Place versus Space: From Points, Lines and Polygons in GIS to Place-Based Representations Reflecting Language and Culture

Abstract

Around the globe, Geographic Information Systems (GISs) are well established in the daily workflow of authorities, businesses and non-profit organisations. GIS can effectively handle spatial entities and offer sophisticated analysis and modelling functions to deal with space. Only a small fraction of the literature in Geographic Information Science—or GIScience in short—has advanced the development of place, addressing entities with an ambiguous boundary and relying more on the human or social attributes of a location rather than on crisp geographic boundaries. While the GIScience developments support the establishment of the digital humanities, GISs were never designed to handle subjective or vague data. We, an international group of authors, juxtapose place and space in English language and in several other languages and discuss potential consequences for Geoinformatics and GIScience. In particular, we address the question of whether linguistic and cultural settings play a role in the perception of place. We report on some facts revealed by this multi-language and multi-cultural dialogue, and what particular aspects of place we were able to discern regarding the few languages addressed.

Extracting human emotions at different places based on facial expressions and spatial clustering analysis

“…In this study, a large number of faces detected might belong to a small group of users and the information provided by social media users may not always comply with quality standards. However, the results of emotions based on facial expressions do reflect active users’ experiences, opinions, interests, and feelings at those places, and can provide new insights for place‐based information research (Blaschke et al., ).…”

“…Place, which plays a central role in daily life not only as a location reference but also reflecting the way humans perceive, experience and understand the environment, is a key issue in geography and GIScience (Tuan, ; Goodchild, ; Winter & Freksa, ; Scheider & Janowicz, ; Goodchild, ; McKenzie, Janowicz, Gao, Yang, & Hu, ; Gao et al., 2017a; Gao, Li, Li, Janowicz, & Zhang, 2017b; Blaschke et al, ; Zhang, Zhang, Liu, & Lin, 2018a; Purves, Winter, & Kuhn, ; Wu, Wang, Shi, Gao, & Liu, ). Agnew () proposed three aspects of place: location, locale, and sense of place, which refers to the experiences of people and their perceptions and conceptualizations of place.…”

A Fuzzy Spatial Region Extraction Model for Object’s Vague Location Description from Observer Perspective

“…Spatial information extracted from place descriptions can be achieved by the graph matching process [30]. The comprehension of the semantics of location, a multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic field, depends on the social attributes of a person rather than the crisp geographic coordinates and boundaries [31,32]. Massive user-generated data from social networks can be used as a key data source to explore the relationship between people and places [33].…”

Boundaries and Policing: Space, Jurisdictions, and Roles in the Collection of Official Crime Data

“…Place-based geographic information science (GISc.) runs the spectrum from questions associated with automatic modeling and the semantic web (Ballatore, 2016;Blaschke et al, 2018;McFarlane & Anderson, 2011) to critical GISc. (Elwood & Leszczynski, 2013;Leszczynski, 2012;Wilson, 2011bWilson, , 2011aWilson, , 2017.…”

“…Following this train of thought, the formalization of place also raises questions regarding the transferability of results . The transferability of results can manifest itself in a broad cultural fashion, such as when language does not precisely distinguish between place and space (Blaschke et al, 2018) or in the culture of professional or the user of the term. For example, Weisburd and his colleagues (Braga et al, 2017;Tita & Greenbaum, 2009;D.…”