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Context of the Study – Writing Guide and Examples

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Context of the Study

The context of a study refers to the set of circumstances or background factors that provide a framework for understanding the research question , the methods used, and the findings . It includes the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical factors that shape the study’s purpose and significance, as well as the specific setting in which the research is conducted. The context of a study is important because it helps to clarify the meaning and relevance of the research, and can provide insight into the ways in which the findings might be applied in practice.

Structure of Context of the Study

The structure of the context of the study generally includes several key components that provide the necessary background and framework for the research being conducted. These components typically include:

• Introduction : This section provides an overview of the research problem , the purpose of the study, and the research questions or hypotheses being tested.
• Background and Significance : This section discusses the historical, theoretical, and practical background of the research problem, highlighting why the study is important and relevant to the field.
• Literature Review: This section provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature related to the research problem, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of previous studies and identifying gaps in the literature.
• Theoretical Framework : This section outlines the theoretical perspective or perspectives that will guide the research and explains how they relate to the research questions or hypotheses.
• Research Design and Methods: This section provides a detailed description of the research design and methods, including the research approach, sampling strategy, data collection methods, and data analysis procedures.
• Ethical Considerations : This section discusses the ethical considerations involved in conducting the research, including the protection of human subjects, informed consent, confidentiality, and potential conflicts of interest.
• Limitations and Delimitations: This section discusses the potential limitations of the study, including any constraints on the research design or methods, as well as the delimitations, or boundaries, of the study.
• Contribution to the Field: This section explains how the study will contribute to the field, highlighting the potential implications and applications of the research findings.

How to Write Context of the study

Here are some steps to write the context of the study:

• Identify the research problem: Start by clearly defining the research problem or question you are investigating. This should be a concise statement that highlights the gap in knowledge or understanding that your research seeks to address.
• Provide background information : Once you have identified the research problem, provide some background information that will help the reader understand the context of the study. This might include a brief history of the topic, relevant statistics or data, or previous research on the subject.
• Explain the significance: Next, explain why the research is significant. This could be because it addresses an important problem or because it contributes to a theoretical or practical understanding of the topic.
• Outline the research objectives : State the specific objectives of the study. This helps to focus the research and provides a clear direction for the study.
• Identify the research approach: Finally, identify the research approach or methodology you will be using. This might include a description of the data collection methods, sample size, or data analysis techniques.

Example of Context of the Study

Here is an example of a context of a study:

Title of the Study: “The Effectiveness of Online Learning in Higher Education”

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions to adopt online learning as an alternative to traditional in-person teaching. This study is conducted in the context of the ongoing shift towards online learning in higher education. The study aims to investigate the effectiveness of online learning in terms of student learning outcomes and satisfaction compared to traditional in-person teaching. The study also explores the challenges and opportunities of online learning in higher education, especially in the current pandemic situation. This research is conducted in the United States and involves a sample of undergraduate students enrolled in various universities offering online and in-person courses. The study findings are expected to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the future of higher education and the role of online learning in the post-pandemic era.

Context of the Study in Thesis

The context of the study in a thesis refers to the background, circumstances, and conditions that surround the research problem or topic being investigated. It provides an overview of the broader context within which the study is situated, including the historical, social, economic, and cultural factors that may have influenced the research question or topic.

Context of the Study Example in Thesis

Here is an example of the context of a study in a thesis:

Context of the Study:

The rapid growth of the internet and the increasing popularity of social media have revolutionized the way people communicate, connect, and share information. With the widespread use of social media, there has been a rise in cyberbullying, which is a form of aggression that occurs online. Cyberbullying can have severe consequences for victims, such as depression, anxiety, and even suicide. Thus, there is a need for research that explores the factors that contribute to cyberbullying and the strategies that can be used to prevent or reduce it.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between social media use and cyberbullying among adolescents in the United States. Specifically, the study will examine the following research questions:

• What is the prevalence of cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media?
• What are the factors that contribute to cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media?
• What are the strategies that can be used to prevent or reduce cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media?

The study is significant because it will provide valuable insights into the relationship between social media use and cyberbullying, which can be used to inform policies and programs aimed at preventing or reducing cyberbullying among adolescents. The study will use a mixed-methods approach, including both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media.

Context of the Study in Research Paper

The context of the study in a research paper refers to the background information that provides a framework for understanding the research problem and its significance. It includes a description of the setting, the research question, the objectives of the study, and the scope of the research.

Context of the Study Example in Research Paper

An example of the context of the study in a research paper might be:

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the mental health of individuals worldwide. As a result, there has been a growing interest in identifying effective interventions to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health. In this study, we aim to explore the impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on the mental health of individuals who have experienced increased stress and anxiety due to the pandemic.

Context of the Study In Research Proposal

The context of a study in a research proposal provides the background and rationale for the proposed research, highlighting the gap or problem that the study aims to address. It also explains why the research is important and relevant to the field of study.

Context of the Study Example In Research Proposal

Here is an example of a context section in a research proposal:

The rise of social media has revolutionized the way people communicate and share information online. As a result, businesses have increasingly turned to social media platforms to promote their products and services, build brand awareness, and engage with customers. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of social media marketing strategies and the factors that contribute to their success. This research aims to fill this gap by exploring the impact of social media marketing on consumer behavior and identifying the key factors that influence its effectiveness.

Purpose of Context of the Study

The purpose of providing context for a study is to help readers understand the background, scope, and significance of the research being conducted. By contextualizing the study, researchers can provide a clear and concise explanation of the research problem, the research question or hypothesis, and the research design and methodology.

The context of the study includes information about the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political factors that may have influenced the research topic or problem. This information can help readers understand why the research is important, what gaps in knowledge the study seeks to address, and what impact the research may have in the field or in society.

Advantages of Context of the Study

Some advantages of considering the context of a study include:

• Increased validity: Considering the context can help ensure that the study is relevant to the population being studied and that the findings are more representative of the real world. This can increase the validity of the study and help ensure that its conclusions are accurate.
• Enhanced understanding: By examining the context of the study, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the factors that influence the phenomenon under investigation. This can lead to more nuanced findings and a richer understanding of the topic.
• Improved generalizability: Contextualizing the study can help ensure that the findings are applicable to other settings and populations beyond the specific sample studied. This can improve the generalizability of the study and increase its impact.
• Better interpretation of results: Understanding the context of the study can help researchers interpret their results more accurately and avoid drawing incorrect conclusions. This can help ensure that the study contributes to the body of knowledge in the field and has practical applications.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Place matters: geographical context, place belonging and the production of locality in Mediterranean Noirs

• Open access
• Published: 25 July 2021
• Volume 87 , pages 3895–3913, ( 2022 )

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• Nicola Gabellieri 1  

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Scholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.

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Introduction

In the last few decades, detective novels have become one of the most successful literary genres in terms of both production and sales (Rushing, 2007 ; Worthington, 2011 ; Perez, 2013 ). Footnote 1 This achievement largely depends on the possibility to resort to the investigative plot as a narrative expedient to expose individual psychological introspection, while at the same time representing the social mechanisms of the place where the crime is committed. As a result, detective stories can incorporate reflections on issues such as gender, multiculturalism and class struggles, which have increased the genre’s appeal to a wider public (Priestman, 2003 ). Furthermore, the renewal of this genre has not been limited to including new characters or articulating new plots, but has also involved geographical contents into the books.

Literary geography is that part of the discipline that studies the way in which certain landscapes or territories influence writers and artists, as well as the way in which these are described in literary works (Lando, 1996 ; Hones, 2014 ; Brosseau, 2017 ). Given the importance of geography as a literary topos (Peraldo, 2016 ), it is yet surprising that the role of spatial descriptions in detective novels has been little considered by the researchers. Notwithstanding some important pioneering contributions, there is still an epistemological gap that needs to be filled. In recent times, scholars have become increasingly interested in approaching the subject of space in detective stories through different heuristic frameworks, including the contemporary problems of place, identity and locality (Tuan, 1985 ; Rosemberg, 2007 ; Rosember 2008 ; Erdmann, 2011 ; Pezzotti, 2012 ; Pichler, 2015 ; Brosseau & Le Bel, 2016 ; Giorda, 2019 ).

Following Roland Barthes ( 1964 ) and Jacques Dubois’s ( 1992 ) suggestions on crime fiction as mirror and expression of social and cultural dynamics, this work explores detective novels from the standpoint of literary geography, considering literature as one source to investigate relations between people and place (Anderson, 2015 ) and focusing on the way in which “space” and “place” are represented as well as the role that geographical space plays in structuring the crime fiction narrative. Geographers have shown that these categories are not just synonymous, nor they merely represent settings for action: they are tools with which people define their identity. The different terms are used to distinguish between the two concepts of neutral Cartesian space and of place as “lived space” invested with meaning by the observer (Tuan, 1974 ; Frémont 1976 ; Paasi, 2002 ; Harvey, 2012 ). In this respect, different and sometime contested definitions of “place” agree in considering the term both as a means that people use to collectively define territory and as a produced symbolic representation for different purposes (Seamon & Sowers, 2008 ; Antonsich, 2010a ).

This study has two main aims. First, to demonstrate that, in late 20th century literature, detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. Second, by focusing on the genre known as Mediterranean noir, the paper aims at shedding new light on the way in which popular literature narrates and contributes to construct the ideas of place according to the category of production of localities suggested by Arjun Appadurai.

In geography, the study of novel settings has a long tradition. Scholars have pointed out that short stories, poems and fiction can capture features of the local reality which are generally overlooked by purely quantitative approaches (Lando, 1996 ; Squire, 1996 ). In the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the studies on regionalism – which aim to define the regions’ local identities – regional literature (i.e. stories taking place at a regional scale, as well as novels produced by local authors) was deemed a fundamental means for revealing the uniqueness of each geographical area (Gilbert, 1960 ). In search of descriptions that could prove useful to grasp the local dimension and “typical” elements of the regions, much research has been dedicated in particular to rural environments and the countryside, often with a critical approach focusing on the discussion of constructed myths (Aiken, 1977 ; Withers, 1984 ;  2018 Frémont, 1990 ; Fournier, 2018 ; 2020 ; Ridanpää, 2019 ; Gope, 2020 ).

More recently, the emphasis has been placed on the capacity of literature to participate in the construction of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983 ). Texts are acknowledged as phenomena, results and producers of complex and different meanings and effects. Defining fiction as “spatial event”, Sheila Hones invites to consider connected spatial and temporal events proceeding and following the publications from a relational perspective (Hones, 2008 , 2014 ), implying that a book can affect the space where its story is settled, endowing it with new significance and identities (Anderson, 2010 ; Briwa, 2018 ).

To build on this line of research, I would link Literary Geography with Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “production of localities”. Appadurai demonstrates that “places” do not represent a permanent natural datum, but rather a context generated by the actions through which different social actors build their relational systems in space, and do so by using various strategies for identifying and mapping accordingly the identity elements that characterize each locality; in turn, places are context-generating agents, because they create relationships between many social actors (Appadurai, 1996 , 2010 ).

To explore the geographical discourse of contemporary detective novels as production of localities, this essay deals with three authors who can be classified in the sub-genre of Mediterranean noir. The term was coined in 2000 by one of its protagonists, Jean-Claude Izzo, to qualify contemporary crime and detective fiction by writers who shared common ground, geographic and otherwise, such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Petros Markaris. These authors are representatives of a new current of detective stories based on postmodernism (Holquist, 1971 ) that has already been approached by literary geographers to examine the construction of the idea of Marseille (Rosemberg, 2007 , 2008 ).

To assess the hypothesis of an emerging role of place in recent detective fiction, this work adopts a comparative method. The first part presents some excerpts from detective fiction falling within an assumed “classic” phase, with the purpose of calling attention to the relationship between detectives and space during the deductive process that guides the story. Footnote 2 In the second and third part, the focus shifts to three prominent authors of Mediterranean detective novels who can be considered as exponents of the Mediterranean Noir. Montalbán, Camilleri and Izzo have been selected as case studies because of their respective relevance to Spanish, Italian and French readerships, alongside their recognition as milestone authors in crime fiction historiography. Their popularity at international level has crossed the boundaries of the literary sphere, making them prime representatives of the places where their novels lure tourism (Di Betta, 2015 ; Ponton & Asero, 2015 ; Redondo, 2017 ; Rosemberg & Troin, 2017 ).

