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Volunteered geographic information: future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS

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Abstract

New interactive web services are dramatically altering the way in which ordinary citizens can create digital spatial data and maps, individually and collectively, to produce new forms of digital spatial data that some term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI). This article examines the early literature on this phenomenon, illustrating its shared propositions that these new technologies are part of shifts in the social and technological processes through which digital spatial data are produced, with accompanying implications for the content and characteristics of geospatial data, and the social and political practices promoted through their use. I illustrate how these debates about VGI conceive of spatial data as socially embedded, and suggest ways in which future research might productively draw upon conceptualizations from participatory, feminist, and critical GIS research that have emerged from similar foundations.

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Notes

  1. Some authors use PPGIS and PGIS interchangeably, while others delineate a careful distinction between them. Two recent reviews of the field provide detailed discussion of these areas of GIS research and practice (Sieber 2006; Dunn 2007). Here, I use PPGIS/PGIS to refer to them together.

  2. Such efforts to de-couple supposed fixed links between research methods and epistemologies are a longstanding contribution from feminist geographers’ writing on methodologies, such as the edited collection “Should Women Count” from The Professional Geographer, 1995, volume 47, issue 4.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the careful reading and incisive comments of the reviewers, who challenged me to strengthen the article in several ways.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Washington, Box 353550, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Sarah Elwood

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Correspondence to Sarah Elwood.

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Elwood, S. Volunteered geographic information: future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS. GeoJournal 72, 173–183 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9186-0

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