Paper short abstract:

This slot serves as an informal introduction to the ways GIS and ethnography can be integrated, using the adoption of gambling in the Western Pacific in the past 150 years as a case study.

Paper long abstract:

I am no expert in GIS. Geographic Information Systems are (to me, at least) a bewildering complex of software which enables the spatial analysis of data. As a social anthropologist, the primary way my colleagues and I interact with GIS is simply to create maps representing our field sites. In this introduction I describe how this relationship escalated in my own case, and how it has led me to seek out others with similar experiences either coming from ethnography to GIS or vice-versa. The dynamics enabled by combining ethnography and GIS open new possibilities, and pose new challenges to the ethnographic sciences. I make a preliminary sketch of the various configurations made possible suggesting preliminary connections with the upcoming papers in the hope of prompting an ongoing dialogue.

Paper short abstract:

How can GIS and ethnography, in their complementary mode of representation, contribute to community-based management, care and stewardship in adapting and mitigating climate change?

Paper long abstract:

Based on ongoing research in a sea-Sami community of Porsanger, Norway, we seek to explore the transformative potential of community-based diverse marine economies (Roelvink, St. Martin, & Gibson-Graham, 2015) and environmental caring practices in the face of climate change (Haraway, 2016). Porsanger fjord may be understood as a capitalist ruin. A few decades ago, it was a rich fishery fjord, now totally transformed due to national fishery politics, changing technologies, ecological changes riven by invasive species. These have ruined kelp forests, spawning grounds and fisherfarmer livelihoods.

The capitalist growth paradigm has reshaped the registers of what Guttari (2000) addresses as three ecologies; the environment, the social relations and the human subjectivity (Latour, Stengers, Tsing, & Bubandt, 2018). Our idea is to explore these ecologies in light of GIS technologies and ethnography. Starting out from a series of map-based interviews on local use of foreshore resources in the fjord of Porsanger, in collaboration with Mearrasiida (sea Sami Centre) and the interviewees, we will identify palpable emic topics, and discuss their potential and relevance for being explored through GIS mapping and visual ethnographic methodologies. PPGIS and ethnography adhere to two very different modes of representation, both criticized for their dangers of disempowerment (Dunn, 2007; Grasseni, 2007). Being aware of these critiques, we want to explore if, and how, their analytical complementarity and differences may be useful for mediating "the three ecologies" (ibid2018) and their potentials for community-based engagement, care and stewardship.

Paper short abstract:

The paper shows the use of maps to visualise changes of the heritage regime of the city of Lviv through decades of post-socialist urban change. Woven together with an ethnography of heritage institutions, mapping directs the attention in a way that is highly productive for ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

Heritage regimes are often interrogated through the interpretations they develop around certain periods and styles. Major socio-political changes like the dissolution of the USSR bring about changes in memory politics. This is especially true in highly contested borderland cities like Lviv in Western Ukraine, that had been symbolically privileged locations for previous regimes. In the paper I bring together an ethnography of the changing institutional landscape of conservation from the beginning of Soviet Lviv through 1991 to today with mapping ownership, protection types and the distribution of key actors. I argue that GIS is a crucial addition to urban ethnography that helps to overcome the dichotomy of informants' versus ethnographers' perspectives, as they are produced at the intersection of these, but independent of both. Mapping the changes in the heritage regime helps to identify the blind spots of ethnographic attention, as well as informants' understanding, a perspective otherwise inaccessible with the tools of conventional ethnography.

Paper short abstract:

If mapping has been used by ethnographers in studying local communities, then what about an ethnography of mapmakers? Because GIS is an organised social activity, I will share experiences of volunteering for OpenStreetMap while I recognise issues such as labour, inclusion, and neocolonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, the public depended on centralised mapping agencies for the collection, analysis, and distribution of geographic information. Today, mapping moves towards outsourcing geospatial work to the public. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an example. It is a map - digital, free, and editable. Also, it is a social project - an international GIS. The OSM community has thousands of active mappers daily who create, maintain, and share the geographic information for various needs in recreational, entrepreneurial, or humanitarian settings.

