Let’s return to that walk you took or time you spent looking out the window at the world around you. You likely noticed that your view contained a number of discrete objects dotting a continuous canvas or background. You might not have conceptualized it in these terms, but thinking back on it with this distinction in mind might be useful. Some aspects of the world are continuous. The landscape is the obvious example here, but other measurable things like air temperature or soil composition are also continuous phenomena. In GIS applications we not only have to decide what we are going to capture, but also how we are going to represent those aspects.

Objects

Objects are discrete, countable entities with (relatively easy) defined boundaries: buildings, roads, battlefields, libraries. They have boundaries, names, and attributes. Determining the boundary of many objects is not as simple as it might first seem. Some objects do not have boundaries that are so easily defined (see the table below). Nevertheless, these kinds of data are usually represented as points, lines, and polygons — and stored using what’s called a vector format.

Fuzzy Boundaries: When Objects Blur
Mountains and Valleys		Where does a mountain or valley begin or end? Is it elevation, slope, vegetation, or cultural significance that defines it?
Indigenous Territories		The boundaries of a First Nation reserve might be defined one way by the federal government, another through traditional knowledge, and still differently by neighboring communities. Historical treaties, natural features, and lived experience all influence the boundary.
Neighborhoods		In cities, boundaries of neighborhoods are often negotiated — shaped by class, race, identity, memory, or development, not just zoning maps.
Battlefields		A site like Gettysburg might have a defined historic district, but the broader battlefield includes movement corridors, burial grounds, and surrounding civilian areas.
Religious Spaces		A mosque or church may be a point on a map, but the sacred space it defines might extend far beyond — encompassing community, memory, and ritual paths.
Fictional or Literary Places		The geography of a particular place in literature might be narrated in multiple fragments and perhaps any character’s experience of an area might be conceptually more expansive than a simple dot. Mapping it as a single point erases the complex spatial experience described in the text.
Key takeaway: deciding how any particular object is represented in a GIS ought to be a productive exercise. Ask questions. Embrace the ambiguity of the phenomena you’re studying and think carefully about the decisions you make (and what you gain or lose in the process).

Fields

Fields are continuous surfaces, or phenomena that exist everywhere but vary in degree (e.g., elevation, population density, wind speed, or ideological intensity). These sorts of phenomena are commonly represented using rasters, which consist of a matrix of cells (or pixels) organized into rows and columns (or a grid). The important point here is that you can go anywhere and measure these phenomena. Take elevation as an example. You can take a measurement and associate that elevation data with a particular location. Perhaps you take a measurement once every kilometer. Or perhaps every meter. (Every centimeter?). Deciding on the scale of these measurements is an important aspect of any study.

In a now classic piece, GISci theorist, Helen Couclelis, provocatively claims, “people manipulate objects but cultivate fields” (Couclelis, 1992). That distinction highlights how different forms of knowledge and control depend on how we conceptualize and divide the world or, as Karen Kemp puts it, “this statement encapsulates an important tension that we confront as we begin thinking about representing the complexity of our places in the computer.” (Kemp, 2010, p. 35) A cemetery might be mapped as a polygon object. The individual gravestones points. The sense of sacredness radiating from it might be conceptualized as a field. This distinction can open up new interpretive possibilities—not just how something is mapped, but what it means to map it at all.

Exercise: Why Objects & Fields Matter

Applying a Humanities Lens

Take a phenomenon from your field (e.g., a pilgrimage, a memory, a rumor, a poem’s setting) and ask:

• Is this phenomenon a distinct entity or a continuous field?
• Is this best modeled as a thing, a path, or a presence?
• Where are its boundaries? Does it even have any?
• Would representing it as an object overstate its stability? Would representing it as a field obscure its specificity?

Your map isn’t just showing the world—it’s shaping what kind of world you can see.

References

• Burrough, P., McDonnel, R. & Lloyd, C. (2015) Principles of Geographical Information Systems (3rd ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Couclelis, H. (1992). “People Manipulate Objects (but Cultivate Fields): Beyond the Raster-Vector Debate in GIS,” in Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed. A.U. Frank, I. Campari, and U. Formentini (Springer, 1992), 65. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55966-3_3
• Kemp, K. (2010) “Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities,” in The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, ed. David Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor Harris. Indiana: Indiana University Press.