GIS, Ethnography, and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping

This article discusses how geographic information system (GIS)

technologies were used to enhance ethnographic methodologies

within a cultural research project, Creative Tropical City: Mapping

Darwin’s Creative Industries. It shows how mapping technologies

can broaden the scope of data available via interview practices

and produce innovative ways of communicating research results to

stakeholder communities. A key component of the interview process

was a “mental mapping” exercise whereby interviewees drew

sketches, revealing important sites and linkages between people

and places. A GIS linked responses to real-world locations, collating

and displaying them in meaningful ways. Responses uncovered

Darwin’s unique geography of creative inspiration—a geography

that preferences Darwin’s natural environment over sites of urban

creative milieu.