Gaining a mobile sense of place with collector for ArcGIS

ABSTRACT

Mobile technology is increasingly widespread in geographic instruction, raising questions about how to integrate and analyse data from multiple users. Collector for ArcGIS allows researchers to gather multi-sensory field data, and is therefore a prospective way to integrate qualitative and quantitative information. We evaluate students’ experience using Collector in an exercise that considered the senses of place in a research neighbourhood. Collector proved somewhat effective, yet requires significant technical expertise to integrate into research assignments. We describe the strengths and weaknesses of mobile applications such as Collector, and provide solutions for faculty interested in mobile applications for the field-based capture of multi-sensory data.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile methods
• collector for ArcGIS
• sense of place
• Pittsburgh
• gentrification
• qualitative methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://doc.arcgis.com/en/collector/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Pittsburgh via Ruth Crawford Mitchell Fellowship and by the project “Spatial Exploration of Economic Data: Methods of Interdisciplinary Analytics (Spationomy),” funded by the European Union within the Erasmus+ programme (No. 2016-1-CZ01-KA 203-024040).