Jacqueline W. Curtis

The prospects and problems of integrating sketch maps with geographic information systems to understand environmental perception: a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods

How people feel about places matters, especially in their neighborhood. It matters for their health, the health of their children, and their social cohesion and use of local resources. A growing body of research in public health, planning, psychology, and sociology bears out this point. Recently, a new methodological tack has been taken to find out how people feel about places. The sketch map, a once popular tool of behavioral geographers and environmental psychologists to understand how people perceive the structural aspects of places, is now being used in concert with geographic information systems (GIS) to capture and spatially analyze the emotional side of urban environmental perception. This confluence is generating exciting prospects for what we can learn about the characteristics of the urban environment that elicit emotion. However, due to the uncritical way this approach has been employed to date, excitement about the prospects must be tempered by the acknowledgement of its potential problems. In this paper we review the extant research on integrating sketch maps with GIS and then employ a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods to demonstrate these prospects and the problems, particularly in the areas of (1) representation of environmental perception in GIS and (2) spatial analysis of these data.

Integrating Sketch Maps with GIS to Explore Fear of Crime in the Urban Environment: A Review of the Past and Prospects for the Future

Understanding the spatial dimension of fear of crime in the urban environment is important to understanding behaviors in response to this concern. Making this connection between perception and action has long been a goal of scholars in the social and health sciences, though this complex relationship has yet to be fully elucidated. Specifically, in studies on fear of crime and its influence on behavior, a variety of definitions and methods have been employed. This situation has yielded insights, as well as inconsistencies. In the past decade, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been added to this methodological mix, though it too has contributed limited understanding of the environmental perception-behavior nexus. During this time, some scholars have integrated a traditional technique for accessing environmental perception, the sketch map, with this newer technology. This article provides a review and critical assessment of the way GIS has been used to understand fear of crime, specifically through the integration of sketch maps. This focus is framed by an overview of substantive and methodological concerns and concludes with a discussion of continued research needs. As behavioral responses to fear of crime are acknowledged to impact physical and mental health and overall well-being, in addition to the viability of neighborhoods, research in this area will continue apace. However, for integration of sketch maps in GIS to be a valuable methodological contributor to this line of inquiry, users of the approach must understand its complexities. This article outlines these issues so that they may be considered in future research and may improve the ability for this approach to yield new understanding of fear of crime.

Spatial video geonarratives and health: case studies in post-disaster recovery, crime, mosquito control and tuberculosis in the homeless.

BackgroundA call has recently been made by the public health and medical communities to understand the neighborhood context of a patient’s life in order to improve education and treatment. To do this, methods are required that can collect “contextual” characteristics while complementing the spatial analysis of more traditional data. This also needs to happen within a standardized, transferable, easy-to-implement framework.MethodsThe Spatial Video Geonarrative (SVG) is an environmentally-cued narrative where place is used to stimulate discussion about fine-scale geographic characteristics of an area and the context of their occurrence. It is a simple yet powerful approach to enable collection and spatial analysis of expert and resident health-related perceptions and experiences of places. Participants comment about where they live or work while guiding a driver through the area. Four GPS-enabled cameras are attached to the vehicle to capture the places that are observed and discussed by the participant. Audio recording of this narrative is linked to the video via time stamp. A program (G-Code) is then used to geotag each word as a point in a geographic information system (GIS). Querying and density analysis can then be performed on the narrative text to identify spatial patterns within one narrative or across multiple narratives. This approach is illustrated using case studies on post-disaster psychopathology, crime, mosquito control, and TB in homeless populations.ResultsSVG can be used to map individual, group, or contested group context for an environment. The method can also gather data for cohorts where traditional spatial data are absent. In addition, SVG provides a means to spatially capture, map and archive institutional knowledge.ConclusionsSVG GIS output can be used to advance theory by being used as input into qualitative and/or spatial analyses. SVG can also be used to gain near-real time insight therefore supporting applied interventions. Advances over existing geonarrative approaches include the simultaneous collection of video data to visually support any commentary, and the ease-of-application making it a transferable method across different environments and skillsets.

