Qualitative GIS

Abstract

In less than a decade, qualitative GIS became widely used not only in geography but across social sciences and humanities. Following critical GIS debates and feminist GIS interventions, qualitative GIS has emerged as a field that pioneered ways to map new types of data derived from qualitative interviews, historical archives, literary texts, and, more recently, social media, neogeography, and artistic visions of place. It also advanced integration of qualitative research methods with geospatial analysis in order to account for nonquantifiable, uncounted, and conceptually marginalized but important experiences and socioeconomic practices. Qualitative GIS, therefore, constructs new imaginaries of place and space that can contribute to inclusive citizenship. Advancing the fusion of this scholarship with new spatially oriented and digital research in social sciences and humanities would help to realize better this critical potential of qualitative GIS.