Methodologically, according to Brosseau ( 1994 ), literary geography may, in first instance, approach the “text as text”.In the first part of this paper plot summaries are thus presented together with some excerpts from famous detective fiction which have been selected in order to identify space descriptions and their geographical elements.

The following part focuses on the evolution of the function and significance of generic setting in relation to story plot and narrative style. To this end, a relational approach has been adopted (Hones, 2014 ), considering the significance of local place settings and the contribution of writers and readers in reflecting and creating territorial meaning and images beyond the story itself.

Space in classic detective stories: Poe, Conan Doyle and Christie

In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) published The Murders in the Rue Morgue , traditionally considered the first detective story in the modern sense of the term. The plot hinges on the solving of a crime that has taken place in a closed room. To present C. Auguste Dupin’s (the main character) exceptional deductive abilities, Poe dwells on some specific details of him strolling on the streets of Paris. The focus then shifts to the closed room where a terrible crime has been committed and which the author describes in detail, focusing on some morbid elements and on some objects that will play a key role in the investigation:

“The apartment was in the wildest disorder—the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of the floor. On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots. Upon the floor were found four Napoleons, an ear-ring of topaz, three large silver spoons, three smaller of métal d'Alger, and two bags, containing nearly four thousand francs in gold. […] Four of the above-named witnesses, being recalled, deposed that the door of the chamber in which was found the body of Mademoiselle L. was locked on the inside when the party reached it” (Poe, 1841 , 169).

Dupin eventually manages to tie up loose ends by combining ground observation, comparative analysis of evidence and inductive logic. In fact, the real plot twist is the discovery of the murderer thanks to the detective’s skills. The surprise lies in the geographical estrangement of the reader, that is the introduction in a known context of an unexpected foreign element: a Bornean orangutan who is later found guilty of the murder.

Starting from this pioneering experiment, detective stories have grown significantly as a genre in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, where the most representative authors are Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and Agatha Christie Mallowan (1890–1976) (Rzepka, 2005 ).

Despite his vast production of fiction and non-fiction, Conan Doyle is most famed as the forerunner of the subgenre of deductive thriller, undoubtedly thanks to the Sherlock Holmes cycle. The adventures of one of the most famous detectives in the world are narrated in four novels: A Study in Scarlet , The Sign of the Four , The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of the Fear , all published between 1887 and 1915, in addition to other 50 short stories and 3 theater plays.

The logical and deductive abilities that underlie the protagonist’s scientific method are explained in the opening pages of the first novel. The first geographical descriptions, however, emerge only in the third chapter, during the inspection of the crime site, a small cottage near London:

“Number 3, Lauriston Gardens wore an ill-omened and minatory look […] A small garden sprinkled over with a scattered eruption of sickly plants separated each of these houses from the street, and was traversed by a narrow pathway, yellowish in colour, and consisting apparently of a mixture of clay and of gravel. The whole place was very sloppy from the rain which had fallen through the night. […] It was a large square room, looking all the larger from the absence of all furniture. A vulgar flaring paper adorned the walls, but it was blotched in places with mildew; and here and there great strips had become detached and hung down, exposing the yellow plaster beneath. Opposite the door was a showy fireplace, surmounted by a mantelpiece of imitation white marble. On one corner of this was stuck the stump of a red wax candle. […] I have remarked that the paper had fallen away in parts. In this particular corner of the room a large piece had peeled off, leaving a yellow square of coarse plastering. Across this bare space there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word—RACHE” (Conan Doyle, 1887 , 27–31).

A full-fledged landscape representation appears only in the second part of the novel, once the killer has been identified and captured. The explanation of the reasons that led him to commit the crime is introduced by an extensive description of the inhospitable habitat where the story had begun – the Colorado desert:

“In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence. Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout this grim district. It comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged cañons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust. They all present however, the common characteristics of bareness, inhospitality, and misery. […] In the whole world there can be no more dreary view than that from the northern slope of the Sierra Blanco” (Conan Doyle, 1887 , 56).

Unlike the first book, in The Hound of the Baskervilles many pages are dedicated to illustrating the gloomy atmosphere of the Devonshire moor since the arrival of Dr. Watson at the castle:

“We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cup-like depression, patched with stunted oaks and furs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees” (Conan Doyle, 1902 , 116).

During his stay at the castle, landscape descriptions are part of Watson’s musings and the gloomy climate, along with the desolate environment, help reinforce the suggestion of a family curse, until Holmes carries out the investigation according to the classic deductive method.

As famous and prolific as Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie is another outstanding author in this phase of the Anglo-Saxon mystery novel tradition (Bargainnier, 1980 ). Through her vast literary output, including nearly 66 novels and 14 collections of short stories as well as some romance novels and plays, she introduced worldwide famous detectives such as Hercule Poirot (who appeared in about 36 novels and collections of short stories between 1920 and 1975) and Jane Marple (who appeared in 12 novels and 4 collections of short stories published between 1930 and 1976).

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) is Christie’s first detective novel featuring Poirot, a Belgian gentleman who has taken refuge in England and possesses remarkable logic skills, which he uses to solve mysterious crimes. In the novel, few lines are spent to describe the English countryside landscape of Essex where the victim’s villa and the cottages of the different characters are located. The first actual geographical overview can be found in the fourth chapter, shortly after the introduction of the protagonist: the reader is presented with an actual topographic map of the room where the victim was found. The sketch pinpoints the location of the furniture as well as some of the passageways through which the investigator will move in search of clues in the following pages (Fig.  1 ). These are the only moments of geographical interest in the text, except for a few descriptions of the surrounding landscape which serve to highlight some features of Poirot’s personality, who is as hostile towards the disorderly countryside as amazed in front of the landscapes ruled by the human touch: “‘Admirable!’ he murmured. ‘Admirable! What symmetry! Observe that crescent; and those diamonds—their neatness rejoices the eye. The spacing of the plants, also, is perfect’” (Christie, 1920 , 50), he whispers while observing an English-style garden.

Map of the crime scene drawn for investigation purposes and published in Christie, 1920

By connecting the various clues with the information that he has gathered and by using his skills in chemical sciences, Poirot is able to reconstruct the events that led to the woman’s death and to uncover the identity of the killer, her unfaithful husband. This deductive investigation procedure – inspired by his counterpart’s, Holmes – is also applied in subsequent books, such as Murder on the Orient Express ( 1934 ). In this case, the crime is committed in a setting that is more exotic for the English reader. Poirot, who happens to be on the famous Orient Express train traveling from Istanbul to Calais, finds himself involved in a murder case for which he is asked to question all the passengers in the victim’s wagon. Despite the fascination of the journey, only few words are spent to depict the landscapes visible from the windows and for the territories traversed by the train; besides, the description of the crime scene is limited to the few false leads that the detective manages to identify. The investigation proceeds by way of a detailed analysis and comparison between the different versions, statements and alibis provided by the passengers. The train remains a closed world consisting solely of its passengers, among which Poirot continues to search for a culprit until he finds twelve; but the narration ends without providing any information on the route traveled.

Montalbán and Carvalho’s Barcelona

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003) is acknowledged as the most important crime fiction writer of Spain, as well as the author of numerous historical novels and literary treatises. Born in Barcelona into a family of socialist tradition, in 1962 he was himself sentenced to three years in prison for anti-Franco activities. With a degree in philosophy and journalism, after the fall of the Regime he began to work for local and national newspapers. His name is associated in particular with the character of Pepe Carvalho, the chief investigator in 18 novels, 6 collections of short stories and a cookbook, all written in Castilian between the 1970s and the 2000s (Bayó Belenguer, 2006 ; Garcia, 2014 ; Tosik,  2020 ).

Pepe Carvalho made his first appearance in the uchronic novel Yo maté a Kennedy ( 1972 ), where the motley court of the Kennedys and the most widespread left-wing cultural theories of the time are presented with a unique fragmentary style and in a visionary, ironic and critical way. This is also where the author introduces the character of a CIA agent of Spain Galician origins, who has a past as a leftist activist and is now a cynical and ruthless double agent.

Starting from the second novel, Tatuaje ( 1974 ), the narrative style, the character of Carvalho and the Catalan setting are consolidated and become the leitmotiv of all subsequent publications. Shortly described as “that tall, dark man, already over thirty, a little neglected despite wearing expensive Ensache tailoring clothes”, Footnote 3 Carvalho is a paradigmatic example of the anti-hero, openly inspired to Philip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). In fact, the work of these two authors is generally considered as a watershed in the history of detective stories, on account of their devising of complex plots in complex worlds where the investigator’s psychological prospects are put to the fore.

Carvalho is a private detective as well as a bon vivant , an educated man who loves women and adores cooking. At the same time, he is deeply tormented, cynical, disenchanted, someone who bears within himself the wounds of dictatorship. Left-wing activist in his youth and a troubled past in the CIA, he dedicates himself to postmodern rebellious practices, such as burning literary works. He also gladly mingles with those who live on the fringes of society, including criminals, prostitutes, fences and former Francoists, which allows Montalbán to bring forth a diverse humanity during the investigations, under a light that is never totally negative, except for the great Catalan capitalists.

In Montalbán, the investigation is an immersion in the social and cultural context where the action unfolds (Bayó Belenguer, 2006 ). Carvalho himself wonders whether “a policeman like me is not perhaps a sociologist?”. Footnote 4 This attention to the surrounding world emerges in the representation of the crime scenes, as in Los mares del sur : while describing the study of the victim, Stuart Pedrell, the narrator focuses especially on listing the titles of the books that are placed in the library, which do not contain any clues for solving the case but offer an insight into the life of a Barcelonan leftist upper-middleclass businessman. Few well-defined elements portray the psychology of the characters: education, social class, and geographic background, as with Carvalho who is described as stubborn because of his Galician origins. Explicitly mentioning the names of the city’s streets and neighborhoods, urban landscape descriptions are rich in details and combine historical and social contextualization with the representation of the protagonist’s feelings and observations:

“The Via Layetana aroused quite another feeling in him with its appearance as an undecided first step in the creation of a Barcelona-based Manhattan, never finished. It was a road built in the interwar period, with the port at one end and the artisan Barcelona of Gracia on the other, artificially open to ease the commercial tension of the metropolis, and over time it had become a road of trade unions and patronages, of policemen and their victims, with the addition of a few savings banks and in the Gothicizing background the monument in the middle of the gardens, dedicated to one of the most solid counts in Catalonia”. Footnote 5

Fundamental topoi for the characterization of the novel’s setting are food and local cuisine, which can be seen as the very element of Spanish identity: “If the Thirty Years War had not determined the hegemony of France over Europe, French cuisine today would have fallen under the hegemony of the various Spanish cuisines. His only patriotism was gastronomic”. Footnote 6 It seems therefore unsurprising that, for instance, the new striker of the Barcelona football team has to eat different Catalan dishes in order to seal his membership to the city community and thereby be introduced to “the matrix of essential Catalonia: bread and tomato, cava , seques amb botifarra , escudella i carn d'olla ”. Footnote 7 When he gets involved in a Catalanist conspiracy, Carvalho too decides to “eat Catalan cuisine to begin to totally identify with the cause, and asked for an escudella barrajada and peus de porc amb cargols , aware of the fact that the escudella barrejada is made with leftovers of the best escudellas , the remains of their splendor, and that the pig’s feet with snails are low in calories and completely free of cholesterol”. Footnote 8

Carvalho is also a skilled cook. Several pages in the novels illustrate the preparation of complex recipes that come from the Catalan culture as from other Iberian areas. Not only the dishes, but each and every ingredient is carefully reported and geographically localized, thus reflecting the author’s critical stance against any geographic-culinary generalization: “Nowadays they pass off any ham as if it were from Salamanca. Any ham who is not from Jabugo or Trevelez is called Salamanca ham. There is to be indignant. And so it is no longer clear whether you eat Salamanca or Totana ham”. Footnote 9

In spite of the identification with Barcelona, Montalbán chose not to write in Catalan but in the Castilian language, which allowed him to reach a wider audience. However, some words in Catalan gradually surface in the dialogues between his characters: the language marks the emergence of an identity that has occurred over the last decades.

