qualmap: qualmap: Opinionated Approach for Digitizing Semi-structured...

In qualmap: Opinionated Approach for Digitizing Semi-Structured Qualitative GIS Data

qualmap: Opinionated Approach for Digitizing Semi-structured Qualitative GIS Data

Description

Provides a set of functions for taking qualitative GIS data, hand drawn on a map, and converting it to a simple features object. These tools are focused on data that are drawn on a map that contains some type of polygon features. For each area identified on the map, the id numbers of these polygons can be entered as vectors and transformed using qualmap.

Details

Qualitative GIS outputs are notoriously difficult to work with because individuals' conceptions of space can vary greatly from each other and from the realities of physical geography themselves. qualmap builds on a semi-structured approach to qualitative GIS data collection. Respondents use a specially designed basemap that allows them free reign to identify geographic features of interest and makes it easy to convert their annotations into digital map features. This is facilitated by including on the basemap a series of polygons, such as neighborhood boundaries or census geography, along with an identification number that can be used by qualmap. A circle drawn on the map can therefore be easily associated with the features that it touches or contains.

qualmap provides a suite of functions for entering, validating, and creating sf objects based on these hand drawn clusters and their associated identification numbers. Once the clusters have been created, they can be summarized and analyzed either within R or using another tool.

This approach provides an alternative to either unstructured qualitative GIS data, which are difficult to work with empirically, and to digitizing respondents' annotations as rasters, which require a sophisticated workflow. This semi-structured approach makes integrating qualitative GIS with existing census and administrative data simple and straightforward, which in turn allows these data to be used as measures in spatial statistical models.

There are six key verbs introduced in qualmap:

• define: create a vector of feature id numbers that constitute a single "cluster"

• validate: check feature id numbers against a reference data set to ensure that the values are valid

• preview: plot cluster on an interactive map to ensure the feature ids have been entered correctly (the preview should match the map used as a data collection instrument)

• create: create a single cluster object once the data have been validated and visually inspected

• combine: combine multiple cluster objects together into a single tibble data object

• summarize: summarize the combined data object based on a single qualitative construct to prepare for mapping

If you use qualmap in your work, please cite the package using the article that discusses this work in Cartographica. See citation("qualmap") for details.

Tidy Evaluation

qualmap makes use of tidy evaluation, meaning that key and category references may be either quoted or unquoted (i.e. bare).

Author(s)

Author and Maintainer: Christopher Prener, Ph.D.

See Also

Useful links:

• Package Website and Documentation

• Source Code on GitHub

• Bug Reports and Feature Requests

qualmap documentation built on May 31, 2022, 9:05 a.m.