Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
different data sources was only possible through focus on a study site and Chat Moss proved
rich in this regard despite being considered a rather 'nondescript' landscape by some.
The ceiling painting by Hampson was exhibited in November 2004 at the REDUX Gallery,
London, and during the event a colloquium was held involving the authors, cultural geog-
raphers, artists and a senior researcher from the Ordnance Survey national mapping agency.
The focus on the case study site as seen through the artwork, where some participants had
visited the site and some not, proved another interesting aspect of the forum. The colloquium
helped to broaden the debate and focus on the research agenda for the remainder of the
project and beyond, and produced the edited volume
Chat Moss
(Hampson and Priestnall,
2005).
The nature of the interdisciplinary collaboration between the authors has been enlight-
ening, in particular the process of verbalizing or visualizing certain aspects of their working
'practice', which will be a model for any future collaborative research undertaken. From the
perspective of landscape representation and visualization, there seem to be three interrelated
themes which constitute the research agenda for further collaboration: data and metadata,
methodological and visualization.
12.6.1 Data and metadata
An important consideration to emerge from the colloquium was the difficulty in attempt-
ing to generate what may be termed 'general purpose' representations of a landscape. From
a GIScience perspective, without a specific application and user community in mind it
becomes almost impossible to define requirements and to identify data which might be
deemed 'fit-for-purpose'. The actual meaning of data became an interesting focus, in par-
ticular how data are interpreted and lead to understanding. An examination of the critical
instances where a dataset had significant impact on the development of the artwork allowed
an unusually methodical and focussed decomposition of the meaning of particular data, for
example the influence of the aerial photograph. This analysis of data and the thinking behind
the development of the artwork could be likened to 'metadata' from a GIScience perspective.
The data describing the data themselves, and their processing lineage, are important, or at
least should be, in determining the way people gain understanding. That said, metadata is
rarely used in the context of visualization almost to the extent an artwork typically functions
without such supporting commentary. The colloquium gave an opportunity for GIS-based
outputs to be presented and discussed in an unusual context and it was clear that these
images were open to great misinterpretation without very careful explanation. The role of
metadata in supporting landscape visualization will be an area of ongoing investigation.
12.6.2 Methodological
The problems with developing a 'general purpose' representation of a landscape relates to
the broader issue of defining geographic ontologies which accommodate different personal
perspectives on the same landscape. Although the development of an ontology was not the
aim of the project discussed here, the nature of the collaboration certainly helped to avoid
presuppositions of commonly used GIS data structures and readily available datasets and
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