Interdisciplinary approaches for describing and comparing landscapes

How do people perceive and describe different landscapes? How can we arrive at descriptions, and ultimately representations in computers, that reflect people’s notions and the cultural values associated with landscapes?

In the Cogito-funded project ‘How language shapes our sense of place’, we investigated these questions applying interdisciplinary approaches. These included traditional empirical methods such as face-to-face interviews and landscape category free listing, but also emerging approaches to harvest crowdsourced data in the form of hiking blogs and social media data.

A combination of methods was used to analyse the resulting texts, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. In ten study sites distributed across Switzerland, a comparison of text data collected through free listing, from hiking blogs and from social media tags showed that different types of landscapes were more similarly described than different landscapes. However, sense of place related terms, such as natural, recreational, quiet and tranquil, did not differ between different landscapes. The novelty of our approach lies in the combination of methods to develop an integrated methodology suitable allowing us to use different forms of language to investigate landscape and sense of place. The project constitutes a step toward including the views of a wider public, integrating multiple perspectives, and adding semantics to the typically expert-based spatial data collected for landscape assessments.

Recent publications:

Flurina Wartmann, Elise Acheson, and Ross S. Purves: Describing and comparing landscapes using tags, texts, and free lists: an interdisciplinary approach. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 32(8), 1572-1592. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2018.1445257

Flurina Wartmann and Ross S. Purves: Investigating sense of place as a cultural ecosystem service in different landscapes through the lens of language. Landscape and Urban Planning, 175, 169-183. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.03.021