Previously, the focus in GIS research was the accuracy, value, or ethics of the digital mapping, respectively. However, mapping is not only representation, practicality, or critique, but also work. As for OSM, it is made possible almost entirely by volunteer work.

I have been volunteering for OSM for the past few years. In my PhD project, I have been doing an autoethnography of mapping to understand what it means and takes to make OSM work, for whom, and why.

I pay attention to both the availability, accuracy, or accessibility of the geographic information, and also the everyday accountabilities of the mapmakers to each other and the local communities being mapped in both intimate and remote ways. Such issues play out in terms of recognition of digital, emotional, and other labour, expertise, notions of private space, and data sovereignty.

In the midst of the hype and momentum in digital mapping today, an ethnography of GIS recognises assumptions, narratives, and worldviews that are inextricably linked to how geospatial data is made, shared, and used.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my fieldwork with GIS in rural, urban, and peri-urban Mongolia, I will explore to what extent GIS could identify and mitigate research bias and its potential limitations in ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract:

Recognising and understanding potential research bias in a study is crucial, as such bias may significantly distort the results of a study (Galdas, 2017; Polit & Beck, 2014). For instance, sampling bias occurs from having underrepresented groups, and nonresponse bias occurs when some sampled subjects cannot be reached (Agresti & Finlay, 2009). Some groups of people who have nomadic lifestyles in rural Mongolia are often excluded from health-related studies, an especially intractable problem among the many nomadic peoples of Mongolia. Fieldwork with GIS enables ethnographers to recognise and mitigate such biases and make adjustments during the fieldwork to make a more valuable end product. GIS can also be used to cross-check data when different methods are used to repeat the initial work with a new twist to increase accuracy. Drawing on my fieldwork with GIS in rural, urban, and peri-urban Mongolia, I will explore to what extent GIS could identify and mitigate research bias and its potential limitations in ethnographic research.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution reflects on the challenges of developing a methodology integrating ethnographic data into GIS-based maps of social vulnerability to disasters. It focuses on the difficulty in reconciling different epistemologies, and of valuing uncertainty when policy recommendations are at stake.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution reflects on the challenges of developing a methodology that integrates ethnographic data into GIS-based maps of social vulnerability to disasters. In the past decade, disaster risk reduction (DRR) scholars have adopted the concept of social vulnerability, using it to account for how socio-economic inequalities amplify disaster risk. They have developed methodologies to quantify social vulnerability, using GIS to calculate a vulnerability score based on geospatial data. Helpfully, this work has encouraged the incorporation of social variables into disaster risk modelling, but critics challenge its conceptualization of vulnerability as static, simplistic and ultimately disempowering. Meanwhile, although alternative approaches to social vulnerability mapping have emerged from the qualitative social sciences, many remain skeptical as to whether they can produce the kind of generalizable, unambiguous findings that can guide decision-making. My research seeks to develop a methodology to integrate ethnographic data into GIS-based social vulnerability mapping, focusing on the Chilean town of Cartagena as a case study. Drawing on feminist epistemologies, I understand the triangulation of quantitative and ethnographic methods as a strategy to 'refract' different ways of knowing. Specifically, I have conducted 10 interviews with residents, and used GIS and Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis software to code the transcripts and produce 3D 'geo-narrative' maps, building on a technique elaborated by Kwan and Ding. Based on the ongoing research, I highlight two main challenges: the reconciliation of different epistemologies in the analysis, and the difficulty of valuing uncertainty and openness when planning and policy recommendations are at stake.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a case of an ethnographic foray into GIS through the case of a mapping pilot program created as part of a Community Driven Development poverty alleviation program by a GIS-trained ethnographer. The paper discusses how ethnography complicated the GIS at all stages of the project.

