Dydia DeLyser

Crossing the qualitative-quantitative chasm I: Hybrid geographies, the spatial turn, and volunteered geographic information (VGI)

This report, the first of three, reviews methods and methodological approaches, qualitative and quantitative. In an effort to look beyond the qualitative-quantitative divide, two geographers with different methodological background and expertise write together. This first report reviews works under the broader context of hybrid geographies, the spatial turn, and the recent explosive growth of volunteered geographic information (VGI). The works reviewed seek to combine methodological approaches in creative ways, or to create other hybrid research methods, all to address the challenging problems of our times – problems that often demand synergy in methodology, holism in ontology, plurarism/open-mindedness in epistemology, and embracing diversity.

Crossing the qualitative- quantitative divide II: Inventive approaches to big data, mobile methods, and rhythmanalysis

In this second of three reports on qualitative and quantitative methods we highlight novel methods with particular purchase on the problems of our time. We again focus on scholarship crossing multiple geographical divides, those of neo/paleo geography, qualitative/quantitative methods, and physical/human geography. We do so now by concentrating on three areas: the emerging digital humanities and the rise of big data, mobile methods, and rhythmanalysis. With this broad approach we seek also to encourage consilience, synergy, and a positive embrace of diversity in geographical scholarship.

Teaching Graduate Students to Write: A seminar for thesis and dissertation writers

Many graduate students face thesis or dissertation writing under-prepared. To help some of them with the task, the author developed a seminar called Social-Science Writing. This article describes that seminar: its organisation, themes, in-class and take-home writing assignments, readings, and student writing workshop. The author also reviews some of the books available to help even novice writers both with their own writing, and to develop the confidence to teach (or request) such a course themselves.

Crossing the qualitative-quantitative chasm III Enduring methods, open geography, participatory research, and the fourth paradigm

In our third and final report, we again prioritize the open embrace of methodological differences, seeking to span the qualitative-quantitative chasm in different ways. Amid broad focus on methodological newness, we review the importance of enduring methods such as interviewing and mapping. Amid efforts to make data and publications openly available, we review efforts to include communities in participatory research. Amid the emergence of data-extensive studies, which some call the fourth paradigm, we highlight the continuing importance of ‘small’ data and methodological pluralism.

Teaching Qualitative Research

Explicitly qualitative research has never before been so popular in human geography, and this article hopes to encourage more graduate students and faculty members to undertake the teaching of qualitative geography. The article describes one such course for graduate students, highlighting its challenges and rewards, and focusing on exercises undertaken by the students that encourage them to explore various qualitative approaches, techniques, strategies and theoretical perspectives including archival research, interviewing, transcription, participant observation, writing field notes, analytic memos, coding data and thinking/writing reflexively.

Hopped Beer: The Case For Cultivation

The history of hops, hopped beer, and hop cultivation is unclear and ambiguous. An assessment of the available literature reveals many contradictions, especially regarding the first use of hops in beer and the earliest incidence of hop cultivation. Historically, hops were used for a variety of purposes; now their primary use is as a preservative and flavoring in beer. Hop cultivation is poorly documented, but was certainly undertaken by the 10th century, most probably in response to the demand generated by beer-brewing. After comparing the literature and investigating source material, a chronology of hop use in beer and hop cultivation is proposed.ZusammenfassungLa littérature écritesur I’histoiredu houblon, son utilisation pour la brasserie, et la cultivation de la plante est imprécise et ambigûe. Une étude de la documentation existante révèle de nombreuses contradictions, surtout sur le sujet de la première utilisation du houblon dans la bière, comparé avec la date de la première culture de la plante. Historiquement, le houblon fut utilisé a des fins diverses; par le suite, son usage principal fut comme agent de consérvation et de goût. La culture du houblon est pauvrement documentée, mais était certainement enterprise à partir du dixième siecle, mais en réponse plus probablement a de la demande générée par la brasserie de la bière. En avoir mené des recherches des sources littéraires, c’est-à-dire des sources originelles ainsi que des sources secondaires, on se propose done à faire une chronologie de l’emploi du houblon dans la fabrication de la bière ainsi que dans la cultivation du houblon.