The character of Carvalho, who has been regarded as an alter ego of the author, progressively ages over the course of the fiction. Even the city of Barcelona changes, reflecting the evolution of a post-regime city which becomes one of the economic, social and cultural hubs of the Mediterranean, although through an urban gentrification process that happens at the expense of the weakest:

“Perecamps Street had to be lengthened to cut through the streets of the old city in search of the Ensanche, making its way for the destroyed meats and calcined skeletons of the most miserable architecture in the city. A gigantic bulldozer with an insect head would have transformed the archeology of misery […] but also after the demolition of homes and the elderly, addicts, petty drug dealers, poor whores, blacks, Moroccans, after having made them escape pushed from the mechanical excavator, somewhere they would have brought their misery, perhaps in the hinterland, where the city loses its name and is no longer responsible for its disasters”. Footnote 10

As a matter of fact, in Montalbán, time assumes a central role (Tosik, 2020 ) which also affects the representation of spaces. A melancholic and nostalgic Carvalho witnesses the progressive destruction and redevelopment of those urban districts with which he identifies and which he cannot help but love:

“Carvalho set out there with a desire to re-read the city, to reconcile himself with Barcelona’s desire to transform itself into a pasteurized city, despite the smell of fried shrimp that came from the metastases of the restaurants of the Villa Olimpica […] Every metaphor of the city was become useless: it was no longer the widowed city, widow of power, because it had now acquired this power through the institutions of Autonomy; it was no longer even the Rose of Fire of the anarchists, because the bourgeoisie had definitively won with the system of changing its name […] Barcelona had become a beautiful city but without a soul, like certain statues, or perhaps it had a new soul that Carvalho neglected in his walks until he admitted that perhaps age no longer allowed him to discover the spirit of the new times [….] but he was falling in love with his city again, and above all he had to restrain the tendency to feel satisfied as he descended the Ramblas”. Footnote 11

The setting of the novel shifts therefore from urban slums to rich bourgeois neighborhoods, in a perpetually changing city which evolves from a 1970s town to one of the richest metropolises in the Mediterranean. Barcelona becomes indeed the stage of an intense cultural ferment and nightlife, reclaiming its role as an economic hub and developing instances of cultural and political independence from Madrid, to which Montalbán spares no fierce criticism (Afinoguénova, 2006 ). Unsurprisingly, Carvalho will leave Barcelona to go on his odyssey around the world only in the last two books, finding death (Montalbán, 2004 ).

Camilleri and Montalbano’s Sicily

Andrea Camilleri (1925–2019) can be considered as the most famous Italian crime writer, owing to the enormous success of his books starring police commissioner Salvo Montalbano and of their screen adaptation (Pieri, 2011 ). Originally from Porto Empedocle, in the province of Agrigento in Sicily, Camilleri began working for RAI national broadcasting in 1957 as a screenwriter and director. His first successful novel, Un filo di fumo ( 1980 ), tells the story of some events that took place in the late 19th century imaginary town of Vigata, in the Agrigento area. The town later became the setting of Commissioner Montalbano’s investigations, narrated in 28 novels and 5 collections of short stories that were published between 1994 and 2020. The influence that Montalbán had on the Italian author is manifestly spelled out in the detective’s name (Lyria, 2003 ). Like his Spanish peer, Camilleri too has often been considered as a committed writer (Chu, 2011 ). Moreover, he has repeatedly claimed to owe an intellectual debt to Italian regionalist writers such as Emilio Gadda and Leonardo Sciascia (Cicioni and Di Ciolla, 2008 ).

All of Camilleri’s literary production is set in Sicily, both crime fiction and historical novels. The writer stated numerous times in his interviews that he does “not possess the fantasy of, say, a Verne” and therefore “after he had imagined a fictional story, all he could do was set it, as it was, in the houses and streets that he already knew well” (Camilleri, cit. in Cicioni and Di Ciolla 2008 , 11). The preferential location for his stories is Vigata, a big city in the province of Montelusa: both are fictitious names for the author’s hometown, Porto Empedocle, and the province of Agrigento respectively (Pezzotti, 2015 ). Other toponyms are also altered in the novels, including the island of Lampedusa, renamed Sampedusa.

Montalbano and his Catalan counterpart share certain identifying features: they are both well-educated, gourmand, tendentially left-wing, grumpy; they are men of insight, gifted with the wit to unfailingly solve the most complicated cases; they are both women lovers in a complicated relationship with their historical partner.

Camilleri’s debut novel, La forma dell’acqua , begins with the description of the site where a corpse is found:

“It was the area called “la mannara”, because many years ago a shepherd was used to maintain his sheep there. It was a large stretch of Mediterranean scrub between the outskirts of the town and the beach, with the remains of a large chemical plant behind it, inaugurated by the omnipresent Deputy Cusumano when it seemed that the wind of the magnificent and progressive fortunes was pulling strong, then that breeze quickly changed into a trickle of breeze and therefore fell completely”. Footnote 12

In few lines, Camilleri introduces the readers to the contradictions of living in a rural environment that is undergoing a discontinuous process of industrialization and modernization, but is at the same time characterized by a traditional and corrupt system of power. Coincidentally, the corpse found by the police belongs to an important local businessman and politician. During the investigation, by exposing the political mafia games behind the murder, Montalbano manages to rule out as a suspect the victim’s lover. In the following books, the narrative structure is progressively established: parallel storylines originate from one or more crimes and then gradually intertwine. However, it is not always about mafia murders. The investigation often revolves around crimes of passion perpetrated after the break of some codes of honor in a traditional and patriarchal society on the periphery of Italy, where violence is daily fare:

‘Any news today?’ ‘Nothing to be taken seriously, Commissioner. Someone’s set fire to Sebastiano Lo Monaco’s garage, the fire brigade went there and put out the fire. Then someone shot at Quarantino Filippo, but it goes wrong and took the window of which is inhabited by Mrs. Pizzuto Saveria. After that there was another fire, certainly fraudulent. In short, doctor, bullshits’. Footnote 13

Anthropological cultural features are not presented invariably under a negative light. Local codes of conduct can often be associated with positive character traits that define Sicilian society: “Montalbano was touched. That was the Sicilian friendship, the true one, which is based on the unspoken, on intuition; one friend does not need to ask, it is the other who autonomously understands and acts accordingly”. Footnote 14

For this reason, the many landscape descriptions in the novels are always complemented by a lucid, sometimes even cynical reflection on society, avoiding any aura of myth:

“Around there were lands planted with vineyards, and as far as the eye could see there were almond trees between which, from time to time, the white of rural huts stood out. It was an enchanting landscape that reassured the hearth and the soul, but in Montalbano arose a tinged thought. Let’s wonder how many mafia fugitives were still living in these houses of apparently innocent traits”. Footnote 15

Montalbano is inextricably attached to his land, to the point that he feels profoundly homesick on the few occasions he goes to Genoa, where his partner lives: “Two or three times, by betrayal, the smell, the speech, the things of his hometown seized him, they lifted him in the air without weight, they brought him back, for a few moments, to Vigata”. Footnote 16 Vigata is not just a rural city but a frontier on the Mediterranean, affected by migration from North Africa, as the readers are told in Il ladro di merendine ( 1996 ). In this book, several narrative storylines intertwine, recounting the investigations on the murder of a retired man, the disappearance of a young Tunisian mother and her son, and the eventful search for an international terrorist. Camilleri emphasizes the existence of a common identity between the two sides of the sea, sometimes dwelling on those elements that testify to the Arab domination of the past while also depicting the poor conditions of the new immigrants:

“In the era of Muslims Sicily, when Montelusa was called Kerkent, the Arabs had built a neighborhood on the edge of the town where they lived together. When the Mulsumans had fled, the Montelusans had gone to live in their homes and the name of the neighborhood had been Sicilianized in Rabatu. In the second half of this century a gigantic landslide destroyed it. The few houses still standing were damaged, lopsided, held in absurd balances. The Arabs, having returned this time as poor people, had resumed living there, putting pieces of sheet metal in place of the tiles”. Footnote 17

Furthermore, the hybrid language of the novel is heavily layered with elements of the Sicilian dialect that are virtually incomprehensible to the average Italian reader, so much so that infratextual explanations are often needed: “’Now I'm going to tambasiare ’ he thought as soon as he arrived home. Tambasiare was a verb he liked, it meant wandering from room to room without a specific purpose, indeed dealing with futile things”. Footnote 18

Despite his great passion for regional cuisine, Montalbano is not the best cook, unlike his Catalan colleague. Consequently, to enjoy the many Sicilian dishes mentioned throughout the books, he relies on Adelina’s – his housekeeper – cooking skills and on his friendship with the owners of Trattoria San Calogero and Trattoria da Enzo, two typical restaurants serving local food: “At the San Calogero Restaurant they respected him, not because he was the Commissioner but because he was a good customer, one of those who know how to appreciate. They made him eat very fresh red mullet, crispy fried and left a time to drain on the paper”. Footnote 19 The act of eating takes on hedonistic and almost ritual connotations, with detailed descriptions of the tasting:

“He received the eight pieces of hake, a portion clearly for four people. They screamed, the pieces of hake, their joy at having been cooked as God commands. The dish smell demonstrated its perfection, obtained with the right amount of breadcrumbs, with the delicate balance between anchovy and beaten egg. He took the first bite to his mouth, but he didn’t swallow it immediately. He allowed the taste to spread gently on the tongue and palate, so that the tongue and palate became more aware of the gift offered to them”. Footnote 20

In Camilleri’s stories Sicily seems destined to unvarying immobility, as if it were frozen in traditional millenary codes. Nevertheless, although more slowly than Montalbán’s Barcelona, the region gradually begins to change along with the society it represents. Over time, rural Sicily starts to disappear:

“When he had arrived in Vigata he had made himself aware of the territory in which he had to struggle. So he had made a long and wide round of reconnaissance. In those time, the countryside was fruitful, green and full of life because was cared for and respected by man. Now a desert was in sight, a kingdom of snakes and yellowish grass. It seemed that that land had been touched by a biblical malice that sentenced it to sterility and that even the houses, ill as they were, had been affected by it”. Footnote 21

While Montalbano himself ages book after book, feeling increasingly incapable of facing the challenges of modernity, such as the spread of computers first and of smartphones later, the narrative touches on current issues in the contemporary public debate, including the tragedy of the deaths in the Mediterranean:

“That little rubbish it would not have caused the sea great suffering compared to everything that was thrown into every day: plastic, toxic waste, sewage purging. But it certainly had suffered for the thousands of thousands of bodies of desperate people, of people dead in the sea while the were trying to reach the Italian coast to escape from war or to obtain a piece of bread”. Footnote 22

In Camilleri’s work, modernity reaches even the most remote areas of Sicily; but it does so through a process of cultural negotiation that requires bending, in turn, to the Sicilian context.

Izzo and Montale’s Marsiglia

The inventor of the very definition of Mediterranean noir, Jean Claude Izzo (1945–2000) is the third exponent of the sub-genre here in question. He was born in Marseille to a family that represents a perfect example of the many migratory waves coming from across the Mediterranean to settle in the city. His father, Gennaro, came from Southern Italy; his mother Isabelle, of French citizenship, descended from a Spanish family. In his youth he was active in several pacifist and socialist movements, until he became a municipal candidate for the French Communist Party. Although trained in professional schools, at the age of 24 he began to collaborate with the communist newspaper La Maseillaise Dimanche , of which he was editor-in-chief until 1980, when he moved to La Vie Mutualiste. Within French cultural circles, his renown as a poet grew to the point that he moved to Paris where he worked as a columnist, became the organizer of literary events and a film author (Dhoukhar, 2006 ).

