Browsing by Author "Jacobson, Daniel"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A Feminist GIS Approach for Identifying, Mapping and Evaluating Gender Inclusive Features in Urban Public Spaces
    (2024-04-30) Falahatkar, Hawjin; Fast, Victoria; Jacobson, Daniel; Neuhaus, Fabian
    This thesis thoroughly explores gender and movement disability inclusion in urban public open spaces, scrutinizing both physical design and digital mapping aspects. It illuminates the unique spatial behavior patterns observed among women and individuals with reduced mobility in urban settings, emphasizing the disparity between these behaviors and their representation in physical design and mapping systems. The study identifies the central concern of current urban designs’ inadequacy in providing safe and equitable access for these groups. Moreover, it recognizes the gender digital divide in mapping systems, where women are frequently underrepresented in spatial datasets, complicating accurate mapping of gender-place relations. To tackle these challenges, the research develops a feminist GIS framework focused on understanding, mapping, and evaluating urban public spaces from a gender and disability perspective. This framework includes defining a data topology containing various gender-inclusive features, collecting multiple data sets to represent these features, establishing a data source hierarchy, and utilizing Esri technology for data collection, mapping, analysis, and visualization. The study produces an interactive map and dashboard, the Inclusive UCalgary Campus Dashboard, to visualize gender-inclusive features and attributes publicly for UCalgary users. Furthermore, it establishes multiple assessment criteria to evaluate the condition of gender-inclusive features within UCalgary’s campus, gauging how UCalgary accommodates the spatial needs of women and those with reduced mobilities. The findings reveal diverse and often fine-scale map features representing women and individuals with reduced mobilities are absent from available datasets resulting in inadequate representation of this group on maps. Through a data source hierarchy, GIS functionalities, and online interactive mapping methods, it is possible to collect, store, manipulate, and map features that are crucial for this group’s space navigation and utilization. Furthermore, the assessment of UCalgary’s campus open space reveals significant challenges in gender and disability inclusion, particularly regarding the uneven distribution of gender-inclusive features and functions across campus areas which adversely affects safety, accessibility, and spatial quality, especially within campus peripheral zones. In conclusion, the study advocates for a purpose-led GIS by redefining the mapping process that prioritizes equity over efficiency. It highlights the feminist GIS framework’s potential to enhance accessibility, safety, and diversity in urban environments for less-represented groups, thereby promoting a sense of belonging and quality of life for all community members.
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    A Geospatial Infrastructure to Collect, Evaluate, and Distribute Volunteered Geographic Information for Disaster Management
    (2016) Poorazizi, Mohammad Ebrahim; Lichti, Derek; Liang, Steve; Wang, Xin; Jacobson, Daniel; Kalantari, Mohsen
    Recent disasters, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, have drawn attention to the potential role of citizens as active information producers. By using location-aware devices such as smartphones to collect geographic information in the form of geo-tagged text, photos, or videos, and sharing this information through online social media, such as Twitter, citizens create Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). This thesis presents a framework for the effective use of VGI in disaster management platforms. The proposed framework consists of four components: (i) a VGI brokering module, to provide a standard service interface to retrieve VGI from multiple social media streams, (ii) a VGI quality control component, to evaluate spatiotemporal relevance and credibility of VGI, (iii) a VGI publisher module, which uses a service-based delivery mechanism to disseminate VGI, and (iv) a VGI discovery component, which acts like a yellow-pages service to find, browse, and query available VGI datasets. A set of quality metrics specifically designed for VGI evaluation is introduced. This research also presents a prototype implementation including an evaluation with social media data collected during Typhoon Hagupit (i.e., Typhoon Ruby), which hit the Philippines during December 2014. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed framework provides a promising solution towards an effective use of VGI in disaster management platforms. Utilization of the proposed quality metrics on the collected VGI database – with multiple social media stream contributions – will allow disaster response teams to make informed decisions that could save lives, meet basic humanitarian needs earlier, and perhaps limit environmental and economic damage.
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    Thinking with Sketches: Leveraging Everyday Use of Visuals for Information Visualization
    (2016) Walny, Jagoda; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Henry Riche, Nathalie; Tang, Anthony; Wood, Joseph; Jacobson, Daniel
    The overarching goal of the information visualization community is to "amplify cognition" — that is, to help people to think — about data. However, the activities that people perform in their everyday thinking practices have not been considered in the core approaches to information visualization. Observing these everyday thinking practices makes it clear that, for many people, a normal and perhaps essential component of thinking includes creating sketched externalizations of their thoughts. People sketch rough ideas; they refine concepts on whiteboards; they annotate texts while reading. We refer to such activities collectively as thinking with sketches. Deliberate support for this kind of thinking is largely absent from information visualizations; we explore the possibility of providing such support. This research is rooted in the thesis that there are observable aspects of sketched externalizations that can inform information visualizations. We first present a series of qualitative observational studies that expand our understanding of sketched externalizations from an information visualization standpoint. We study the contexts in which people sketch to think, catalog the visuals seen in sketched externalizations on office whiteboards, and examine the representations people create when they sketch data. Second, we examine some fundamental challenges that arise from translating observations of the flexible, expressive, human-driven nature of sketched externalizations to more constrained, semi-automated interactive environments. This is supported by a Wizard of Oz study of a sketch-based data exploration software prototype and our earlier findings about sketched externalizations. Finally, we leverage our observations to perform a set of initial explorations into new approaches to designing interactive information visualizations. We study the inclusion of basic active reading support into information visualizations and we suggest a new interaction approach, Constructible Interaction, that supports the kind of flexibility that we have observed in thinking sketches. We outline the open research questions that arise from our studies, both in better understanding sketched externalizations and in leveraging our knowledge of these to explore new approaches to information visualization. In the long term, we hope that this research will contribute to a class of information visualization interfaces that provide improved support for people’s unique individual thinking needs.
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    When Hydrocarbon Agendas Meet Indigenous Agency: Political Ecologies of Oil Conflicts in Ecuador’s Yasuni Amazon Forest
    (2024-04-25) Borja, Danilo; Davidsen, Conny; Jacobson, Daniel; Alonso Yanez, Gabriela
    The Amazon Forest is a highly biodiverse and culturally rich region with global significance for combating climate change. However, extractive activities (e.g., oil drilling) threaten the region by accelerating its deforestation and increasing poverty and inequity. This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the multiscale politics of oil conflicts in the Ecuadorian Amazon, addressing questions relevant to indigeneity, violence, gender, and oil benefit-sharing policies. This study focuses on a worldwide visible case for hydrocarbon governance: Ecuador's Amazon Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. The Yasuní is in Ecuador’s northeastern Amazon and comprises the Waorani Ethnic Reserve, Intangible Zone, the Yasuní National Park, and transition and buffer zones. The region is the ancestral home of the Waorani, who are among Ecuador's most recently contacted Indigenous groups and have traditional Waorani (known earlier as Huaorani) tribes continuing to live in voluntary isolation. Over the past decades, the area has seen increasing territorial conflict and political contradictions between Indigenous agendas, climate efforts, changes in resource distribution policies, and the expansion of oil extraction in the region. Theoretically, this dissertation uses political ecology concepts and approaches to analyze power relationships and political strategies of key actors in this governance system, including the Waorani, the state, and oil companies. Empirically, this study draws on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis. The findings illustrate how local, national, and global pressures have shaped and been shaped by conflicts over resource distribution, gender constructions, indigeneity, and political participation, highlighting the fundamental role of constructions of Indigenous subjectivities in shaping this governance system. Given the complex socio-environmental dynamics seen in the Yasuní, this research contributes to resource governance literature and policy.