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Coding the Village Inventory

Introduction
Methods
Interview Findings
Discussion
Coding Scheme

Introduction
A strand of the GIS and Society debate has focused on incorporating public input into GIS. In part, this reflects a larger shift toward community-based planning that has occurred over the last thirty years, combined with emergence of participatory research methods in the academy. (1) Park describes participatory research as "a catalytic intervention in social transformative processes," showing the emphasis on directed social change. (2) Public public participation in GIS (PPGIS) uses the historically "closed" technology of GIS to empower communities to contribute to knowledge production and planning as well as better understand complicated technology. Notable PPGIS studies include the development of a GIS for mapping forced displacement to aid land reform in post-apartheid South Africa (3), a system for representing chemical risk and health data in West Virginia (4), and planning for neighborhood revitalization in Chicago. (5)

An Inventory and Analysis of Village and Rural Qualities in South Kingstown was a model of participatory community planning. Volunteers mapped the boundaries of village and rural areas within the town, essentially producing a land use mental map. Although not part of the formal project, these maps were digitized by the Planning Department to produce perhaps the only publicly created GIS data layers in Rhode Island. However, much of the data in the Village Inventory is not captured in that GIS data set for the reasons presented in Critiquing GIS.

Continuing the participatory nature of the Village Inventory was, from the conception of this project, seen as important. The existing form of the report presented several challenges for coding in GIS:

• Instructions to the district groups were broad
• Eleven separate groups conducted their work independently, sometimes focusing their efforts on collecting different types of data
• Some groups presented a great deal of accompanying information with their narrative summaries, while others were more terse
• Some groups took pictures, others did not

A coding system must be sufficiently specific to accurately represent the information, but broad enough to encompass the work of all eleven districts. One example of too fine a coding system came from the Peace Dale group. Working with GIS, the group leader produced a point coverage with 69 data points and 63 separate labels. Some of the labels included simple descriptors like "old trees," "countryside," "wetlands," or "views." In part, this was the result of the limited space for description in the tabular database, but it also produced a map that was not comparable to other districts. Moreover, it captured none of the value statements present in the Peace Dale report, which included a section titled, "Why do I love Peace Dale?"

A subset of districts was selected for study. Based on recommendations by the Planning Department, Peace Dale, Wakefield, and Kingston were chosen as pilots for developing a coding system. The reports represented a fair cross-section of styles in the Village Inventory. Wakefield included a narrative summary and a long table of features and descriptions with locations linked to a map. Peace Dale included a broad summary and no information on individual points aside from the brief descriptions in the GIS map. Finally, Kingston's report included personal narrative summaries without an explicit discussion of features.

Methods
The participant interviews had four objectives:

1. to determine if any data was left out of the final report (pictures, additional narrative summaries, etc.)
2. to better understand the goals of the Village Inventory and how those goals were perceived by participants
3. to better understand the process of conducting the Village Inventory
4. to determine the best form of distribution for the Cultural Resource Inventory

The three district leaders were contacted to see if there was any additional information not included in the final report and to obtain names of team members who might be willing to be interviewed. A far more detailed draft report was obtained from the Peace Dale leader that was crucial to supplementing the limited GIS point coverage. Although several groups took pictures to document individual sites (most notably, the Wakefield group), it appears these have been lost. Neither the project's organizers nor the Planning Department were able to locate them.

Eleven team members were contacted by letter or in person at a meeting for the South County Greenspace Protection Project. Semi-structured interviews lasting from 10 to 30 minutes were conducted with six participants. The purpose of these interviews was to understand how each group conducted its portion of the project and why they identified particular features in the written report and maps.

Each of the reports was then read in light of the interviews. Points on the maps were compared with the text and a system of codes was developed for each location and entered into the GIS database.

Interview findings
Team composition and process
Each district team was composed of about 10 participants. Both Wakefield and Peace Dale assigned subsections of their districts to two or three team members who performed the inventory. These smaller teams then walked or drove the roads of their section, recording their observations. Several participants mentioned a lack of maps or aerial photographs. The Inventory, then, was primarily limited to features seen from the road. As one Peace Dale member put it, there might be a beautiful wetland on a property interior "but when you're walking down the road, you can't go on private property."

Project goals and purpose
The teams attempted to follow the guidelines prepared by the project coordinators. A major task was dividing the district into village, rural, and other areas. Nevertheless, certain features were given priority over others. As one district leader noted, everybody has a favorite topic — some people are historically oriented, some care about preservation. Both positive and negative features of the landscape were recorded or written about by all three district teams. A member of the Wakefield team mentioned that new developments could fit in with the existing village, while others stand out.

However, there was a tension, expressed in the different report styles and by one of the district leaders, between a strict cataloguing of features and a report infused with statements of value about each location. Was the project an objective inventory or an attempt to document local sense of place?

In part, this confusion stemmed from uncertainty over the ultimate purpose of the inventory. How would the Planning Department or Planning Board use the data? Almost everyone interviewed expressed (usually unprompted) dissatisfaction with the use of the Village Inventory since its completion. "This information never got used, it got buried by the town," commented a Peace Dale participant. This sentiment was again expressed at the initial meetings of the South County Greenspace Protection Project.

Internet access
All of the participants interviewed reported having access to the Internet. Similarly, all of the members of the cultural resources subgroup of the Greenspace Protection Project had e-mail addresses, indicating widespread Internet access within this population.

Discussion
The question of value is central to interpreting these data. A dispassionate description of the landscape is of little value when considering how South Kingstown should develop. As Ryden writes:

A place...is much more than a point in space. To be sure, a place is necessarily necessarily anchored to a specific location which can be identified by a particular set of cartographic coordinates, but it takes in as well the landscape found at that location and the meanings which people assign to that landscape through the process of living in it. (6)

Two examples from the Wakefield report illustrate this point. The first is purely descriptive:

Southern end of "Old" Post Road (Camp Fuller Road to Wood Hollow Road): Mostly wooded with a few homes visible. Private access road to Camp Fuller, with open pasture lands and walls. Presently used for agriculture with agricultural lands and buildings still in active use.

In contrast, the second is laden with place-based value statements:

Bordering both Main Streets and Pond Streets: The old Robinson Farm, with animals and picturesque rolling hills and fields and pastuerland is a gem and helps add to the great quality of life in Wakefield. This area along with other areas plays an important role in the history and historical lives of South Kingstown (emphasis added).

It is this intimate description of place that makes the Village Inventory such a valuable study. The first passage could have been written by anyone trained in aerial photo interpretation. To write the second requires a personal connection with the landscape accrued over years.

The main contribution of citizen-led planning efforts is communicating value-based information about place. The coding scheme for the Village Inventory should include the ability to distinguish between positively valued features and negatively valued features. Dispassionate description provides little information for planning professionals.

Coding Scheme
Since each district had already classified parcels as rural, village, or other, these categories were taken as base coding criteria. Added to them was a value descriptor, producing six possible categories:

• rural positive
• rural negative
• village positive
• village negative
• other positive
• other negative

In addition, a major theme in the data was access to recreation. This added another two categories:

• access positive
• access negative

Finally, given the activity surrounding open space preservation in Rhode Island, parcels were coded for open space language:

• open space

Typically, this was used only if explicit reference was made to preservation such as "should this property come up for sale, the Town or Land Trust should consider buying it." However, given the general concern about development and loss of character throughout the Village Inventory, any parcels coded as 'rural positive' could be considered candidates for open space acquisition.

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2. Park, P. (1993). What is Participatory Research? A Theoretical and Methodological Perspective. In P. Park, M. Brydon-Miller, B. Hall and T. Jackson (eds.). Voices of Change. Westport Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey: 2.
3. Weiner, D., Warner, T. A., Harris, T. M., and Levin, R. M. (1995). Apartheid Representations in a Digital Landscape: GIS, Remote Sensing and Local Knowledge in Kiepersol, South Africa. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22(1), 30-44.
Weiner, D. and Harris, T. (1999). Community-Integrated GIS for Land Reform in South Africa. Retrieved 8 April 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://albrecht.geog.uwm.edu/GIS/RegSci/pdffiles/gisweiner.pdf
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5. Al-Kodmany, K. (1998). Multimedia GIS Applications for Neighborhood Planning and Design: The Case of Pilsen, Chicago. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis Specialist Meeting: Empowerment, Marginalization and Public Participation GIS. Retrieved 15 January 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/varenius/ppgis/papers/al-kodmany.html
6. Ryden, K. C. (1993). Mapping the Invisible Landscape. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press: 38.