In 1993, he made his debut in the world of detective stories with a short story featuring the investigator Fabio Montale, who was to become the protagonist of the so-called “Marseille Trilogy”, published between 1995 and 1998. In 2000, at the age of 54, an illness took his life. After his death, a collection of short writings and articles was published in the volume Marseille , which represents a sort of poetic manifesto of his cultural vision of the Mediterranean (Matalon, 2020 ).

The three books share the same setting, Marseille. In chronological succession, the plots follow the events around the protagonist Montale (a surname inspired by the Italian poet, winner of the Nobel Prize) as he has to deal with French, Italian and Algerian organized crime, collusive politicians, and the rise of new social actors amidst the rapid urban developments of the largest port of the Mediterranean. Montale too comes from a social context of immigration and marginalization. Unlike his childhood friends, however, he chooses to join the police in order to fight the injustice that has lead his peers to criminal life, while trying to keep his values intact. A shy and tormented antihero according to the Chandlerian paradigm, just as his counterparts Carvalho and Montalbano he has a passion for women, literature, good food and wine.

Because of the death of two friends and of a beloved woman in the first volume of the trilogy, as an outsider policeman with acquaintances in the suburbs Montale feels compelled to dive into the local underworld: the Neapolitan mafia and the Front National. Instead of a positive resolution of the case, the mutual killing between the antagonistic factions in the ending leads him to the bitter conclusion that “the only plot is the hatred of the world”. Footnote 23 The sense of loathing induced by the epilogue is so strong that in the second book Montale has resigned from the police force and retired to private life. Yet the accidental murder of his cousin’s son forces him to contend with the criminal world again. In this case as well, two parallel stories intertwine, leading Montale to eventually confronting his past in addition to Arab fundamentalism and the Italian-French mafia. In the course of his personal war against organized crime, while trying to help an old lover, he will find his end in the epilogue of the third volume.

Methodologically, Montale is not a good deducer and often comes to wrong conclusions. He harshly admits that “as a detective, I was still not worth shit. I went forward by intuition, but without ever giving myself time to reflect”. Footnote 24 The storyline is rather to be found in the action, in the exploration of all layers of Marseillaise society, in the scattered search of a bundle to unravel. That is the reason why it has been noted about Izzo’s novels that “la ville n’y est pas un décor où se déroule l'enquête […] est l'object de la quête du héros qui redécouvre la ville” (Rosemberg & Troin, 2017 , 3). Montale travels across all the most famous areas of Marseille, from the port to the Calanques, topographically described in such detail that the Triology texts can be seen as a laboratory for experimenting with methodologies of literary cartography (Rosemberg, 2007 ; Rosemberg & Troin, 2017 ), which can also be consulted through GoogleMaps. Footnote 25 Besides, the stories involve conflictual spaces such as the suburbs with a high concentration of immigrants, where the social and intercultural conflict emerges at its fullest: spaces like La Paternelle, hastily described as “A Magrebin town. Not the hardest […] Like another continent”, Footnote 26 or the historic city center, where “the fear of the Arabs had made the Marseillais flee towards less central neighborhoods, where they felt safer […] Streets of whores. With unhealthy buildings and lousy hotels. Every migration had passed through those streets. Until a restructuring would have sent everyone to the suburbs”. Footnote 27

However, any social criticism in the books fails to hide the extremely positive appreciation about the aesthetics of the social and urban context, mainly due to Marseille’s vocation as a port and “gateway to the East. Other place, Adventure, dream” Footnote 28 as well as space of communication, “crossroads of all human mixes”, Footnote 29 historically open and tolerant. The city is favorably presented as the actual synthesis of the exchanges between the myriad cultures of the Mediterranean, which make it resemble more to the Italian seaside towns than to the northern French: “Italian Marseille. The same smells, the same laughter, the same bursts of voices from the streets of Naples, Palermo or Rome”). Footnote 30 Traces of such multicultural crossbreeding can therefore be found in many elements of the urban landscape and life: in the language, “a curious French, a mixture of Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, with a hint of slang and some of verlan” Footnote 31 ; in its characteristic smells, as “sometimes until the end of October, autumn retains an aftertaste of summer. A draft of air is enough to revive the scents of thyme, mint and basil” Footnote 32 ; in its music, “Arab music […] Oud spread through the bush like a smell. The sweet smell of oases. Dates, dried figs, almonds” Footnote 33 ; in the cuisine, fusing local dishes with those imported by migrants. Food plays a vital role in the narrative: cooking, eating and drinking is the moment of collective sharing and of inner catharsis at the same time, a sanctuary which Montale seeks every time he finds himself the witness to a heinous act.

Montale presents himself as the guardian (who will ultimately be defeated) of a world at its sunset hour, threatened not only by crime and corruption, but also by a process of cultural globalization that aims to erase Mediterranean traditions in the name of an alleged European homogeneity:

“Marseille had a future only if it gave up its history. This they explained to us. And when we talked about port renewal, it was to legitimize the necessity to finish with this port as it was today. The symbol of ancient glory […] they would raze the hangars to the ground […] And remodeled the maritime landscape. This was the last great idea. The new big priority. The maritime landscape […] ‘now I’ll explain. When they start talking to you about city center generosity, you can be shure they mean everyone out. Away! The Arabs, the Comorians, the blacks. In short, everything that tarnishes. And the unemployed, and the poor … Out!’”. Footnote 34

Discussion: from the crime space to the crime place

Literary criticism on crime fiction has long remarked that over the years the genre has undergone a fundamental transformation in terms of form and content, interpreted as the result of the postmodernist crisis of reason (Rzepka, 2005 ).

The initial phase of the detective novel history referred to in the second paragraph above reflected an absolute rationalist faith in the mind’s power. In the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet , Conan Doyle has Holmes explain the science of investigative deduction: according to the investigator, “deceit is an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis” ( 1887 , 23–24). With respect to this stage of evolution of detective stories, Julian Symons points out that writers had to structure the plot development so as to answer three essential questions: “Who, Why and When” (Symons, 1962 , 8), while Roger Callois claims that “How” was at the core of the questioning (Callois, 1983 , 4).

Admittedly, Dupin, Holmes and Poirot all adopt a comparable approach in analyzing the crime scene. The detective story unfolds in a space that is intended as a frame for tangible elements (objects and people) through which the rational mind logically reconstructs the causal relationships that connect clues, facts and events.

The first geographer who considered detective fiction as a case study was Yi -Fu Tuan, who addressed Holmes stories. While highlighting the important role of the Victorian world in the narrative defined by a “dark London” metropolis, exotic characters, and worldwide travels, Tuan ( 1985 ) argued that Conan Doyle’s success lies in the reason’s capacity to solve mysteries and restore order in a rapidly changing world (Hones, 2010 ). In addition, as a specific literary feature in the canon, he noticed that murder scenes are always described as obscure and sinister; so are criminals, who “are marked by some sinister physiognomic trait” (Tuan, 1985 , 59).

In fact, the territorial context identified by Tuan is always a background aspect. When looking only at the storyline – the collection of evidence and the deductive process – the murder of the Rue Morgue could have been committed anywhere, just as the investigation on the Orient Express could have been conducted in any enclosed space. Even in the stories where the setting holds a greater importance, such as the Colorado desert in A Study in Scarlett or the moor of the Baskervilles, the landscape descriptions mainly serve a decorative purpose, as backdrop for the plot.

As subsequently shown in this paper, however, the role of geography in later crime fiction changed completely. Sheila Hones ( 2011 ) has acutely pointed out that the story setting is not any more merely a “general socio-historico-geographical environment” working as framework for the action. In the examples considered in previous paragraphs about the selected cycles, Pepe Carvalho, Salvo Montalbano and Fabio Montale are one with their home territories – Barcelona, Sicily, and Marseille respectively.

The connection between the description of the crime scene and the deductive process is missing for the most part, as becomes clear already from Camilleri’s first book where the inspector’s surveys leave out any details so as to give prominence to the landscape context: “the Commissioner lit a cigarette, turned to look towards the chemical factory. That ruin fascinated him. He decided that one day he would return to take photographs”. Footnote 35 As a matter of fact, Carvalho, Montalbano, and Montale succeed in solving cases not so much because they are good at piecing clues together, but mostly because they are able to interpret them in the light of the practices and conduct laws that govern the local society and mindset, of which they have a deep understanding. In a metafictional passage, Montalbano himself says:

“‘Priestley is an author known for his ability to write para-detective works. What does it mean? It means that on the surface they look like crime plots but in reality they are profound investigations into the soul of contemporary man’. Montabano argued that a cop not able to understand the soul of the human beings would not be a good cop”. Footnote 36

To analyze social, political and cultural problems of their territories, Montalbán, Camilleri and Izzo need the topographical description of Barcelona, of the imaginary Vigata or of Marseille as a privileged observatory from which constructing the representation of the society they know so well (Pezzotti, 2012 ). Therefore, the investigation continues to function as the narrative guiding thread, but it loses its primary relevance: murder and theft are only the trigger for the detectives’ work, which involves reading the landscape, self-reflection, and socio-geographical and psychological analyses.

It has been pointed out that “rather than the crime perpetrator, Montalbano investigates the Sicilian territory and identity” (Pezzotti, 2012 ). As a matter of fact, Mediterranean noirs also introduce new variations on the themes typical to classic noir, such as the problem of the isolation of the individual and the crisis of the subject in its relationship with the world. Investigation as a narrative key is retained, but with the aim of recontextualizing it. The plot is triggered by strolls in the local territory, sometimes even depicted in a nostalgic vein with different narrative techniques. The new canons tend to externalize what classic noir had internalized, extending the investigation out of the individual and into society. Behind the description of the setting emerges a need to reflect on the context itself and do so through the narrative involvement of the investigation, seeking to reach deeper insight and hidden truths. The investigation continues to function as a narrative guideline, but it loses its primary relevance: murder and theft are only the trigger for the detectives’ work, which involves reading the landscape, self-reflection, and socio-geographical and psychological analyses.

In fact, what differentiates Mediterranean writers from classical ones and partially explains the importance of locality is the strong sentiment of belonging with which place-settings are invested. As Elaine Stratford and Marco Antonsich suggest, “belonging” could be interpreted as an intimate identification process involving personal biography and symbolic or material spaces (Antonsich, 2010b ; Stratford, 2009 ). Such connection appears to be crucial in Montalban, Camilleri and Izzo’s act of writing: not only they all have settled their stories in the place where they come from, but have also acknowledged similarities between the protagonists’ lives and their own.

From the analysis of these authors’ writings, it is therefore possible to shed new light on the development of those literary topoi which have become the books hallmarks and that stem from the authors’ attachment to their home-region. In this regard, the Izzo’s collection of essays Marseille ( 2000 ) represents a sort of manifesto pinpointing most of the topoi that characterize space. A common thread throughout the three cycles thereby becoming an intrinsic part of the local culture in the collective imagination, such topoi include different territorial elements.

First, the social struggle within the locality: all three detectives are ideologically left-wing, part of or open to the lower strata of society. After all, Montalbán, Camilleri and Izzo share with Chandler his critique of capitalism based on the underlying assumption that the current economic system increases inequalities, corrupts the people and leads to crime (Broe, 2014 ).

Secondly, the clash between local identities and the consequences of globalization and modernity. Carvalho helplessly witnesses the transformation of his city into a European metropolis that eventually yields to the advocates of an artificial Catalanism, which is in turn fostered by international capital. Montalbano is troubled by the erasure of old Sicily values, uneasy in dealing with new technologies, horrified by the consequences of naval blockades in the Mediterranean. Montale’s ideological aim is to prevent Marseille transformation from a gateway into a frontier between the wealthy North and the poor South. In this sense, Izzo clearly claims the existence of a Mediterranean culture with common roots that is currently in danger (Izzo, 2000 ).

