Britta Ricker

The electronic Trauma Health Record: design and usability of a novel tablet-based tool for trauma care and injury surveillance in low resource settings.

BACKGROUND Ninety percent of global trauma deaths occur in under-resourced or remote environments, with little or no capacity for injury surveillance. We hypothesized that emerging electronic and web-based technologies could enable design of a tablet-based application, the electronic Trauma Health Record (eTHR), used by front-line clinicians to inform trauma care and acquire injury surveillance data for injury control and health policy development. STUDY DESIGN The study was conducted in 3 phases: 1. Design of an electronic application capable of supporting clinical care and injury surveillance; 2. Preliminary feasibility testing of eTHR in a low-resource, high-volume trauma center; and 3. Qualitative usability testing with 22 trauma clinicians from a spectrum of high- and low-resource and urban and remote settings including Vancouver General Hospital, Whitehorse General Hospital, British Columbia Mobile Medical Unit, and Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. RESULTS The eTHR was designed with 3 key sections (admission note, operative note, discharge summary), and 3 key capabilities (clinical checklist creation, injury severity scoring, wireless data transfer to electronic registries). Clinician-driven registry data collection proved to be feasible, with some limitations, in a busy South African trauma center. In pilot testing at a level I trauma center in Cape Town, use of eTHR as a clinical tool allowed for creation of a real-time, self-populating trauma database. Usability assessments with traumatologists in various settings revealed the need for unique eTHR adaptations according to environments of intended use. In all settings, eTHR was found to be user-friendly and have ready appeal for frontline clinicians. CONCLUSIONS The eTHR has potential to be used as an electronic medical record, guiding clinical care while providing data for injury surveillance, without significantly hindering hospital workflow in various health-care settings.

Dear Diary: Early Career Geographers Collectively Reflect on Their Qualitative Field Research Experiences

After completing a qualitative methods course in geography, we moved classroom discussions into practice. While undertaking graduate fieldwork in sites across the globe, we participated in critical, reflexive journaling. Whereas journal writing is often private, we shared our entries, aiming to facilitate rigour while concurrently exploring similarities and differences. We became conscious of common themes including ethical dilemmas, power relations and researcher fatigue. In this paper, we critically analyse these experiences, examining the strategies implemented to resolve such predicaments. We argue that reflexive group journaling during fieldwork is a valuable learning tool which could be introduced into many research-active curricula.

Tourism and environmental change in Barbados: gathering citizen perspectives with volunteered geographic information (VGI)

New map-based online tools have the potential to facilitate citizen participation in discussing the impacts of tourism. This research investigates the use of Geospatial Web 2.0 (Geoweb) tools to gather volunteered geographic information (VGI) on tourism-related environmental change from citizens of Barbados. We hosted participatory mapping workshops where groups of Barbadians directly contributed content to a series of online maps. These maps were made with the free Google My Map tool, allowing users to interact with detailed satellite imagery of Barbados. Qualitative observations were added and geo-referenced to these maps identifying several types of environmental change concerns, both those generated by tourism, and those with implications for tourism development. We analysed how participants used Google My Maps, identifying concerns of accuracy, data completeness and digital/computer literacy amongst users that could affect further use of this tool. Overall, the Geoweb approach provided participants with a unique perspective on environmental change that facilitated deeper discussion of issues and produced a publicly available, spatially referenced record of citizen concerns. Further research needs are demonstrated, including user interface design, accuracy and uncertainty, and how to manage varying levels of digital literacy.

Revisiting critical GIS

Even as the meeting ‘revisited’ critical GIS, it offered neither recapitulation nor reification of a fixed field, but repetition with difference. Neither at the meeting nor here do we aspire to write histories of critical GIS, which have been taken up elsewhere.1 In the strictest sense, one might define GIS as a set of tools and technologies through which spatial data are encoded, analyzed, and communicated. Yet any strict definition of GIS, critical or otherwise, is necessarily delimiting, carving out ontologically privileged status that necessarily silences one set of voices in favor of another.

