Methods for Research

I strive to work with both qualitative and quantitative methodologies; I respect the broad but shallow results of statistical spatal demographic analysis and the deep but narrow insights of community ethnography. I intend to do both; and, when it comes to tools, I'm interested in exploring how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be pushed to produce more qualitative, less quantitative results.

Often, when people talk about qualitative GIS they either mean participatory GIS, where non-experts participate in the production of maps using GIS tools, or else they try to speak to qualitative questions. I certainly am interested in both, but I'm also interested in asking: how do we generatemore qualitative data sets for mapping? How can we engage in a process that captures emotive, experiential sense of the city and exposes it to analysis (and comparison with more quantitative layers)?