Thirdly, the relationship with the sea as a geographical expression of the common roots. The stories all take place in maritime areas and all three main characters have a habit to plunge into the waters of the sea, especially in difficult times. Swimming in Mediterranean becomes a cathartic purifying process of inner reflection: in the words of Izzo “we know very well that it is our sea which unites us” (Izzo, 2000 , 79).

Fourth, local cuisine. The investigators are all food connoisseurs and their habit of having lunch always in the same places reflects their view of eating as a communitarian, almost familiar action: the rituals that they perform during lunch (i.e. being silent, tasting each flavor, localize ingredients etc.) make the meal an act of conviviality and regional ritualism. Thus, the role attributed to food and to the act of eating as an instrument of identity, a way to create and maintain strong roots, is a paradigmatic example of how space becomes place by assuming the connotation of feelings, culture and traditions (Bakhtiarova, 2020 ; Michelis, 2010 ).

It can therefore be said that these elements, including the landscape descriptions of the countryside and of urban neighborhoods, the language, the sea, the local cuisine, and social classes stratigraphy related to specific spaces are all viewed through the emotional prism of the writers’ attachment to their land, even more so than through the characters’.

Conclusion: the crime place as production of locality

Crime and detective fiction offers to literary geography an intriguing field of research. Firstly, exploration and investigation-based plots facilitate the depiction of space and society in a semi-documentary approach. In the second place, geographies are represented from the protagonist’s (and sometimes from the writer’s) point of view, which allows the identification of personal and collective images, feelings and ideas with which the space is invested. In the third place, due to their popular success, it is possible to consider these books as vectors for the transmission and consolidation of such images.

In his attempt to classify and systematize literary geographies, Anderson ( 2010 ) suggests five key questions for an assemblage approach to intertwined fictional and physical worlds, with regard to intra-textual, intertextual, and extra-textual geographies. Following his line, the paper has explored the relation between narrative and space in crime fiction.

In this respect, crime fiction stories like Montalban, Camilleri and Izzo’s allow the readership to identify a Mediterranean noir inter-textual literary space thanks to the citation of names, to the references to common geographical locations of authors and settings, and to the description of recognisable territorial elements and meanings. The very definition of “Mediterranean noir” used to label them is based on a geographical criterion and would even be incorrect from a formal perspective, at least in the case of Camilleri’s books, which cannot be considered noir strictu sensu.

Regarding the intra-textual perspective, Geoffrey Hartman noted that “to solve a crime in detective stories means to give it an exact location: to pinpoint not merely the murderer and his motives but also the very place, the room, the ingenious or brutal circumstances” (Hartman, 1999 , 212). However, this assumption seems inadequate to define more recent detective stories, where the solving of the crime is not as central as it used to be. What we argue is that the very center is now the location itself: the place needs a crime story just to be showcased. The identification of the detective with a specific place is reinforced by the reiteration of crime stories settled in the same area over different cycles. In this sense, Rosemberg and Troin ( 2017 ) have observed that recent detective stories are more similar to travel stories than to investigations. A different geography supports the novels, where the topography of space is no longer as relevant as the chorography of place, that is to say the social, cultural, environmental, collective and psychological structures that shaped it. As opposed to the investigations of Sherlock Holmes or Poirot, Carvalho, Montalbano and Montale’s stories could not be set elsewhere, because they originate from the very context of the narrative. Unlike American detective stories where the detective represents the centrality of the individual in a mass society, the characteristic that enhances the ability of Mediterranean noir to spur ideas of locality is the celebration of a collective sense of community.

In Carvalho, Montalbano and Montale’s investigations, belonging and local identities emerge as key components of the story and the plot, resulting in the construction of new ideas of narrated territories. Consequently, due to the genre’s popularity in mass culture, the making of extra-textual geographies and of relations between people and place – in other words, their literary or factual impact on a specific place – needs to be studied with an eye on text reception. This particular type of narrative structure responded to the necessity of Italian, Spanish, and French readers, confronted with globalisation processes, to recognise chosen elements of identity as keys to read their territory while taking into account their cultural roots. In the same years in which the discussion about locality was growing, Mediterranean noir then claimed a vantage point to reflect on and interpret these processes.

Literature has been acknowledged to possess the potential to create discourses of local identity (Hones, 2008 ; Ridanpää, 2019 ). Such anthropological theory can be effectively applied to the new trends in crime fiction in order to explain their genesis and the success which they have met with the general public, even as cinematographic transpositions. In this respect, the adventures of Carvalho, Montalbano and Montale have also been reified as promotional tools for the territories they represent. In Barcelona, for instance, many package tours have been organized to let tourists rediscover the places of Montalbán (Redondo, 2017 ). Similarly, in Italy, the significant increase in tourist flux to the province of Agrigento – where the Montalbano television series was shot – has even led tourism sciences to coin the expression “Montalbano effect” (Di Betta, 2015 ; Ponton & Asero, 2015 ). Unlike Sherlock Holmes’, however, the author’s and the character’s houses are not the only tourist attractions: the entire territory narrated in the fiction continues to capture the interest of the public. While Robert Rushing has explained the success of detective fiction in terms of satisfaction of inner desires ( 2007 ), the very setting should be considered as a crucial factor for the understanding of popular reception. It is not a coincidence that, over the years, several other Italian cities and regions have become the set for detective stories of lesser or greater literary value, the topoi of which were not far from those identified above. As demonstration of the performative power of fiction, in 2003 the Municipality of Porto Empedocle had decided to change the name of the city in “Porto Empedocle Vigata”, a decision later revoked in 2009.

The new role and function assigned to place in Mediterranean crime stories are not only a fascinating practice of literature, but also a cultural and geographical phenomenon. This paper proposes to interpret this phenomenon as a discourse of production of local identities with respect to the problem of globalization. The way in which globalization has, on the one hand, complicated the modern configurations of identity and, on the other, sparked disagreement about the contents of such category, has been widely discussed (Browning and Ferraz de Oliveira, 2017 ; Rembold and Carrier, 2011 ; Terlouw, 2012 ). In Modernity at Large ( 1996 ), Appadurai linked the topics of modernity/modernization and globalization to daily social practices. In contrast to the prediction of a global homogenization and leveling of identities, the anthropologist convincingly argues that in the face of modernization and globalization processes, human groups react by re-producing local identities and seeking affiliations of smaller groups. Appadurai demonstrates that globalization does not necessarily lead to the leveling of differences; on the contrary, it can trigger resilient responses. Thus, locality represents the result of a work of context interpretation and enhancement conducted by agents who develop strategies and construct identity discourses through the selection of social categories, symbols and contents capable of identifying a place (Escobar, 2001 ).

It is interesting to notice that in our case study the production of image happens at multiple levels. At a local scale, by describing the environment as a setting for the ethnographic investigations/journeys of their protagonists in a relational space, Montalbán, Camilleri and Izzo tend to represent their own idea of Barcelona, Sicily and Marseille respectively. For this purpose, they select some of the geographical elements that they perceive as typical, thereby conveying a constructed image and subsequently developing a geographical discourse. At chorographic scale, such selected elements are mostly the same and reinforce the perception of a common and shared Mediterranean, which builds on Fernand Braudel’s concept of a unified culture between the different shores of the sea. Thus, the writers work on a multiple scale, developing a discourse that connects local identities in a broader Mediterranean one: in the words of Izzo, a “Mediterranean creolity” (Izzo, 2000 , 43).

Availability of data and material

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

In literary sciences there is a wide debate on the different definitions of detective fiction, crime story, thriller and noir. For the purpose of this paper, I adopt the general definition of detective fiction as a “narrative whose principal action concerns the attempt by an investigator to solve a crime and to bring a criminal to justice” (Herman, Jahn and Ryan, 2010 ).

The definition of “classic detective fiction” to define 19th century crime fiction focusing on an investigator and the story of his investigations has been borrowed by Marty Roth ( 1995 ).

“Aquel hombre alto, moreno, treintañero, algo desalineado a pesar de llevar ropas caras de sastrería del Ensanche” (Montalbán, 1974 , 20). A literal translation into English is provided for all quotes in this paper.

“Acaso un policía como yo no es un sociólogo?” (Montalbán, 1974 , 119).

“Sentimiento contrario le despertaba Vía Layetana con su aspecto de primer e indeciso paso para iniciar un Manhattan barcelonés, que nunca llegaría a realizarse. Era una calle de entreguerras, con el puerto en una punta y la Barcelona menestral de Gracia en la otra, artificialmente abierta para hacer circular el nervio comercial de la metrópoli y con el tiempo convertida en una calle de sindicatos y patronos, de policías con sus victimas, mas alguna Caja de Ahorros y el monumento entre jardines sobre fondo gotizante a uno de los condes mas sólidos de Cataluña” (Montalbán, 1979 , 36).

“Si la guerra de los Treinta Años no hubiera sentenciado la hegemonía de Francia en Europa, la cocina francesa a estas horas padecería la hegemonía de las cocinas de España. Su único patriotismo era gastronómico” (Montalbán, 1979 , 63).

“En la matriz de la Cataluña esencial: el pan con tomate, el cava, las seques amb botifarra , la escudella i carn d’olla” (Montalbán, 1988 , 32).

“Quería comer cocina catalana, empezar a identificarse totalmente con la causa y pidió escudella barrejada y peus de porc amb cargols , consciente de que la escudella barrejada es la resaca de las mejores escudellas , los restos de sus esplendores y que los pies de cerdo con caracoles son anticalóricos y nulos portadores del colesterol” (Montalbán, 2000 , 26).

“A todo le llaman jamón de Salamanca. A todo lo que no es jamón de Jabugo o de Trevélez, pues de Salamanca. Hay que fastidiarse. Y así no sabes cuando comes jamón de Salamanca o jamón de Totana” (Montalbán, 1979 , 17).

“La calle Perecamps seria continuada y cortaría las carnes da la Ciudad Vieja en busca del Ensanche, abriéndose camino a través de la carnes vencidas y los esqueletos calcificados de las arquitecturas mas miserables de la ciudad. Un gigantesco bulldozer con cabeza de insecto de pesadilla convertiría la arqueología de la miseria […] pero aunque se derrumbaran las casas y los viejos, los drogadictos, los camellos, las putas pobres, los negros, los moros tuvieran que escapar empujados por la pala mecánica, a algún lugar llevarían su miseria, tal vez al extrarradio, donde la ciudad pierde su nombre y ya no se hace responsable de sus desastres” (Montalbán, 1988 , 51).

“Carvalho encaminó hacia allí sus pasos en un deseo de releer la ciudad, de reconciliarse con la voluntad de Barcelona de convertirse en una ciudad pasteurizada y en olor de gambas fritas que salían de las metástasis de los restaurantes de la Vila Olímpica […] Todas las metáforas de la ciudad se habían hecho inservibles: ya no era la ciudad viuda, viuda de poder, porque lo tenia desde las instituciones autonómicas; tampoco la rosa de fuego de los anarquistas, porque la burguesía había vencido definitivamente por el procedimiento de cambiar de nombre […] Barcelona se había convertido en una ciudad hermosa pero sin alma, como alguna estatuas, o tal vez tenia una alma nueva que Carvalho perseguía en sus paseos hasta admitir que tal vez la edad ya no le dejaba descubrir el espíritu de nuevos tiempos […] Pero estaba reenamorandose de su ciudad y especialmente debía reprimir la tendencia a la satisfacción cuando bajaba por las Rambles” (Montalbán, 2000 , 19).

“Il settore detto la mannara, perché in tempi immemorabili pare che un pastore avesse usato tenervi le capre. Era un largo tratto di macchia mediterranea alla periferia del paese che si spingeva quasi fin sulla pilaia, con alle spalle i resti di un grande stabilimento chimico, inaugurato dall’onnipresente onorevole Cusumano quando pareva che forte tirasse il vento delle magnifiche sorti e progressive, poi quel venticello rapidamente si era cangiato in un filo di brezza e quindi si era abbancato del tutto” (Camilleri, 1994 , 9–10).