Evolving technology, shifting expectations: cultivating pedagogy for a rapidly changing GIS landscape

Abstract As humans and natural processes continuously reshape the surface of the Earth, there is an unceasing need to document and analyze them through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The public is gaining more access to spatial technologies that were once only available to highly trained professionals. With technological evolution comes a requirement to transition traditional GIS training for the next generation of GIS professionals. Traditional GIS combined with non-traditional GIS (i.e. mobile and location media) and CyberGIS educational materials could attract new and diverse students into Geography departments while informing the next generation of geospatial tool builders and users. Here we pose an applied pedagogical framework for teaching cutting-edge GIS material to diverse student populations with varying levels of technological experience and professional goals. The framework was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberGIS Fellows program and was applied as a course template at the University of Washington Tacoma’s Master’s of Science in Geospatial Technologies. We chart how the framework developed into a cyclical structure from our original conceptualization as a hierarchy. This changed the epistemological orientation accommodating the shifting technological terrain of the GIS landscape to improve the skills of those driving the machines.

“Dear Diary” revisited: reflecting on collaborative journaling

The genesis of this article was a request from the Journal of Geography in Higher Education to provide a reflection piece about our article ‘Dear Diary: Early Career Geographers Collectively Reflect on their Qualitative Field Research Experiences’ (2011) that won the journals biennial award for 2009–2011. This request has afforded us the opportunity to reconnect as a team and, through self-directed interviews, to reflect upon how writing ‘Dear Diary’ continues to influences our current perceptions of journaling in qualitative research. More specifically, we focus here on the relationships between journaling and our approach to research, team-based collaboration, and our current teaching and mentoring practices. We all continue to keep fieldwork journals and perceive reflexive journaling as a crucial tool for qualitative methods and other collaborative ventures.

Introduction to Digital Location Minitrack

The purpose of this minitrack is to comprehensively engage with research that investigates digital locational data. We call for papers that address the production, capture, and study of location information through both technical and theoretical perspectives. Research into the processes associated with data capture and analysis, including visualization techniques, is in high demand. This is in part due to the evergrowing production of locational data via emerging spatially-aware technologies, such as smartphones, personal fitness trackers, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Here we invite papers that address ‘location information’ in a broad sense that includes both precise geolocated coordinates and more general expressions of space and place. Potential data sources include individuals and industries – for example, government open data initiatives, personal activity trackers, social media services, or aerial photography from UAVs. We wish to engage with scholarship that addresses the technical considerations around working with locational data as well as its transformation into locational media. This includes, but is not limited to, papers that: offer new technical and methodological solutions to the capture, interpretation, analysis or visualization of spatial media; examine the epistemological and ontological effects of spatial social media upon users; present empirical work on the creation or consumption of spatial social media; advance our understanding of how spatial social media relate to social and political processes; present new work on the role of economic forces in the creation and use of spatial social media, for example, location-specific advertising; or explore spatial social media as a means of better understanding urban and non-urban environments. More specifically, we encourage papers that engage with the following topics or related areas: • Spatial Informatics, data mining and data exploration of spatial information • Crowdsourced spatial information • New or emerging locational data collection techniques • Resistance and/or surveillance through spatial digital information and social media • Mapping social media for humanitarian efforts • FOSS technologies for location aware research • Social media and citizen science initiatives • Governmental Open Data analyzed and distributed through social media • Gendered representations in spatial digital information and social media • Ethical considerations associated with the use of spatial digital media for information sharing • Scale and information relevance related to social media networks and location • Qualitative research on the use of spatial social media by end-users and firms • New or alternative methodological techniques for the collection, analysis and visualization of spatial social media information

Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository

Orthorectified imagery is valuable for a wide range of initiatives including environmental change detection, planning, and disaster response. Obtaining aerial imagery at high temporal and spatial scale has traditionally been expensive. Due to lower costs and improved ease of use, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been increasingly prevalent. This presents an opportunity to share images as part of participatory geographic information systems initiatives similar to OpenStreetMap. We outline a workflow to generate maps from UAV aerial images. We then present a characterization of software platforms currently available to aide development of maps from UAV imagery, defined by type of service, whether imagery hosting or data processing. From this analysis we identify existing barriers to imagery sharing, including data licensing, data quality, and user engagement.

Introduction to Social Media and Location Minitrack

Minitrack introduction.

Introduction to Social Media and Location Information Minitrack

This minitrack focuses location information generated through the use of digital and social media, with a particular emphasis on how that information may be collected and interpreted to better understand how location and environment intersect with social, political, and economic forces. Interpreting social media through an explicitly spatial lens, these papers engage, on one level, the praxis of gathering and visualizing spatial information and, on another, theoretical explorations of the generation, capture, use, and exchange of the intersection of location information and social media data.