GeoStoryTelling: An Integrative Multi-Media Methodology and No-Code, Cost-Free Software to GeoContextualize Ethnographic, Health, and Survey Evidence

Abstract

Our life stories evolve in specific and contextualized places. Although our homes may be
our primarily shaping environment, our homes are themselves situated in neighborhoods that expose us to the immediate “real world” outside home. Indeed, the places where we are currently
experiencing, and have experienced life, play a fundamental role in gaining a deeper and more
nuanced understanding of our beliefs, fears, perceptions of the world, and even our prospects of
social mobility. Despite the immediate impact of the places where we experience life in reaching a
better understanding of our life stories and even health outcomes, to date most qualitative and
mixed methods researchers forego the analytic and elucidating power that geo-contextualizing our
narratives bring to social and health research. From this view then, most research findings and
conclusions may have been ignoring the spatial contexts that most likely have shaped the
experiences of research participants. The main reason for the underuse of these
geo-contextualized stories is the requirement of specialized training in geographical information
systems (GIS) and/or computer and statistical programming along with the absence of cost-free and
user-friendly geo-visualization tools that may allow non-GIS experts to benefit from
geo-contextualized outputs. To address this gap, we present GeoStoryTelling, an analytic framework and user-friendly, cost-free, multi-platform software that enables researchers to visualize their geo-contextualized data narratives. The use of this Code Ocean (https://codeocean.com/)
peer-reviewed software (https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.7385885.v2) that is also available in Mac and
Windows operating systems, does not require users to learn GIS nor computer programming to obtain state-of-the-art, and visually appealing and interactive maps. In addition to providing a toy
database to fully replicate the outputs presented, we detail the process that researchers need to
follow to build their own databases without the need of specialized external software nor hardware.
We show how the resulting HTML outputs are capable of integrating a variety of multi-media inputs
(i.e., text, image, videos, sound recordings/music, and hyperlinks to other websites) to provide
further context to the geo-located stories we are sharing (example https://cutt.ly/k7X9tfN).
Accordingly, the goals of this paper are to describe the components of the methodology, the steps
to construct the database, and to provide unrestricted access to the software tool, along with a
toy dataset so that researchers may interact first-hand with GeoStoryTelling and fully replicate
the outputs discussed herein. Since GeoStoryTelling relies on OpenStreetMap, its applications may
be used worldwide, thus strengthening its potential reach to the mixed methods, ethnographic, and
health scientific communities, regardless of location around the world.

Keywords: Geographical Information Systems; Interactive Visualizations; Data StoryTelling; Mixed Methods, Ethnographic, and Qualitative Research Methodologies; Spatial Data Science; Geo-Computation; Survey Data