Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice

TLDR

The rise of interactive web technologies and user‑generated content has created a new form of geographic information—volunteered geographic information—where citizens use handheld devices and web mapping to collect, annotate, and share spatial data, fundamentally changing how geographic information is produced and disseminated. This article outlines the key dimensions of VGI for geography, highlights its potential, and identifies the most urgent research questions needed to harness it. The authors analyze VGI’s content and characteristics, the technical and social processes that generate it, methods for synthesizing and applying the data, and emerging social and political concerns.

Abstract

The convergence of newly interactive Web-based technologies with growing practices of user-generated content disseminated on the Internet is generating a remarkable new form of geographic information. Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets, using Web-based mapping interfaces to mark and annotate geographic features, or adding geographic location to photographs, text, and other media shared online. These phenomena, which generate what we refer to collectively as volunteered geographic information (VGI), represent a paradigmatic shift in how geographic information is created and shared and by whom, as well as its content and characteristics. This article, which draws on our recently completed inventory of VGI initiatives, is intended to frame the crucial dimensions of VGI for geography and geographers, with an eye toward identifying its potential in our field, as well as the most pressing research needed to realize this potential. Drawing on our ongoing research, we examine the content and characteristics of VGI, the technical and social processes through which it is produced, appropriate methods for synthesizing and using these data in research, and emerging social and political concerns related to this new form of information.