Qualitative GIS

Qualitative geographic information systems (qual-GIS) incorporates nonquantitative data into GIS, integrates qualitative data collection and analysis with quantitative spatial analysis facilitated by GIS, adopts epistemologies typically associated with qualitative research, or a combination of these. Qual-GIS is simultaneously represented as a spatially oriented organizer of qualitative data, a mixed-methods research approach, and an open-ended style of knowledge making. Qual-GIS emerged as a response to criticisms that GIS is rigidly embedded in positivist epistemologies. In the 1990s, GIS supporters and critics debated the implications of GIS on society (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Geographic Information Science”). The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) organized a series of meetings to bring GIS practitioners and social geographers together to address this debate. In 1993, these specialists met in Friday Harbor, Washington, and developed a research agenda to better understand the implications of GIS on society. This meeting resulted in a series of publications, including a 1995 special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Systems (“GIS and Society: Towards a Research Agenda”; see Sheppard 1995, cited under GIS Critiques), with research papers and essays that focused on GIS ethics, technocracy, practices, and politics. A companion book edited by John Pickles titled Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems (see Pickles 1995, cited under GIS Critiques) provided a more theoretical critique of spatial technologies. NCGIA also held a specialist meeting in 1996 about Initiative 19, titled “GIS and Society: The Social Implications of How People, Space, and Environment Are Represented in GIS,” to further develop this research agenda (see Harris and Weiner 1996, cited under GIS Critiques). With these works as a beginning, progressively more researchers acknowledged GIS as socially constructed, and qual-GIS emerged as an alternative. Politics of knowledge production with GIS were especially significant given the technology’s use in community planning. Researchers and practitioners began to more widely promote the general public’s participation in the development and use of GIS (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Public Participation GIS, Participatory GIS, and Participatory Mapping”). Incorporating local and indigenous knowledges into GIS has become a popular research agenda. Some human geographers, seeking to reconfigure what they consider a positivist and exclusive technology, advance a version of GIS with a critical edge that analyzes subjective rather than objective data, recognizes partiality of knowledge, and promotes alternative geographies (e.g., critical, feminist, queer, affective, and nonrepresentational GIS). Relevant qual-GIS case studies include projects that organize and subsequently visualize qualitative and subjective data. Qual-GIS could contain multimedia (e.g., images, audio, and video), ethnographic (e.g., narrative text about human experiences, perceptions, and emotions; maps sketched by participants), and historical (e.g., past events, temporal changes) data; however, considerable limitations exist regarding their cartographic representation. Qualitative data collection methods (e.g., in-depth interviews, oral life histories, participant observations, surveys, and sketch mapping) are joined parallel with GIS analysis and visualization but are performed as separate steps. Triangulation validates data sets and results by using multiple and mixed methods. Researchers have advanced the capabilities of existing GIS software to also perform qualitative data analysis. Qual-GIS is used in the humanities as well (e.g., historical GIS, narrative GIS). The topics in this article represent the disciplinary trajectories and debates that led to or influenced qual-GIS, and primary ways that qual-GIS is understood by its applicants.

Neogeography

The use of the term “neogeography” serves as a shorthand for a range of technical practices and attitudes that embrace ludic and everyday uses of geospatial technologies, amid their general proliferation. While the origins of the early-21st-century use of the term is often attributed to a post on the website Platial by Di-Ann Eisnor in 2006, neogeography has a more extended, if punctuated, provenance. This article will take up this more recent emergence to overview the conditions through which neogeography becomes a response to variants of academic and industrial mapmaking. Neogeography, as a more recent attitude or response, operates at a different rhythm than that of academic publication, and, as such, an overview of the efforts nominally considered neogeographic requires a broader understanding of the modes of production—academic and industrial—as these ideas proliferate. As part of this broadened understanding, this article places neogeography within a continuity of discussions that gained traction in the mid-1990s, under the umbrella subfield of GIS and society. This includes specific debates around participation and democracy, privacy and pervasiveness, and commodification and connectivity. Those promoting the idea of neogeography tend to do so in absence of the history of the industries and academic fields that led to its early-21st-century provenance. This overview article is meant to establish some foundations for such departures.

Tracking Public Participation in Urban Governance

This chapter examines the use of GIS, geovisualization, and other geo-locational technologies and applications, including social networking websites and mobile phones associated with Web 2.0, as a tool kit for promoting democratization or leading to loss of data privacy and freedom, focusing on the relevant historical events in 2011 and the first half of 2012. The chapter begins by presenting a brief history of the GIS and society literature, including public participation GIS, volunteered geographic information, and geoslavery. The discussion covers both the rosy view (geospatial and Web 2.0 technologies as a democratizing force) and the gloomy perspective (these same technologies as tools of control based on data capture and loss of privacy). Underlying both of these views are scale and the ability to jump scales, which are examined through the lens of Kevin Cox's (1998) “spaces of dependence and engagement.” Having laid this groundwork, the chapter considers events in the recent past, focusing first on the Arab Spring movements in Tunisia and Egypt and the Occupy movement in the U.S. as examples of the optimistic perspective. It then proceeds to discuss data capture from smart phones and cell phones as examples of the pessimistic view. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how individuals may enhance the democratization potential of geotechnologies and Web 2.0 while minimizing data capture, loss of spatial data privacy, and the harm that these can bring.

Tracking Public Participation in Urban Governance

This chapter examines the use of GIS, geovisualization, and other geo-locational technologies and applications, including social networking websites and mobile phones associated with Web 2.0, as a tool kit for promoting democratization or leading to loss of data privacy and freedom, focusing on the relevant historical events in 2011 and the first half of 2012. The chapter begins by presenting a brief history of the GIS and society literature, including public participation GIS, volunteered geographic information, and geoslavery. The discussion covers both the rosy view (geospatial and Web 2.0 technologies as a democratizing force) and the gloomy perspective (these same technologies as tools of control based on data capture and loss of privacy). Underlying both of these views are scale and the ability to jump scales, which are examined through the lens of Kevin Cox’s (1998) “spaces of dependence and engagement.” Having laid this groundwork, the chapter considers events in the recent past, focusing first on the Arab Spring movements in Tunisia and Egypt and the Occupy movement in the U.S. as examples of the optimistic perspective. It then proceeds to discuss data capture from smart phones and cell phones as examples of the pessimistic view. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how individuals may enhance the democratization potential of geotechnologies and Web 2.0 while minimizing data capture, loss of spatial data privacy, and the harm that these can bring.