting early-twentieth-century ideas about the primacy of space in organizing information. In this article I discuss the philosophical underpinnings that drove the creation of my digital monograph Enchanting the Desert Different than a spatial narrative that associates data points with their attendant cartographic representations, I use space-and specifically landscape-to order my information. Spatial proximity bundles and orders items on its own, a priori giving meaning to things existing next to one another in a landscape. Using space as a way to forge topical relevancy appears to be an uncommon approach, but in fact is paramount for a more productive and holistic ecological practice. The digital medium of the interactive web application makes this spatial epistemology possible.