Introduction: writing creatively – process, practice, and product

For most academic geographers writing remains the primary means through which we communicate our work. Typically, of course, in monographs and journal articles, but with ongoing creative efforts to engage geographical audiences through practices beyond academic publishing – something cultural geographies in practice has long featured – that writing sees a myriad of expressions. Nevertheless, the process and practice of our writing remains masked by its product, as the polished published work obscures the means of its production, and even the production of our most frequent output (a scholarly publication) is, with few exceptions, seldom spoken of, let alone written about. The aim of these papers is to open writing for discussion as an expression of cultural geographies in practice, as a way of revealing some of the engaged and embodied practices of cultural geography that lie behind the varied published expressions of our scholarship, and to explore some of the creative forms of expression such writing practices may lead to. Of course, all writing is creative – a monograph no less so than a monologue, a paper no less so than a poem. And even when we choose to reject, or work outside of, the conventions of scholarly prose, we open ourselves to the structures of other expressive forms. But just as each form has its restrictions, so can those restrictions be leveraged by a skilled writer to harness rather than hamper creativity – none, after all, has thought Shakespeare uncreative for his 154 sonnets, despite their fixed rhyme scheme and prescribed format of 14 lines. Still, some academics turn to forms of expression other than those most often accepted in the scholarly repertoire as creative means to forward their scholarship, while still others engage these outlets for work other than their scholarship. So while literary writing has long formed an empirical entry point for geographers, offering, among other things, a powerful repost to positivistic science, creative-writing practices have themselves, as Cresswell observes here, long been enrolled as part of the geographer’s ‘craft.’ Indeed, this relationship between geography and literary writing can,

Teaching Qualitative Research: Experiential Learning in Group-Based Interviews and Coding Assignments.

This article describes experiential-learning approaches to conveying the work and rewards involved in qualitative research. Seminar students interviewed one another, transcribed or took notes on those interviews, shared those materials to create a set of empirical materials for coding, developed coding schemes, and coded the materials using those schemes. Students’ input reveals that these assignments were more effective than readings and discussions in conveying the challenges and rewards of qualitative research. In particular, the coding assignment revealed the labor involved in doing qualitative research, but also the insights qualitative research can lead to. Others are urged to try similar assignments.

`Thus I salute the Kentucky Daisey's claim': gender, social memory, and the mythic West at a proposed Oklahoma monument

On 22 April 1889, at the beginning of the first Oklahoma land run when the US federal government allowed non-Indian settlers to claim what had been Native American lands, Nannita R.H. Daisey entered the newly opened territory by train to become one of the very first women to stake a quarter-section land claim, on land today part of Edmond. According to local lore, Daisy leapt from the cowcatcher of the train to stake her claim, removing her petticoat to mark the spot. Over 100 years later Edmond has proposed a bronze monument to Daisey, petticoat flying, riding on the cowcatcher, in an effort both to attract tourists with public art, and to recognize womens contributions to Oklahoma settlement. On the surface this seems a laudable attempt to re-inscribe womens lives in the history of the American West, the social memories of Oklahomans, and the landscape of contemporary Edmond — except that the story about the cowcatcher and the petticoat, though passed down in local lore for more than 100 years, is false. And that, in turn, provides feminist historical geographers with an opportunity to examine the canonization of an exaggerated version of an already heroicized tale of Euro-American conquest, and what that implies for the representation of women in the American West. In this article, in an effort to improve upon decades of superficial scholarship, and in the face of the proposed monuments mis-portrayal, I attempt to detail Daiseys biography and describe her actual deeds. But, since the lives of prominent westerners are often difficult to disentangle from the powerful romanticizing influence of the mythic West on themselves and on their representations, my attempt itself raises issues about the study and representation of westerners in the US as the article explores ways that western women have been represented, the role of a monument as the landscape representation of a western woman, and the specific gendered spatial framework for the creation of contemporary social memory that Nannita Daiseys monument and legendary tale present.

Recovering social memories from the past: the 1884 novel Ramona and tourist practices in turn‐of‐the‐century southern California

Scholars studying social memory have identified a priority for future work: using the study of documented social memories to understand constructions of the past and social identities in the present. Recovering such lived, individual engagements with social memory is challenging when those engaging the memory are deceased, yet that is what this article attempts to do: Through fine‐grained study of archival traces, I explore the lived practices of tourists in an attempt to understand how the immensely popular 1884 novel Ramona changed the way people thought about southern Californias past, creating a new, Ramona‐inspired social memory for the region. In so doing I suggest that those interested in recovering social memories (like these) from the past use such detailed analysis, paying close attention to even the tiniest of details.