Home > JFS > Iss. 25 (2024)

Using GIS to Visualize Daily Routines at the Neighborhood and Household Scales: A Feminist Approach Using a Nineteenth-Century Diary

Sterling D. Quinn, Central Washington UniversityFollow

Abstract

Feminist scholars in the discipline of geography have noted the ways that routine activities at the household and neighborhood scales contribute to power relations and identity formation. Geographic information systems (GIS), with their ability to create multiple visual representations of people’s experiences in space at any scale, hold great potential for revealing these local processes and patterns that are often lost or invisible in broader historical narratives, especially when they pertain to women and children. This article contributes an example by using GIS to encode and map everyday events in a diary kept by Elisabeth Koren, a nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrant to the midwestern United States. Combining GIS methods with a careful cataloging of the text, I create maps showing social and economic connections developed during Elisabeth’s routine walks; geographic realms of pleasant and unpleasant emotions she encountered while traversing the landscape; and differing ways that women, men, and children used domestic space in the home where she boarded. I demonstrate that even highly computational GIS methods, such as kernel density estimation, can be appropriated toward the portrayal of nuanced and uncertain types of phenomena such as feelings, wanderings, and sites of household chores. This case study is intended to inspire researchers of social topics to look closely for ways that life writings, interviews, or other personal data may contain themes that could be better understood using GIS and mapping tools.

Recommended Citation

Quinn, Sterling D.. 2024. "Using GIS to Visualize Daily Routines at the Neighborhood and Household Scales: A Feminist Approach Using a Nineteenth-Century Diary." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 25 (Fall): 10.23860/jfs.2024.25.01.