Context and Spatial Nuance Inside a Neighborhood's Drug Hotspot: Implications for the Crime–Health Nexus

New geographic approaches are required to tease apart the underlying sociospatial complexity of neighborhood decline to target appropriate interventions. Typically maps of crime hotspots are used with relatively little attention being paid to geographic context. This article helps further this discourse using a topical study of a neighborhood drug microspace, a phrase we use to include the various stages of production, selling, acquiring, and taking, to show how context matters. We overlay an exploratory data analysis of three cohort spatial video geonarratives (SVGs) to contextualize the traditional crime rate hotspot maps. Using two local area analyses of police, community, and ex-offender SVGs and then comparing these with police call for service data, we identify spaces of commonality and difference across data types. In the Discussion, we change the scale to consider revealed microspaces and the interaction of both “good” and “bad” places. We enrich the previous analysis with a mapped spatial video assessment of the built environment and then return to the narrative to extract additional detail around a crime-associated corner store next to a community center. Our findings suggest that researchers should reevaluate how to enrich typical hotspot approaches with more on-the-ground context.

A Methodology for Assessing Dynamic Fine Scale Built Environments and Crime: A Case Study of the Lower 9th Ward After Hurricane Katrina

This chapter will present a method of data collection and analysis for fine scale environments experiencing change. The setting for this work is the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans for the period 2010 and 2011. The approach described here utilizes a low cost mobile data collection strategy involving a spatial video, a built environment coding scheme, and fine scale spatial analysis using a spatial filter that creates a surface of abandonment/blight/returnee rates linked to individual crimes. This chapter will also address the need for longitudinal analysis beyond simply considering changes in crime events by framing crimes between two data collection periods. Although this chapter should be viewed as a methodological example, including the importance of primary data collection and spatial investigation at the street segment scale, one interesting result is that crimes in association with abandonment and blight only became statistically significant for the 2011 landscape. The chapter concludes with several examples of spatial video derived fine scale maps that can be used to advance current spatial crime theories.

Using a Geographic Information System (GIS) to Assess Pediatric Surge Potential After an Earthquake

Geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial technology (GT) can help hospitals improve plans for postdisaster surge by assessing numbers of potential patients in a catchment area and providing estimates of special needs populations, such as pediatrics. In this study, census-derived variables are computed for blockgroups within a 3-mile radius from Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and from Los Angeles County-University of Southern California (LAC-USC) Medical Center. Landslide and liquefaction zones are overlaid on US Census Bureau blockgroups. Units that intersect with the hazard zones are selected for computation of pediatric surge potential in case of an earthquake. In addition, cartographic visualization and cluster analysis are performed on the entire 3-mile study area to identify hot spots of socially vulnerable populations. The results suggest the need for locally specified vulnerability models for pediatric populations. GIS and GT have untapped potential to contribute local specificity to planning for surge potential after a disaster. Although this case focuses on an earthquake hazard, the methodology is appropriate for an all-hazards approach. With the advent of Google Earth, GIS output can now be easily shared with medical personnel for broader application and improvement in planning.

Breaking Out of Surveillance Silos: Integrative Geospatial Data Collection for Child Injury Risk and Active School Transport

The preponderance of active school transport (AST) and child injury research has occurred independently, yet they are inherently related. This is particularly true in urban areas where the environmental context of AST may pose risks to safety. However, it can be difficult to make these connections due to the often segregated nature in which these veins of research operate. Spatial video presents a geospatial approach for simultaneous data collection related to both issues. This article reports on a multi-sector pilot project among researchers, a children’s hospital, and a police department, using spatial video to map child AST behaviors; a geographic information system (GIS) is used to analyze these data in the environmental context of child pedestrian injury and community violence.

Historic Disease Data as Epidemiological Resource: Searching for the Origin and Local Basic Reproduction Number of the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee

Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases continue to pose considerable regional and global concerns. A vital contribution to be made by geographers is in developing an understanding of the spatial structure of these epidemics across various scales. Confidentiality concerns and a general lack of individual data from many developing world areas mean that individual or subneighborhood-scale epidemic information is often unavailable. One alternative potential source of data is historical epidemics. Although these data exist in the form of board of health reports, these should not be considered complete, and the onus is on the researcher to perform due diligence on data validation and identifying supplementary spatial and cultural context. This article presents an example of such a methodological task for the 1878 yellow fever epidemic of Memphis, which leads to exploration of two important spatial questions: the correct origin of the epidemic in the city and its associated local basic reproduction number, which is the number of ensuing cases stemming from an original. This article should be viewed as a template for a subsequent series of fine-scale historical epidemic analyses, which together can produce an important conduit into further development of spatial epidemiological theory.

