Читать книгу GIS Research Methods - Steven J. Steinberg - Страница 60

Making information more accessible to GIS requires upfront organization and structure of data storage as well as data coding and formatting. These tasks are not unique to GIS; rather, they are essential considerations for all data collection and analysis. Computers and GIS provide additional storage opportunities. Multimedia capabilities of the computer allow you to link photographs, sound bites, movie files, and scanned information, providing significant opportunity for raw data preservation and thus maintaining complete, detailed information.

For example, you could record a key informant interview or oral history on tape in its entirety, or you could record a traditional dance on video. (A key informant is an individual who is knowledgeable about the particular issue or topic under study. An oral history is a qualitative research method in which a researcher gathers individuals’ stories and histories associated with a particular place, event, or issue.) You can convert these records into sound and video computer data files and link them to a GIS map, as discussed in chapter 6. When a user clicks on the location associated with a video or sound file on the GIS map, the complete recording becomes available.

Data coded or summarized from open-ended surveys or interviews for purposes of analysis are simultaneously available in their entirety to a researcher who may opt for a different coding scheme or analysis at a later time. To code data means to assign a meaningful symbolic numbering system to represent the answers in the data. For example, researchers collecting answers using a rating scale of 1 to 5 may reserve an additional code to represent questions that the respondent skipped, 0 or 99 being the most commonly used codes for this purpose.

Thus, beyond the many analytical and data presentational benefits we explore in this text, the GIS can store a variety of digital datasets collected during a particular study. If these data can be maintained in raw form, they can be used in new and different analyses at a later time. If you consider how your data can be used in the future when you build your library of GIS datasets, you can greatly extend the life and utility of any individual dataset.