Assessing the usefulness of PPGIS for qualitative exploration of human relationships with places: an empirical study

Participatory mapping (PM) in contemporary research has seen the proliferation of digital methods and methodologies, notably Public Participation Geographical Information Systems (PPGIS) and crowd mapping, together with extensive utilization of spatial concepts, including landscape, space, and place. This study delves into the potential of PPGIS and crowd mapping approaches to qualitatively investigate the concept of place. Our objective is to determine how data collected in large quantities in crowd mapping projects can serve as input for qualitative and mixed-method analyses of terms such as place meaning, place attachment, placemaking, and agency of place. We employed text data gathered through a custom geoquestionnaire to conduct a thematic analysis. The themes identified included examples of emotional and psychological aspects of human relations to place, descriptions of human-made and natural material qualities of locations. External experts evaluated the resulting themes and concurred that this kind of data is most helpful for analyzing a sense of place and least useful for an agency of place. We posit that PPGIS can uniquely augment place-based research through their provision of precise geospatial information. This characteristic enables researchers to employ both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, fostering a more comprehensive and nuanced exploration of place.