Same space – different perspectives: comparative analysis of geographic context through sketch maps and spatial video geonarratives

ABSTRACT The importance of including a contextual underpinning to the spatial analysis of social data is gaining traction in the spatial science community. The challenge, though, is how to capture these data in a rigorous manner that is translational. One method that has shown promise in achieving this aim is the spatial video geonarrative (SVG), and in this paper we pose questions that advance the science of geonarratives through a case study of criminal ex-offenders. Eleven ex-offenders provided sketch maps and SVGs identifying high-crime areas of their community. Wordmapper software was used to map and classify the SVG content; its spatial filter extension was used for hot spot mapping with statistical significance tested using Monte Carlo simulations. Then, each subject’s sketch map and SVG were compared. Results reveal that SVGs consistently produce finer spatial-scale data and more locations of relevance than the sketch maps. SVGs also provide explanation of spatial-temporal processes and causal mechanisms linked to specific places, which are not evident in the sketch maps. SVG can be a rigorous translational method for collecting data on the geographic context of many phenomena. Therefore, this paper makes an important advance in understanding how environmentally immersive methods contribute to the understanding of geographic context.

Introduction to special content section “The power of mapping in primary and secondary science education”

The genesis for this special content on the power of mapping in primary and secondary science education is based on our observations from 4 years of leading professional development for teachers on this subject. Over this time, we have seen successful adoption of maps and a range of geospatial technologies that has resulted in positive outcomes for teachers and their students. We also have witnessed the variability of such adoption, as well as cases where the connection failed to be made. There have been teachers who needed little convincing of the power of mapping and those for whom buy-in took longer. Furthermore, the cohorts changed each year with a different combination of grade levels, content, specializations, and computer technology available. Some came from high-need districts while others taught at affluent schools. We listened to teachers talk about the differences in their students from one class to the next and from year to year, and the variety of courses that they are assigned to teach. We observed technology preferences change based on district or school policies and resources, from laptops to tablets to Chromebooks, and had to adjust what and how we taught accordingly. Overall, teachers’ access to resources changes – from local classroom design to global technology advances, as does their exposure to external influences such as revisions to content standards and student testing policies. In essence, dynamic scales of influence and an uncertain context (including geographic – Kwan, 2012) operate on teachers in their classrooms. Any work toward having them integrate mapping must realistically account for these scales and contexts. It is promising that there is an ever-growing body of research on the use of mapping in primary and secondary schools, and many studies are addressing this influence of confounding issues. However, in preparing for our professional development, we gravitated toward different studies to inform our work. It is not surprising that the relevant research is often siloed into geography/geographic information science or science education. Furthermore, there was a lack of evidence on how to proceed with our teachers in resourcechallenged settings or who taught students with special needs. As there is a well-established need to broaden participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), this dearth of information is a gap in clear need of more contributions. This special content section is a direct response to this need and has the following two objectives. First, it aims to consolidate the current state of knowledge on best practices for integrating maps and mapping technologies for science in primary and secondary education. Second, it seeks to create awareness across disciplines and stakeholders, including policymakers, of what is traditionally siloed – but complementary–research in science education, geography, and allied disciplines. Guiding these specific objectives is our observation that with improved usability, costs, and availability, web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) and geospatial technologies continue to increase in their potential to improve teachers’ and students’ awareness of and participation in science, including cartography and geographic information science. Yet students have not had equal access to such geospatial technologies, constraining the impact on the sciences and their future diversity and innovation. Therefore, this special section is devoted to research on mapping in primary and secondary education in two areas: high need schools and school districts/divisions, especially those with limited resources such as little to no computer access and special education; an important context rarely considered in science education. Given this background and set of high ideals, selecting articles was challenging and a number of quality manuscripts have not been included. The two that are presented in the following pages are exceptional in answering the call. They concisely but thoroughly consolidate the body of knowledge. They demonstrate transdisciplinary collaboration across the sciences and education with a focus on students with special needs and schools with resource challenges. Furthermore, they account for the dynamic scales of influence and uncertain contexts in which teachers are expected to excel. They provide evidence-based guidance to harCARTOGRAPHY AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE, 2018 VOL. 45, NO. 4, 289–291 https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2018.1429167