“ ‘Ci sono novità oggi?’’Niente da pigliarsi sopra il serio, dottori. Hanno dato foco al garaggi di Sebastiano Lo Monaco […] Poi hanno sparato a uno che di nome suo di proprio si chiama Quarantino Filippo, ma l’hanno sbagliato e hanno pigliato la finestra della di cui la quale è abitata dalla signor Pizzuto Saveria. Doppo c’è stato un altro incendio, assicuramente doloso, un incendio doloro. Insomma, dottore, minchiate’” (Camilleri, 1996 , 108).

“Montalbano si commosse. Quella era l’amicizia siciliana, la vera, che si basa sul non detto, sull’intuito; uno a un amico non ha bisogno di domandare, è l’altro che autonomamente capisce a agisce di conseguenza” (Camilleri, 1996 , 172–173).

“Torno torno c’erano tirreni coltivati a vigneti, e a perdita d’occhio si vidivano arboli di mennule ‘n mezzo ai quali, di tanto in tanto, spiccava il bianco di casuzze di viddrani. Era un paisaggio ncantevoli che rassirinava il cori e l’anima, però a Montalbano vinni un pensiero tinto. Va’ a sapiri quanti mafiusi latitanti s’attrovavano ancora dintra a ‘ste casuezze accussì ‘nnucenti all’apparenzia” (Camilleri, 2018 , 83).

“Due o tre volte, a tradimento, l’odore, la parlata, le cose dellla sua terra lo pigliarono, lo sollevarono in aria senza peso, lo riportarono, per pochi attimi, a Vigata” (Camilleri, 1994 , 165).

“ All’ebica dei musulmani in Sicilia, quando Montelusa si chiamava Kerkent, gli arabi avevano fabbricato alla periferia dei paisi un quartiere dove stavano tra di loro. Quando i mulsumani se n’erano scappati sconfitti, nelle loro case c’erano andati ad abitare i montelusani e il nome del quartiere era stato sicilianizzato in Rabatu. Nella seconda metà di questo secolo una gigantesca frana l’aveva inghiottito. Le poche case rimaste in piedi erano lesionate, sbilenche, si tenevano in equilibri assurdi. Gli arabi, tornati questa volta in veste di povirazzi, ci avevano ripreso ad abitare, mettendo al posto delle tegole pezzi di lamiera” (Camilleri, 1996 , 97).

“ ‘Ora mi metto a tambasiare’ pensò appena arrivato a casa. Tambasiare era un verbo che gli piaceva, significava mettersi a girellare di stanza in stanza senza uno scopo previso, anzi occupandosi di cose futili” (Camilleri, 1994 , 151).

“All’osteria san Calogero lo rispettavano, non tanto perché fosse il commissario quanto perché era un buon cliente, di quelli che sanno apprezzare. Gli fecero mangiare triglie di scoglio freschissime, fritte croccanti e lasciate un pezzo a sgocciolare sulla carta da pane” (Camilleri, 1994 , 67).

“Gli arrivarono gli otto pezzi di nasello, porzione chiaramente per quattro pirsune. Gridavno, i pezzi di nasello, la loro gioia per essere stati cucinati come Dio comanda. A nasata, il piatto faceva sentire la sua perfezione, ottenuta con la giusta quantità di pangrattato, col delicato equilibrio tra acciuga e uovo battuto. Portò alla bocca il primo boccone, non l’ingoiò subito. Lasciò che il gusto si diffondesse dolcemente e uniformemente su lingua e palato, che lingua e palato si rendessero pientamente conto del dono che veniva loro offerto” (Camilleri, 1996 , 33).

“Quanno era arrivato a Vigata si era fatto diviri d’acconosciri il territorio nel quali doviva travvagliare. Eppercio si era fatto un lungo e largo giro di ricognizioni. Na vota la campagna, che ora sta sutta ai so occhi, era feconda, virdi e china di vita pirchì curata e rispittata dall’omo. Ora era addivintata quasi un diserto, regno di serpi e di erba giallusa ncapaci pirsino di fari un sciuri. Pariva che quella terra fusse stata toccata da na malidizioni biblica che la cunnannava alla stirilità e che macari le case, malannate com’erano, ne fussiro state suggette” (Camilleri, 2017 , 40).

“Quella picca munnizza nn gli avrebbi arrecato ‘na granni sofferenza rispetto a tutto quello che di jorno in jorno ci veniva scarricato dintra: plastica, rifiuti tossici, spurgo di cloache. Ma di certo aviva soffruto chiossà per le migliara di migliara di corpi di dispirati, di genti morti ‘n mari nella spiranza di raggiungiri la costa taliana per scappari dalle guerro o per vinirisi a guadagnari un tozzo di pani” (Camilleri, 2017 , 214).

“La haine du monde est l’unique scénario” (Izzo, 1995 , 235).

“Comme enquêteur, je ne valais toujours pas un radis. Je fonçais à l’intuition, mais sans jamais prendre le tempes de réfléchir” (Izzo, 1996 , 125).

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?msa=0&hl=fr&ie=UTF8&t=m&ll=43.299697%2C5.359955000000016&spn=0.224876%2C0.466232&z=11&source=embed&mid=1W_762SmB0xrbZriMrxKFXl0_ec4

“Une cité maghrébine. Ce n’était pas la plus dure […] Comme un autre continent” (Izzo,  1995 , 53).

“La peur des Arabes avait fait fuir les Marseillais vers d’autres quartiers plus excentrés, ou il se sentaient en sécurité […] Des rues à putes. Aux immeubles insalubres et aux hôtels pouilleux. Toutes les migrations avaient transite par ces rues. Jusqu’à ce qu’une rénovation les refoule an périphérie” (Izzo, 1995 , 153–154).

“Marseille, porte de l’Orient. L’ailleurs. L’aventure, le rêve” (Izzo,  1995 , 197).

“Le carrefour de tous les brassages humains” (Izzo, 1995 , 120).

“Marseille italienne. Avec le mêmes odeurs, le mêmes rires, les mêmes éclats de voix que dans les rues de Naples, de Palerme ou de Rome” (Izzo,  1996 , 107).

“Un curieux français, mélange de provençal, d’italien, d’espagnol, d’arabe, avec une pointe d’argot et un zeste de verlan” (Izzo, 1995 , p. 77).

“À Marseille, jusqu’à la fin d’octobre parfois, l’automne garde un arrière−goût d’été. Il suffisant d’un courant d’air pour en raviver des odeurs de thym, de menthe et de basilic” (Izzo, 1996 , 83).

“De la musique arabe […] l’oud se répandit dans la voiture comme un odeur. L’odeur paisible des oasis. Dattes, figues sèches, amandes” (Izzo, 1995 , 66).

“Marseille n’avait d’avenir qu’en renonçant a son histoire. C’est cela que l’on nous expliquait. Et s’il était souvent question du redéveloppement portuaire, ce n’était souvent question du redéveloppement portuaire, ce n’était que pur mieux affirmer qu’il fallait en finir avec ce port tel qu’il etait aujourd’hui. Le symbole d’une gloire ancienne […] on raserait donc les hangars […] et on remodèlerait le paysage maritime. Çà, c’était la nouvelle grande idée. La nouvelle priorité. Le paysage maritime […] je vais t’expliquer. Quand on commence a te parler de générosité du centre−ville, tu peux être sur que ça veut dire tout le monde dehors. Du balai! Les Arabes, les Comoriens, les Noirs. Tout ce qui fait tache, quoi. Et le chômeurs, et les pauvres… Ouste!” (Izzo, 1998 , 71).

“Il commissario si accese una sigaretta, si voltò a taliare verso la fabbrica chimica. L’affascinava, quella rovina. Decise che un giorno sarebbe tornato a scattare delle fotografie” (Camilleri, 1994 , 22).

“‘Priestley è un autore noto per la sua bravura nello scrivere opere para-poliziesche. Che significa? Significa che all’apparenza sembrano trame gialle ma in realtà sono indagini profonde nell’animo dell’uomo contemporaneo’. Montabano arriflittì che non esisteva bravo sbirro che non fusse macari capaci di ‘ndagare a funno nell’animo dell’essiri umani” (Camilleri, 2018 , 128).

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The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their suggestions. He also acknowledges Giulio Sanseverino (University of Trento) for helpful comments and for proofreading the paper.

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Gabellieri, N. Place matters: geographical context, place belonging and the production of locality in Mediterranean Noirs. GeoJournal 87 , 3895–3913 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10470-x

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Accepted : 06 July 2021

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10470-x

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Geographic Information Science and the Analysis of Place and Health

Jeremy mennis.

1 Temple University

Eun-Hye Enki Yoo

2 University at Buffalo

The representation of place is a key theoretical advancement that Geographic Information Science can offer to improve the understanding of environmental determinants of health, but developing robust computational representations of place requires a substantial departure from conventional notions of geographic representation in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Unlike conventional GIS representations based on either objects or locations, we suggest place representation should incorporate dynamic subjective, experiential, and relational aspects of place, as the influence of place on health behavior concerns not only the features that can be objectively observed at a particular location but also the environmental perceptions of the individual, as molded by biological, social, and experiential characteristics. In addition, assessments of environmental exposures on health outcomes should focus on individuals’ time-activity patterns and microenvironment profiles, which form a potentially unique personalized exposure environment for each individual. Addressing these representational challenges via collaborative research has the potential to advance both Geographic Information Science and health research.

1 Introduction

This is an article about investigating the role of place in human health, and how Geographic Information Scientists can contribute to this investigation. We argue that theoretical advances in Geographic Information Science are key to addressing some of the most pressing challenges in health science. One concern, however, is that intersections with other fields outside of Geographic Information Science are often considered ‘applied GIS’ and relegated to second class status, a designation that has stunted the growth of our field, while other fields have made substantial theoretical advances on topics that are clearly within the realm of Geographic Information Science. This sentiment was captured eloquently by Jerry Dobson (2016) in his statement that “…geographic information scientists routinely create immensely valuable insights, data, methods, techniques, and tools that clearly advance science, but it’s mainly other disciplines that apply them to science theory…if we don’t use it ourselves, then we become merely the clerks of science ” (emphasis ours). The consequence of this viewpoint is that the potential contribution of Geographic Information Science to major scientific and policy-relevant investigations is going unfulfilled. We certainly see this limitation in our own research on place and health, as it relates to topics associated with health behaviors, such as substance use, and exposure to environmental hazards, such as air pollution.

We note that health researchers have increasingly embraced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related geographic methods and technologies as they have become more accessible and more well-known ( Richardson et al., 2013 ). Quantitative geographic approaches to health have expanded from a focus on the geographic distribution of disease to examinations of neighborhood effects on health to more theoretically informed models of the mediated and moderated mechanisms of how geographic contexts affect health outcomes ( Diez-Roux and Mair, 2010 ; Macintyre et al., 2002 ; Rosenberg, 2016 ). Geospatial technologies have facilitated new health research incorporating individuals’ daily movements and georeferenced survey data on individuals’ health perceptions and behaviors.

Much of this quantitative, geographically oriented health research, however, remains rooted in a definition of place based on objectively defined observations of geographic context, such as the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods derived from census data. Of health research that incorporates individual perceptions of place, for example via survey data capturing the perception of neighborhood social cohesion or access to healthy food or recreation, the geographic aspect is often limited to georeferecing at the home location. This stands in contrast to the humanistic notion of place as a subjective and experiential relation that occurs between a person and location, and which has long been proposed as a key ingredient to understanding how place affects health ( Kearns, 1993 ; Kearns and Moon, 2002 ). One simple and compelling reason for the sparsity of quantitative health research that incorporates this humanistic perspective on place is the lack of accessible place-based computational models and analytical tools in GIS – conventional GIS representations were simply not developed to support subjective and experiential notions of place, a critique also notably voiced by researchers interested in geographic issues of power relations, social justice, and the lived experience of individuals ( Pickles, 1995 ; Crampton, 2010 ).