Paper long abstract:

Maps and geographic information are often touted as powerful tools for decision-making due to their ability to visualize spatial distributions across space/territory. However, there is an implicit assumption that the decision-makers are requesting maps and geographic visualizations. How do maps assist decision-making in situations marked by community decision-making processes, financial and social marginalization, and low education levels? This paper presents a case of an ethnographic foray into GIS through the case of a mapping pilot program - MapAtlas - created as part of a Community Driven Development (CDD) poverty alleviation program in the Philippines by a GIS-trained ethnographer. Designed to assist community volunteers in their decision-making processes, MapAtlas affected decision-making in an uneven manner. Through examination of spatial literacy, data gaps and rejections, and the politics of agency, the paper demonstrates the need to carefully consider the role and relationship of maps in development projects and other policy interventions, above and beyond a map's presumed role as an informational artifact or document. The combination of GIS and ethnographic expertise was also uneven, marked by limitations and uncertainty, but informative to both in furthering an understanding of the politics of knowledge and its place in decision-making for both the policy-implementers and the scholar.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how approaches to participatory mapping that employ digital tools may draw upon ethnography and experiment with design in order to become more responsive to the way territories expand, shrink, and move in relation to kinship dynamics and ecological shifts.

Paper long abstract:

What does land use and tenure mapping mean for people whose access to land has historically been determined not by hereditary titles but by shifting relationships, not only with the land itself but with the people one shares it with? Can the participatory design of mobile mapping tools contribute to more appropriate ways of recording these relationships? Leading up to Namibia's independence from South Africa, participatory mapping served as a crucial means through which historically marginalised populations were able to claim ancestral rights to land and resources that had fallen under the purview and control of the apartheid regime. These efforts had the effect of devolving power and securing forms of political and economic self-determination, but also of fixing, in time and in space, what were once more flexible forms of territory. Approaches to participatory mapping have developed significantly, from specialists working with local people to produce paper maps and lay GPS waypoints, to local people engaging with very high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery using accessible mobile mapping tools. These technologies make land use and tenure mapping possible not only for professionals but for lay people with low levels of literacy, but they are not, in themselves, responsive to what ethnography reveals about the way territories expand, shrink, and move in relation to kinship dynamics and ecological shifts. As an anthropologist and a GIScience researcher, we have been experimenting with how to approach this issue. This paper reports our current thinking on how to go about this.

Paper short abstract:

LifeofBAM.com is the outreach tool for portraying ethnographic data to the broader public in Siberia along the Baikal Amur Mainline railroad. In this paper, the problems and opportunities to intersect qualitative data and GIS in the research project "Configurations of Remoteness" will be discussed.

Paper long abstract:

The website www.lifeofbam.com is an outreach tool developed in the context of the research project "CoRe - Configurations of Remoteness: Entanglements of Humans and Transportation Infrastructure in the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Region" in Siberia. It is a cartographic storytelling portal where ethnographic knowledge is translated into a series of narrative and illustrated episodes. These are linked to a dynamic map which takes the visitor interactively though the studied locations along and off the BAM. Users can trace research results in lay language. This is of importance to reach out to the broader public and to feed back findings and materials to the research partners in the field who contributed with their knowledge. The target groups are therefore interview partners, experts from museums and cultural centres, social and political institutions as well as inhabitants of the villages and cities along the railroad. The project team continuously extends the episodes in English and in Russian and updates their analysis.

This paper will highlight the potentials of interactive cartographic storytelling and touch upon the challenges that come along with the methodological linkage of a numeric system such as GIS and often spatially blurred qualitative data. We discuss also the benefits and shortcomings of the ArcGIS storymap platform as well as the effectiveness of internet based outreach involving heavy data traffic in places with limited technical infrastructure (such as Siberia). Finally, we explore analytic and epistemic potentials of cartographic storytelling and invite discussion of its technical and methodological boundaries.