Qualitative Methods and Geohumanities

Introduction: On Being Coincident

The development of cheaper, faster, and more powerful digital tools, and the way they have fed the ‘digital turn’, has been largely contemporaneous with the (re)activation of qualitative research in geography. While qualitative research has always been important in the discipline, the period since the late 1990s has seen a deepening and diversification of the use of, and critical reflection upon, qualitative methods; this lines up coincidentally with the evolution of the internet, smartphones, and instantaneous global connectivity, making for a productive convergence.

This chapter examines the intersections between qualitative methods and digital geographies, particularly along two underlying themes: practice, looking at how digital tools have been adopted and adapted for qualitative data collection, analysis, and representation (including visualizations); and meanings, to help us understand digital lives, digital worlds, and new social/spatial engagements. I examine the mutual conditioning of digital techniques and the revitalization of qualitative geographies, qualitative GIS, and an emerging ‘digital/spatial/geo-humanities’, while identifying specialized resources on related debates and subfields. In the final section, I draw from my own work on two youth geography projects, separated by a decade, to demonstrate emerging shifts in the practice and meanings of digital qualitative geographies, and propose several future developments to watch.

Historical Context and Main Debates

Geography has always had a strong tradition of qualitative research, but in the past two decades the practice of qualitative methods and a growing critical reflection on those practices have resulted in a robust set of methodological and epistemological developments. This can be traced, in part, to the ‘critical turn’ in geography from the 1970s onwards, whereby issues of social justice, diverse standpoints, and a shift in ontology (what can be known about the world) led activist scholars to develop diverse methods in line with social and political goals of equity, justice, and relevance (see Aitken and Valentine, 2006, for a detailed overview). Similarly, as traced by Corrigan (2015), humanists and phenomenologists in geography have explored the creation and meanings of place, landscape, poetics, and power for decades, using textual and visual interrogations to discern meanings. With solid critical foundations in both the social science and humanities sides of geography, and a mid-1990s critique of spatial science (Pickles, 1995), it is no surprise that the first editions of what are now essential guidebooks for qualitative methods in geography were published around the turn of the millennium. Similarly, the Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers was founded in 2000 when sufficient demand for an intellectual forum was recognized. Subsequent editions of most of the guidebooks, as well as new volumes (e.g., DeLyser et al., 2010; Gomez and Jones, 2010) and substantial journal publishing in qualitative geographies, have created a much richer library and platform for debate, inquiry, and scholarly development in qualitative geography.

The recent expansion of qualitative geography has been aided by the expansion of user-friendly tools for data collection, analysis, and representation: as new digital tools and capacities have been developed, the potential for examining “geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital” (Ash et al., 2018: 27; emphasis in original) has been equally captivating to ethnographers as to quantitative modellers. In terms of (qualitative) geographies produced through the digital, the tools of qualitative data collection have been rapidly digitized, including digital voice recorders and cameras for interviews and focus groups, scanners for hand-drawn materials, online survey tools for open-ended responses, smartphone apps with GPS for participant diaries (travel, food, activity, etc.), and optical character recognition for digitizing the riches of the archive and making them searchable. This digitization has been incremental, unevenly adopted, and not without a certain amount of handwringing by practitioners who worry about losing something along the way – perhaps a sense of intimacy with one’s data? In addition to shifting the tools of data collection practice, the ‘digital turn’ has also had significant impact on analysis, such as in mixed reactions of researchers to computer-aided qualitative data analysis software (see Watson and Till, 2010).

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