In the present paper we propose that the representation of place, as a dynamic, subjective, experiential, and relational entity, is a key theoretical advancement that Geographic Information Science can offer to improve the understanding of environmental determinants of health. We note that advancements in the capabilities and accessibility of GIS, GPS, and spatial statistics have led to a rapid expansion in the breadth and sophistication of health geography research over the past 20 years. Likewise, the development of a place-based GIS that supports the representation of human perceptions, experiences, and interactions with the environment would open the door to new lines of health geography research in the future, particularly those relating to health behaviors, environmental exposures, and interactions between individual and environmental mechanisms of disease. Developing robust computational representations of place, however, requires a substantial departure from conventional notions of representation in GIS. Here, we review research that introduces place representation into GIS-based health research, and offer several challenges to the Geographic Information Science community that we see as key to moving the place and health research agenda forward.

2 The Challenge of Representing Place in GIS and Health Geography

Arguably, the primary project, or mission, of the field of Geographic Information Science is geographic representation – the symbolic embodiment of the geographic world. We acknowledge that this idea is not particularly new. The idea of Digital Earth as described by Vice President Al Gore (1998) captures some of this idea, and indeed has been previously suggested as the grand challenge of Geographic Information Science ( Goodchild, 2008 ), though the idea of Digital Earth would seem to focus somewhat explicitly on physical earth systems, as opposed to social or cultural characteristics. While the project of representation in Geographic Information Science is clearly oriented towards computational representation, it also encompasses visual and cognitive representation, as well as the societal and cultural implications of the ways in which geographic information is represented and used. The project of representation can also be interpreted to encompass geographic analysis, where statistical models, computational simulations, and data mining algorithms can be considered representations of real world phenomena, formalized as a set of rules or equations.

Some geographic things are harder to represent than others. Geographic objects which are simple, have a clear physical manifestation, have crisp boundaries, and do not typically change over time, such as parcel boundaries, are fairly easy to represent. Entities which are similar, but move through space over time, as with cars and other vehicles, are somewhat more difficult to represent, but the conceptual nature of representation is still straightforward. Representations get more difficult with geographic entities which can be conceptualized as a process, however, such as a traffic jam, which, while conceptualized as a single geographic entity, can simultaneously be conceptualized as composed of multiple moving objects, i.e. individual vehicles. Representation becomes even more challenging when the represented phenomenon is semantically ambiguous, as with a process such as gentrification, which is typically inferred indirectly from several separate, yet related occurrences, such as the opening of fancy coffee shops or a rapid increase in real estate prices due to speculation.

The representation of place in Geographic Information Science, however, is more challenging than any of these previously mentioned phenomena. Take, for instance, the representation of a ‘risky place’ or a ‘dangerous neighborhood.’ To some, such a designation might conjure in the mind a poor urban neighborhood, with physical indicators such as vacant housing, abandoned cars, graffiti, and liquor stores. Such are the features found in the image appearing on the cover of the American Journal of Psychiatry to depict risky urban environments, intended as an illustration of our research on neighborhood risks for substance use ( Stahler et al., 2009 ). However, despite this depiction of, arguably, prototypical signifiers of urban neighborhood disadvantage and disorder, ascribing concepts of risk and danger to locations is not so simple. Consider a related research project where we asked approximately 250 adolescents residing in inner-city Philadelphia to name both a safe place they frequented as well as a risky place, where risk was defined as the likelihood of engaging in harmful behavior such as drug use or violence ( Mennis and Mason, 2011 ). The most commonly named risky place turned out to be The Gallery, an indoor shopping mall in downtown Philadelphia which was a known gathering place for youth. Many subjects intimated that it was risky because of potential violence that could occur when different groups of youth intermixed in an unsupervised environment. One might conclude that The Gallery is a dangerous place. This was contradicted, however, by the fact that among the places listed by the adolescents as their safe place, The Gallery was also the most commonly named.

So, is The Gallery a risky place or a safe place? As it turns out, it depends to whom the question is asked, and this gets at the heart of why it is so challenging to represent place in Geographic Information Science. Unlike many geographic phenomena represented in GIS, such as parcel boundaries or elevation, place can be considered not an objective characteristic of a location to be observed, but a subjective experience that is created and interpreted ( Elwood et al., 2013 ; Winter and Freksa, 2012 ). Thus, concepts such as ‘risky’ and ‘dangerous’ may not necessarily be qualities of locations themselves, but rather emerge from an individual’s subjective interpretations of that location. Such interpretations are derived in part from the characteristics and prior experiences of the individual. Therefore, computational representations of place need not conform to the object- or location-based conceptual models, where attributes are assigned to objects tethered to a location, or to locations directly themselves, that form the basis of computational representational structures in GIS.

Instead, the meaning of place can be considered to be subjective, experiential, and relational – it emerges from the interplay between a person and a location. The relational nature of place has been demonstrated in empirical research on place attachment ( Brown et al., 2015 ) and is a feature in longstanding ideas about place in humanist geography. As Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) said, “Place may be said to have ‘spirit or ‘personality’ but only human beings can have a sense of place.” Importantly, subjective experiences and perceptions of one’s environment are no less relevant to understanding place than the physical features of the environment which can be readily observed visually. Indeed, when considering health behaviors, subjective experiences and perceptions may be more important than what can be ‘objectively’ observed via, say, census data, administrative data, business listings, or remotely sensed imagery. This idea is captured by sociologist Robert Sampson (2012) in his statement about the effect of neighborhood disorder on economic outcomes, “If you think something’s real, its consequences are real…shared perceptions of disorder lead to future rates of poverty. What this suggests is that perceptions, not just the reality of how many broken windows or broken beer bottles there are in the street really matter.”

In addition, the particular locations that hold meaning and are thus influential for an individual can be unique to each person; Each person has their own set of specific locations that compose their activity space – their home, the homes of their close friends and family, their workplace, and other places that serve particular functions such as shopping and leisure. This is of particular concern for investigations of place and health, where one is concerned with how characteristics of the environment influence individual health behaviors and outcomes ( Kwan, 2009 , Spielman and Yoo, 2009 ). Measurements of environmental exposure to health determinants can vary considerably according to an individual’s activities and movements over time. Thus, place representation in GIS ought to be concerned not only with the subjective and relational experience of place that can vary among individuals at a specific location in space, but also with the dynamic personalized expression of an individual’s activity space that determines the set of potential environmental exposures that is unique to each individual.

3 Theorizing and Capturing Place-Meaning and Health Behavior

A number of previous researchers have offered conceptual frameworks for how geographic characteristics influence a variety of health outcomes. In the context of substance use, Galea et al. (2005) describe how individual risky behaviors can be seen as a product of contextual characteristics, such as social norms and neighborhood disadvantage, which can influence substance use behaviors through mediating factors such as social networks and supports, all of which are influenced by policy and regulatory environments. In a similar manner, Northridge et al. (2003) distinguish between health factors at the macro level (e.g. climate and legal codes), community level (e.g. the built environment), and individual level (e.g. health behaviors).

Gee and Payne-Sturges (2004) describe a conceptual model of geographic factors and health with a focus on health disparities, in which they assert that residential segregation produces disparate exposures to community level stressors and resources that consequently impact individual level stress and related health outcomes. A somewhat similar perspective is offered by Diez-Roux and Mair (2010) who emphasize that residential segregation and associated inequalities in resource distribution result in differential exposure to physical and social neighborhood environments and, consequently, psychological stress and health behaviors. They note that these psychological states and behaviors can serve as mediators for each other, such as where stress precipitates a negative health behavior like smoking.

While these conceptual frameworks incorporate the idea that the effect of contextual characteristics on health outcomes are mediated and moderated by individual level characteristics, they tend to focus on objectively measurable characteristics of the environment, such as regulations or community level economic disadvantage, rather than on individuals’ perceptions of the environment, such as feelings of fear, safety, discrimination, or the types of social relationships that occur in particular places. Not surprisingly, geographers have offered some interpretations in this regard. The integration of humanistic notions of place with health research was described by Gesler (1992) through the concept of therapeutic landscapes, where landscapes are seen to confer health benefits (and risks) via not only structural forces, such as legacies of discrimination that have produced residential segregation, but also through the rituals, symbols, feelings of attachment, and personal experiences that tie an individual to a place.

Conradson (2005) argues for a relational interpretation of therapeutic landscapes – that the qualities of health risk and protection associated with a particular place should be seen as “…something that emerges through a complex set of transactions between a person and their broader socio-environmental setting.” (p. 338). This idea was also elucidated by Cummins et al. (2007) , who emphasize the importance of investigating the unique and personalized exposures of individuals to place characteristics, and note that contextual effects operate at different spatial scales. They contrast what they call the conventional analytical approach, which emphasizes static and objectively defined measures of people and their environment, with the ‘relational’ approach, which emphasizes dynamic and relative measures of how people interact with their environment and each other. A related argument was made more recently by Wiese et al. (2018) who point out that representations of identity which assume static and immutable characteristics (e.g. race, gender), as is typical in medicine, would be improved by incorporating biographical characteristics that acknowledge the fluid and dynamic nature of identity and its relationship with health.

Building on this previous research, our view of how subjective and relational notions of place can be conceptualized to influence health behavior can be summarized as 1) through the physical, social, and emotional character of the places people encounter in their everyday lives, 2) as mediated by individuals’ interpretations of those places, and 3) where those interpretations are molded by individual characteristics and prior personal experiences. This interpretation fits not only with humanistic geography perspectives on the subjective experience of place as articulated by scholars such as Tuan (1977) , but also with the social-ecological model of human development as proposed by Bronfrenbrenner (1979) . This influential theoretical model situates the individual as residing within a set of nested contextual social and physical environments, termed the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem, in order of proximal to distal associations with the individual. Characteristics of these contexts include family, peers, and school within the microsystem to socioeconomic features of the neighborhood, the media, and cultural ideologies at the more distal levels.

Figure 1 presents a diagram of a conceptual model of place and health behavior, which provides examples of some of the mediated and moderated pathways through which neighborhood characteristics can influence health behaviors. It is not intended as a comprehensive framework but as an example of how place effects on health may be conceptualized. Here, we begin with the idea of a chain of causation that starts with place characteristics on the left side of the diagram, which influence an individual’s psychological state, which consequently influences a health behavior; i.e. the influence of place on health behavior is mediated by an individual’s psychological state. For example, exposure to community violence may cause psychological stress that causes substance use as a coping mechanism. That mediated relationship can be moderated, however, by other characteristics of the individual, such as their racial or ethnic identity, gender, prior life experiences, and their family and peer social contexts. For instance, given the example of substance use, the mediated effect of community violence on substance use via stress may differ depending on the level of family support to abstain from substance use.

Conceptual model of mediating and moderating factors in how place can influence a health behavior.

Of course, neighborhood, biological, and social characteristics can also have direct effects on psychological state and health behaviors. For example, an individual’s past experiences can influence their psychological state, and family and social characteristics can directly affect health behaviors, e.g. an individual is more likely to use substances if their close friends are substance users. And these relationships among different characteristics can also occur in different directions. For instance, health behaviors can influence family and peer relationships, as with a situation in which an individual’s substance abuse disrupts family cohesion or causes psychological stress due to feelings of guilt or shame.

It is also important to point out the difference between mechanisms of influence and selection. Thus far we have described the conceptual model as consisting of contextual influences on psychological state and consequently health behavior, but individuals also choose where to live and spend their time, and with whom to be friends. These choices are also influenced by psychological state and health behaviors. For example, not only might an individual be influenced by their peers to use substances, but substance-using individuals might choose other substance users as friends.

