Revisiting the Role of Place in Geographic Information Science

Abstract

Although place-based investigations into human phenomena have been widely conducted in the social sciences over the last decades, this notion has only recently transgressed into Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Such a place-based GIS comprises research from computational place modeling on one end of the spectrum, to purely theoretical discussions on the other end. Central to all research that is concerned with place-based GIS is the notion of placing the individual at the center of the investigation, in order to assess human-environment relationships. This requires the formalization of place, which poses a number of challenges. The first challenge is unambiguously defining place, to subsequently be able to translate it into binary code, which computers and geographic information systems can handle. This formalization poses the next challenge, due to the inherent vagueness and subjectivity of human data. The last challenge is ensuring the transferability of results, requiring large samples of subjective data. In this paper, we re-examine the meaning of place in GIScience from a 2018 perspective, determine what is special about place, and how place is handled both in GIScience and in neighboring disciplines. We, therefore, adopt the view that space is a purely geographic notion, reflecting the dimensions of height, depth, and width in which all things occur and move, while place reflects the subjective human perception of segments of space based on context and experience. Our main research questions are whether place is or should be a significant (sub)topic in GIScience, whether it can be adequately addressed and handled with established GIScience methods, and, if not, which other disciplines must be considered to sufficiently account for place-based analyses. Our aim is to conflate findings from a vast and dynamic field in an attempt to position place-based GIS within the broader framework of GIScience.

Extracting human emotions at different places based on facial expressions and spatial clustering analysis

“…As place is a product of human conceptualization that is derived from the human experience of describing a specific space (Tuan, ; Couclelis, ; Curry, ; Merschdorf & Blaschke, ), a major challenge for modeling places in GIS is the vague boundaries (Burrough & Frank, ; Montello, Friedman, & Phillips, ; Gao et al., 2017a). The boundary is often generated from the density estimation and spatial clustering of georeferenced photos (Feick & Robertson, ; Hu et al., ).…”

“…Agnew () proposed three aspects of place: location, locale, and sense of place, which refers to the experiences of people and their perceptions and conceptualizations of place. And place has been comprehensively depicted as the context and affordance with various human activities, linking to memories and emotions of individuals (Jordan, Raubal, Gartrell, & Egenhofer, ; Kabachnik, ; Scheider & Janowicz, ; Merschdorf & Blaschke, ). Human emotions, which are innately stored in human neural systems (Wierzbicka, ; Izard, ), provide bridges linking the surrounding environments and human perceptions.…”

Factors associated with using alternative sources of primary care: a cross-sectional study

“…As a measure of access, SAD captures the social and physical barriers to care that stem from residential segregation. More researchers are calling for mixed-method measures that revisit the geographic roles of space and place when studying segregation, health, and accessibility [35, 47].…”

“…The SAD index accounts for perceived quality of care and geographic distance simultaneously by adjusting travel distance by an individual’s perception of the clinic [34]. Perceived distance measures like SAD are novel but have been found to be useful in mapping multi-factorial concepts of the built environment [33, 35–37]. In the current study, BCQ score was substituted for the patient-satisfaction questionnaire score used in the development of SAD [34].…”

From Exile to Homeland Return: Ethnographic Mapping to Inform Peacebuilding from Afar

“…Research participants may choose to spatialise memories through mental maps or imagine their futures in a utopian iteration of such. Yet again, there need not be a divide between professionalised and counter-maps, as several scholars have devised sophisticated methods to merge technological/quantitative/'representational' spatial methodologies with more descriptive/qualitative/'non-representational' ones (Boschmann and Cubbon 2014;Caquard et al 2015Caquard et al , 2019Kwan and Ding 2008;Merschdorf and Blaschke 2018). Ethnographic mapping, thus, is purposefully flexible in this regard, as the spatial representation component of its craft is tightly bound to the process of ethnography and the understanding and negotiation of community preferences that transpire through it.…”