IT'S GRIM UP NORTH

That is a powerful statement. It MEANS something. It's wrong but it's how people think about geographical areas.

How can wecapture, record, analyse and inform using such

vernacular vague geographies

keywords: vernacular qualitative spatial vague fuzzy maps

Vernacular Geographyup northdown townthe shops in the centredog shit alleyHyde Park is a high crime areathe bad side of townthe posh neighbourhoods

Are used much much much more than the coordinates and scientifically defined variables beloved of most professional analysts, websites and web maps.

the use of descriptors like ‘Downtown’ or ‘the grim area down bythe station’ allows us to communicate geographical references that often includeinformation on associated environmental, socio-economic, and architectural data

These vernacular geographical terms are not simplyindicative – they often represent psychogeographical areas in which we constrain ouractivities, and they convey to members of our immediate socio-linguistic community thatthis constraint should be added to their shared knowledge and acted upon

Neogeography

Volunteered Geographic Information

Paleogeographyby professionals. Official.lines, polygons, top down, powerful, heavy on the sciencedefined. discrete

Neogeography is about people using and creating theirown maps, on their own terms andby combining elements of an existing toolset

Ordnance.S. - vernacular placenamesOpenStreetMap loc_name and old_name“dog shit alley” “the Giant Bench”

geocodr.netFinds places / events from people's Flickr photos. The text peopleuse when describing their snapshots.

vernacular areasbit confusing this bit....

Indifference Continuousness

Poor precision

Multivariate classification

Averaging

Definitional disagreement

1. Vernacular areas, often fall into all of these.Ask people to outline and justify areas where they think crime levels are high, most people will draw on a slew of continuous and discrete variables at differing scales of detail, historical experiences, urban morphology and mythology, as well as introducing linguistic vagueness

2. Internal variationsHigh crime areas, for example, often have zones of greater or lesser danger. Overlaid on this will be a variation in the familiarity with areas or confidence with which people assign an area to a term

SoritesUnbounded areasdont caremantle

transition between town centre and not

there is a line, but we dont know how to define, measure it

soils, rough area, binned into classes

seaside, hill, boundary is average

high crime for a norweigan and a mancunian

most people think LA is a high crime area’ but have no idea how ‘LA’ or‘high crime’ are being used.

So.

Pain to capture using traditional discrete mapping tools, and even if you did, itwouldn't make much sense within those models. Geo data is good because computers can do stuff with it, but people dont think in geo terms

meet people halfway, somehow?

Treating areas as having diffuse boundaries, internal variations

Why can't people think like my computer??!!

Fuzzy sets / logic

Statistical and probabilistic approaches

Mereotopological calculi

Supervaluation semantics

a coordinate might be 80% ‘High Crime’, for example. The use is clearest when there are contrasting classes, even if these are implicit: 80% ‘High Crime’ also suggests a 20%membership of a ‘Low Crime’ class. Fuzzy Logic ‘if CRIME is HIGH, INVEST = MORE’.

perceived areas as surfacesacross which a membership level varies we

Mereological Algebras, those that deal with parts andwholes, have developed to cope with three-part logics – that is, logical problems dealing with true, false and indeterminate questionsEgg Model. Yoke = true, White = indeterminate, fryingpan = falsevector. spatial relationships, does one overlap, within etc

multiple people hold multiple spatial and aspatial definitions.multiple definitions of an area canbe overlapped to construct a mereotopological entity in which the yolk is areaseveryone agrees are ‘Downtown’, the white is where there is some agreement, andthe pan areas where everyone agrees no definition holds

methods already out thereor, in academia, perhaps

Problems

Fitness for purpose

Precision and accuracy

both with reference to an individual (can data collected from aperson for one purpose be used for another?) and the group (are two people’s datacomparable?)define the question, increase the specificity of the problemsi.e. “where are the areas you mean when you say “you are going to the shops” ?vs “define the areas where you shop, and rate them according to how often you go there in a week.”

the instrument is the mind, can we gauge the accuracy and confidence.Qualify depending on user-confidence in their own judgement or familiarity with the area?

AimsAn intuitive system to record, capture analyse and inform using vague vernacular geographies

BenefitsDatasets that are rich in information. Comparable with empirical data.Personally & group comparable.Applied to anything where there is folk vague geographies

e.g. Best shopping areas in LeedsSmelliest streetsbest beachespercieved highest crime areasfavourite part of the DalesWhich areas around the town are more important for you, before we create a bypass.Where are the terrorists? ask an American, then ask an Irishman.

Points to consider

Ease of use – meet people half way

Capture vague borders

Intra and inter variations

Linquistic component?

Comparison

Outputs

Tell Tim to stop here!

Then discussion

then he will tell you about his

methodology

tagger

So far, some applications:

Where do you think has more crime?

Where are you most familiar with?

Where is wilderness in the UK?

on Indian Reservation:Which areas are more important for you

when thinking about hunting

Which places are more important for sensitive cultural practices