Qualitative GIS

Dr. Meghan Cope is an urban social geographer. She is mainly interested in the ways that social, economic, political, and environmental processes influence cities and communities, as well as the ways that people′s everyday lives create meaningful spaces and places within, or even against, the larger-scale processes operating on them. Her focus has always been on social/spatial processes of marginalization and disempowerment, for example, through gender, race/ethnicity, class, youth, etc. She is especially motivated by issues such as employment, households and neighborhoods, welfare, public space, poverty, discrimination, and identity. She is also a qualitative researcher who uses ethnography and other methods to learn about the geographic meanings and processes that matter to marginalized groups. Over the past 10 years she has developed an associated interest in critical perspectives on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and have explored methods of combining qualitative research with GIS (Cope & Elwood, 2009). Sarah Elwood is a professor of geography at University of Washington and cofounder of the Relational Poverty Network with Victoria Lawson. Her research contributes to relational poverty studies, critical GIScience and digital geographies, visual politics and mixed methods, and urban geography. Current activities include research on poverty politics of creative activisms around homelessness, feminist and critical race theorizations of digital geographies, and a collaborative public scholarly project on horizons of critical poverty studies under emerging national populisms. She is the coeditor of Relational Poverty Politics (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge (Springer, 2012) and Qualitative GIS (SAGE, 2009) and author of journal articles in Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, International Journal of Geographic Information Science, and others. She holds an MA and PhD in geography from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Geography from Macalester College.

′An important and meaningful, even an innovative, resource in its field of inquiry. It makes a major contribution to geography by describing, presenting and analyzing the way in which qualitative information may be included in geographic information systems. GIS technology in general is not merely a tool for processing quantitative or qualitative spatial data. Qualitative GIS in particular constitutes a knowledge base with philosophical (ontological and epistemological) foundations. The incorporation of qualitative methods into GIS produces a whole that is "greater than the sum of its parts". Moreover, the book contributes to our understanding of the process in the social sciences by giving a visual presentation of social and spatial phenomena, and thus its contribution goes beyond the geographic discipline′ - Geography Research Forum ′Qualitative GIS is coming of age, and this definitive collection explains why it deserves broad attention. These carefully selected essays by leading researchers, organized around a broad conception of qualitative GIS that extends beyond multi-media data integration to embrace new software tools and interpretive, situated epistemologies, will push readers to rethink not only their preconceptions about qualitative GIS, but also about GI science and critical GIS. GIS researchers, practicioners, observers and users will find much to chew on here′ - Professor Eric Sheppard, University of Minnesota, USA

• Introduction: Qualitative GIS: Forging mixed methods through representations, analytical innovations, and conceptual engagements - Sarah Elwood and Meghan CopeNon-quantitative GIS - Marianna Pavlovskaya PART ONE: REPRESENTATIONSMetadata as a site for imbuing GIS with qualitative information - Nadine SchuurmanMultiple representations, significations, and epistemologies in community-based GIS - Sarah ElwoodGeographic information technologies, local knowledge, and change - Jon Corbett and Giacomo RambaldiPART TWO: ANALYTICAL INTERVENTIONS AND INNOVATIONSGrounded Visualization and scale: A recursive analysis of community spaces - LaDona Knigge and Meghan CopeComputer-Aided Qualitative GIS: A software-level integration of qualitative research and GIS - Jin-Kyu JungPART THREE: CONCEPTUAL ENGAGEMENTSAffective visual geographies and GIScience - Stuart Aitken and Jim CraineTowards a genealogy of qualitative GIS - Matthew W WilsonConclusion: For Qualitative GIS - Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood