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 households may be our primarily shaping environment, our neighborhoods expose us to the immediate “real world” outside home. Indeed, the places where we are currently experiencing and have experienced life play fundamental roles in the development of our identities, beliefs, fears, perceptions of the world, and even in the (mis)understanding of our prospects of social mobility. Despite the analytic benefits that knowledge of the places and contexts where we experience life brings to better understanding our life stories and health outcomes, most qualitative, health, and mixed methods researchers continue to forego the analytic and elucidating power that geo-contextualizing our participants' narratives bring to our analyses, research findings, conclusions, and plans of action. From this view then, most qualitative, health, and mixed methods 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 qualitative narratives. The use of this peer-reviewed software (see https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.7385885.v3), available in Mac (https://cutt.ly/E724wAx) and Windows (https://cutt.ly/J724f0C) operating systems, does not require users to learn GIS nor computer/statistical programming to obtain state-of-the-art, and visually appealing and interactive maps. These resulting HTML visualizations are capable of integrating a variety of multi-media inputs that include text, image, videos, sound recordings/music, as well as hyperlinks to other websites—see https://cutt.ly/k7X9tfN. Since GeoStoryTelling relies on OpenStreetMap, its applications may be used worldwide, thus strengthening its potential reach to the qualitative, mixed methods, ethnographic, and health scientific communities, regardless of location around the world.