Sarah Elwood

Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice

The convergence of newly interactive Web-based technologies with growing practices of user-generated content disseminated on the Internet is generating a remarkable new form of geographic information. Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets, using Web-based mapping interfaces to mark and annotate geographic features, or adding geographic location to photographs, text, and other media shared online. These phenomena, which generate what we refer to collectively as volunteered geographic information (VGI), represent a paradigmatic shift in how geographic information is created and shared and by whom, as well as its content and characteristics. This article, which draws on our recently completed inventory of VGI initiatives, is intended to frame the crucial dimensions of VGI for geography and geographers, with an eye toward identifying its potential in our field, as well as the most pressing research needed to realize this potential. Drawing on our ongoing research, we examine the content and characteristics of VGI, the technical and social processes through which it is produced, appropriate methods for synthesizing and using these data in research, and emerging social and political concerns related to this new form of information.

“Placing” Interviews: Location and Scales of Power in Qualitative Research

For qualitative researchers, selecting appropriate sites in which to conduct interviews may seem to be a relatively simple research design issue. In fact it is a complicated decision with wide-reaching implications. In this paper, we argue that the interview site itself embodies and constitutes multiple scales of spatial relations and meaning, which construct the power and positionality of participants in relation to the people, places, and interactions discussed in the interview. We illustrate how observation and analysis of interview sites can offer new insights with respect to research questions, help researchers understand and interpret interview material, and highlight particular ethical considerations that researchers need to address.

Critical Issues in Participatory GIS: Deconstructions, Reconstructions, and New Research Directions

In the mid-1990s, several critical texts raised concerns about the social, political, and epistemological implications of GIS. Subsequent responses to these critiques have fundamentally altered the technological, political, and intellectual practices of GIScience. Participatory GIS, for instance, has intervened in multiple ways to try to ameliorate uneven access to GIS and digital spatial data and diversify the forms of spatial knowledge and spatial logic that may be incorporated in a GIS. While directly addressing core elements of the ‘GIS & Society’ critique, these reconstructions of a critical GIScience introduce their own ambiguities with respect to access, equity, digital representation of spatial knowledge, and epistemologies of new GIS research practices. In this paper, I examine some of the new and persistent ambiguities of participatory GIS that bear inclusion in future critical GIScience research.

Geographic information science: emerging research on the societal implications of the geospatial web

This review examines emerging research on the geoweb, particularly recent efforts to assess the social, political and disciplinary shifts associated with it. The rise of the geoweb is associated with shifts in the processes and power relations of spatial data creation and use, reconfigurations in previously bounded disciplinary knowledge sets, and shifts in the subjectivities and social relations that are produced through the geoweb’s technologies, data, and practices. This early research on the societal implications of the geoweb is drawing productively upon conceptual frameworks from critical GIS, public participation GIS, and spatial data infrastructure research, but must also theorize beyond these existing bodies of work.

GIS Use in Community Planning: A Multidimensional Analysis of Empowerment

A growing body of research examining the social and political implications of geographic information systems (GIS) considers the extent to which the use of this technology may empower or disempower different actors and institutions. However, these studies have tended not to articulate a clear conceptualization of empowerment. Thus, in this paper, I develop a multidimensional conceptual framework for assessing empowerment (and disempowerment), and employ it in examining the impacts of GIS use by community-based organizations engaged in urban planning and neighborhood revitalization. Drawing on a case study conducted with a Minneapolis, Minnesota, neighborhood organization, I show how this multidimensional framework fosters a more complete analysis of empowerment, and therefore, development of a more detailed explanation of the impacts of this new technology.

Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge

The phenomenon of volunteered geographic information is part of a profound transformation in how geographic data, information, and knowledge are produced and circulated. By situating volunteered geographic information (VGI) in the context of big-data deluge and the data-intensive inquiry, the 20 chapters in this book explore both the theories and applications of crowdsourcing for geographic knowledge production with three sections focusing on 1). VGI, Public Participation, and Citizen Science; 2). Geographic Knowledge Production and Place Inference; and 3). Emerging Applications and New Challenges. This book argues that future progress in VGI research depends in large part on building strong linkages with diverse geographic scholarship. Contributors of this volume situate VGI research in geographys core concerns with space and place, and offer several ways of addressing persistent challenges of quality assurance in VGI. This book positions VGI as part of a shift toward hybrid epistemologies, and potentially a fourth paradigm of data-intensive inquiry across the sciences. It also considers the implications of VGI and the exaflood for further time-space compression and new forms, degrees of digital inequality, the renewed importance of geography, and the role of crowdsourcing for geographic knowledge production.

GIS and Spatial Knowledge Production for Neighborhood Revitalization: Negotiating State Priorities and Neighborhood Visions

ABSTRACT: In this article, we examine the role of geographic information systems used by neighborhood organizations in their planning and revitalization efforts in US inner cities. The use of GIS is related to marked changes in the roles and responsibilities of neighborhood organizations as part of a neoliberal policy agenda that expects them to play an increasing role in neighborhood revitalization. Drawing upon research about neighborhood organizations in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and St. Paul, we show how the spatial knowledge and revitalization strategies produced by these organizations frequently reflect and reinforce those promoted by the state. At the same time, some neighborhood organizations construct alternative knowledge through their use of GIS and employ alternative visions of neighborhood revitalization as they navigate the tensions between community visions and state priorities.

PPGIS in Community Development Planning: Framing the Organizational Context

This article examines the local variability of public participation GIS (PPGIS) by urban community revitalization organizations, arguing that this variability is in part shaped by a variety of organizational factors. Existing research has shown PPGIS production to be highly context dependent, identifying an ever-growing set of key elements of this context, including a variety of locally available resources for GIS access and use as well as organizational capacities and characteristics. Contributing to current efforts to expand the conceptual basis of PPGIS research, this article argues that the conceptualization of organizational context must be expanded beyond internal capacities to include organizational networks with local actors, institutions, and resources; organizational knowledge and stability; and organization mission and priorities, all of which shape its activities and relationships, as well as the utility of available GIS resources. This broadened conception of organizational context enables a ...

Mapping Children's Politics: The Promise of Articulation and the Limits of Nonrepresentational Theory

Reflecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in childrens geographies has focused attention on the meanings of the political. While supportive of work that opens up new avenues for conceptualizing politics beyond the liberal rational subject, we provide a critique of research methods which delink politics from historical context and relations of power. Focusing on the use of nonrepresentational theory as a research methodology, the paper points to the limits of this approach for childrens political formation as well as for sustained scholarly collaboration. We argue instead for a politics of articulation, in the double sense of communication and connection. An empirical case study is used as an illustrative example.

Extending the Qualitative Capabilities of GIS: Computer‐Aided Qualitative GIS

A number of approaches for integrating GIS and qualitative research have emerged in recent years, as part of a resurgence of interest in mixed methods research in geography. These efforts to integrate qualitative data and qualitative analysis techniques complement a longstanding focus in GIScience upon ways of handling qualitative forms of spatial data and reasoning in digital environments, and extend engagements with ‘the qualitative’ in GIScience to include discussions of research methodologies. This article contributes to these emerging qualitative GIS methodologies by describing the structures and functions of ‘computer-aided qualitative GIS’ (CAQ-GIS), an approach for storing and analyzing qualitative, quantitative, and geovisual data in both GIS and computer aided data analysis software. CAQ-GIS uses modified structures from conventional desktop GIS to support storage of qualitative data and analytical codes, together with a parallel coding and analysis process carried out with GIS and a computer-aided data analysis software package. The inductive mixed methods analysis potential of CAQ-GIS is demonstrated with examples from research on childrens urban geographies.