One approach to capturing individual level data on subjective and relational experiences of place is through the extension of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) to Geographic EMA, or GEMA. For readers unfamiliar with conventional EMA, it is a data collection technique that involves repeated sampling of participant’s behaviors, moods, social interactions, and experiences in real time, and in a subject’s natural environment, often delivered via brief surveys over a mobile phone ( Shiffman et al., 2008 ). EMA has been widely used in ecological studies of health behaviors, including substance use, healthy eating, and exercise. Given that most mobile phones now have GPS technology embedded, it is possible to integrate the EMA survey methodology with synchronous location data to yield a rich spatial data set of locations with linked EMA responses. These ‘EMA locations’ can be considered the expression of an individual’s activity space, and can be linked to other geographic data from government censuses, business listings, remotely sensed imagery, and so on using GIS software, in order to investigate the influence of exposure to environmental characteristics on health (Kirchner and Shiffman, 2016). Though still in its infancy, GEMA has been used to investigate the influence of place characteristics on a variety of health indicators and outcomes, including psychological stress ( Mennis et al., 2016 ), craving among recovering heroin uses ( Epstein et al., 2014 ), alcohol use ( Freisthler et al., 2014 ), and smoking ( Kirchner et al., 2013 ).

We acknowledge that those in the Geographic Information Science community might think of collecting location information via mobile phones, in concert with EMA, as a technical, incremental advance. However, GEMA offers unprecedented opportunities to capture the personalized and subjective aspects of place for studies of health. Notably, it provides a means to connect momentary and in-situ information on an individual’s perceptions of their social and physical environment with their physical location. Kirchner and Shiffman (2016) state that GEMA is “most useful for the study of ‘places’ imbued with meaning by subjects – representing each subject’s personal eco-system ” [emphasis ours]. This idea closely adheres to the humanistic geography perspective on place, where the meaning of place is actively constructed by individuals through their experiences and interactions with the features and people at a location. It also echoes theory regarding computational and visual representation in cartography and GIS, where the meaning of cartographic and GIS database symbols can be viewed in part as a process where the map reader or GIS software user brings their own prior experiences and cognitive interpretive framework to bear on understanding geographic representations encoded in maps and GIS databases ( MacEachren, 1995 ; Peuquet, 2002 ).

4 Capturing Time-Activity Patterns using Personal Location Data

The significance of time-activity patterns, i.e. the locations and durations of time one spends at various places throughout daily life, have long been recognized as key to understanding environmental exposures linked to disease. Advanced technologies in sensing devices, such as GPS and accelerometers, that facilitate monitoring time-activity patterns at the individual level are now readily available. These light-weight and relatively low-cost devices have made it possible to accurately record individuals’ movements and infer their activities, enabling researchers to assess the influence of specific locations on health outcomes and behaviors. Examples include empirical studies on physical activity and the built environment ( Kerr et al., 2011 ; Krenn et al., 2011 ; Saelens et al., 2003 ) and infectious disease transmission ( Vazquez-Prokopec et al., 2013 ; Wesolowski et al., 2012 ), as well as environmental exposure ( Nyhan et al., 2016 , Rabinovitch et al., 2016 ). These developments in monitoring also align with research initiatives from the environmental health sciences on what has been termed the ‘exposome,’ the totality of an individual’s environmental exposures over the lifespan, which been recognized as key component to understanding chronic diseases (Wild, 2005), and which has recently been extended to the realm of GIS-based health research ( Jacquez et al., 2015 ; Stahler et al., 2013 ).

In personal exposure assessment, the significance of activity space-based air pollution exposure estimates has long been recognized ( Duan, 1982 ). One common traditional approach is to compile a person’s time-activity pattern based on personal diaries which record the location and times of daily activities, in combination with a direct or indirect measure of environmental air pollution concentrations. Diaries provide information on the time spent at various locations, so called ‘microenvironments,’ throughout the day. In the context of analyses of air pollution exposure, the microenvironment refers to a setting with homogeneous air quality, i.e. a spatial extent within which the air quality is assumed to be constant, and is a key concept underlying various models for human exposure to air pollution.

The individual’s exposure calculated as a time-weighted average of microenvironment air pollution concentrations can also be used to estimate the average exposure over a target population of interest in a model-based approach. Thus, misspecification of the microenvironment type in epidemiological studies is of great concern in exposure estimates ( Spiegelman, 2010 ). A typical example of misspecification of the microenvironment is found in both time-series analyses of acute health effects and cohort studies of long-term health effects, where exposure was estimated at the location of participants’ residence. This is problematic because adults in the U.S. spend, on average, about half of their day away from home, and almost half of adult workers commute 25 minutes or more ( Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007 ). Many epidemiological studies have also shown that errors induced by using residence-based estimates of human health exposure to ambient air pollution serve to potentially underestimate health effects ( Armstrong et al., 1998 ; Jerrett, et al., 2005 ; Miller et al., 2007 ; Navidi et al., 1995 ; Setton et al., 2011 ; Wilson, et al., 2005 ).

This issue of properly quantifying environmental exposure for health analyses has been identified by Kwan (2012) as the Uncertain Geographic Context Problem (UGCoP), the idea that the results of analyses of area-based characteristics on individual outcomes, as occurs with many studies of place and health, can differ depending on the delineation of the area based units. In studies of place and health, the UGCoP typically manifests as a problem of measuring the exposure of an individual to environmental characteristics. Efforts to address the issues of exposure misclassification and measurement error have typically been limited to fixing the problems at the stage of statistical analysis rather than improving the methodology of the exposure assessment itself. Moreover, most complex statistical methods developed to correct for such error and bias are based on strict assumptions of random error (Carroll et al., 2006; Spiegelman, 2010 ; Zeger et al., 2000), which are not generally applicable in practice.

In theory, microenvironments are a four-dimensional space-time concept, which allows researchers to utilize an individual’s time-activity pattern to capture exposure at the microenvironment level. We argue that this dynamic conceptualization of significant locations of individuals is likely to reduce exposure misclassification in epidemiological studies while at the same facilitating efficiency in individual level exposure sampling and monitoring efforts.

Researchers in Geographic Information Science have made key advances on monitoring human mobility using geospatial technologies, and have developed new methods and concepts for monitoring the movements of individuals and their everyday exposure to environmental air pollution in space and time ( Glasgow et al., 2016 ; Park et al., 2017 ; Steinle et al., 2013 ;). As shown in Yoo et al. (2015) , the time-location data obtained from participants’ GPS-equipped smart phones could be used to develop mobility-based estimates of individual exposures to ambient air pollution. Similarly, the classification of activities based on GPS tracking data can be used to improve the estimation of indoor air quality, given that the indoor air quality of a location is dynamic and changing over time, and is dependent on the activities that occur at that location and time. For example, pollutant concentration levels at a particular location, such as a home, are higher when cooking activities occur as compared to during other activities, such as reading or sleeping. This is important because individuals spend up to 90% of their time indoors. Combined with state-of-the-art techniques, such as a random forest decision tree model ( Yoo and Eum, 2016 ; Wu, et al., 2011 ), the concepts from classical time-geography, such as a space-time prism, have the potential to offer an efficient means of quantifying and summarizing individuals’ time-activity patterns ( Miller, 2007 ). A better understanding of human spatial behaviors, captured through time-activity pattern monitoring, can assist investigators to identify the optimal number and types of key microenvironments for environmental exposure assessment at the individual level ( Branco et al., 2014 ).

5 Challenges and Opportunities for Geographic Information Science

We suggest five challenges for the Geographic Information Science community to advance its contribution to the study of place and health. First, the development of sophisticated and coherent computational models of humanistic aspects of place, a ‘platial’ GIS ( Goodchild, 2015 ), is sorely needed. We note recent Geographic Information Science research on extracting place information from linguistic descriptions, formalizing computational notions of place, spatializing sense of place characteristics, georeferencing place data, and reasoning with place data ( Acedo et al., 2017 ; Gao et al. 2013 ; Mackaness and Chaudhry, 2013 ; Scheider and Janowicz 2014 ; Vasardani et al. 2013 ). Much of this research, however, addresses relatively constrained computational research questions, such as techniques for extracting place-names from social media data. We suggest that this research can be leveraged to develop a more comprehensive framework for the computational representation of the dynamic, subjective, experiential, and relational aspects of place. This perspective on place representation also aligns with the set of emerging themes in Geographic Information Science research elicited by Sui (2015) , which emphasize narrative and synthetic approaches. Similarly, well-defined models of the personalized activity spaces of individuals would allow investigators to save the time and resources needed to measure environmental exposure at the individual level ( Jarup, 2004 ).

The second challenge is to operationalize these computational models of place in integrated geographic data sets which capture activity spaces, social networks, and perceptions and interactions of individuals with place. While we suggest above that GEMA provides one approach for developing such data sets, the integration of geocoded momentary survey responses with more conventional GIS data does not begin to get at the potential for the use of georeferenced imagery, narrative text, social media and other ‘unconventional’ place-based data sets for studies of place and health. Recent advances in qualitative GIS may point some way forward for integrating and encoding these disparate types of place data for health studies ( Cope and Elwood, 2009 ; Kwan and Ding, 2008 ; Mennis et al., 2013 ).

The third challenge is to develop geospatial analytical approaches that will enable us to more fully test for cause and effect, and distinguish mechanisms of influence and selection. Traditional GIS applications or spatial modeling in spatial epidemiology have primarily focused on available (collected) data using disease mapping and disease clustering techniques ( Lawson 2006 ). However, the potential of GIS in health research extends beyond its functionality for data storage, retrieval, and presentation in descriptive analysis. Improving the representation of place in GIS will offer support for key health questions, such as the health impacts of unexpected events, such as natural disasters, and the diffusion of disease through social networks or environmental pathways ( Bian, 2013 ; Lawson et al., 2016 ). Recent advances in dynamic network modeling of linked social-spatial data may offer some way forward here ( Andris, 2016 ; Zhong and Bian, 2016 ). Additionally, the application of machine learning to space-time trajectory data has enabled researchers to improve their understanding of individuals’ time-activity patterns by classifying a sequence of time-stamped location records ( Zheng et al., 2010 ; Yoo and Eum, 2016 ). And Bayesian spatial and spatio-temporal geostatistical models ( Diggle and Ribeiro 2002 ; Banerjee et al. 2004; Cressie and Wikle 2011), in combination with the integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA) approach ( Rue et al., 2009 ), have allowed environmental scientists to estimate air pollutant concentrations along individuals’ space-time trajectories while taking into account uncertainty in the estimations of parameters and predictions.

Statistical mediation and moderation can be used to account for both the complex pathways by which the subjective experience of place influences health as well as the different effects place characteristics may have depending on individual-level characteristics (including one’s prior experiences). Advances in longitudinal modeling, such as with the time varying effect model (TVEM) which assesses temporal fluctuations in relationships among variables ( Li et al., 2017 ), can be extended to incorporate place-based characteristics ( Mason et al., 2016 ). Other relevant advances include the development of mediated and moderated multilevel longitudinal growth models for analyzing EMA data ( Bolger and Laurenceau, 2013 ), and techniques for disaggregating within- and between-person effects in multilevel longitudinal data analysis ( Curran and Bauer, 2011 ). To our knowledge, however, it is rare, to see such techniques applied to repeated sampling designs where multiple within-subject observations are acquired both over time and throughout space, as with GEMA-based studies. The development of accessible software tools for applying these types of analytical techniques to such data would represent a substantial advance in the ability to disentangle mechanisms of influence and selection, as well as composition and context, in analyses of place and health.

The fourth challenge concerns the recent substantial initiatives in the Geographic Information Science community (as well as in health research) on Big Data, or Data Science, as a research paradigm. In a recent keynote presentation to the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, speaker Damian Gessler (2016) stated that “The advent of Big Data in the early decades of this century may have as large an effect on the century’s science as the advent of grand theories did at the beginning of the previous century.” Mr. Gessler demonstrated the efficacy of big data analytics using a recent video of a rocket manufactured by SpaceX landing on its base on a small platform in the ocean. The video, along with much other research utilizing big data approaches, suggests the power of big data analytics for identifying optimal solutions to well-defined problems, such as those in engineering and business. Given the personalized, subjective, and relational nature of place outlined above, however, challenges remain in applying big data analytics to the understanding of why and how place influences health behaviors and outcomes through the constructed and subjective place-meanings people create. Perhaps the recent interest among Geographic Information Science researchers in the analysis of georeferenced social media data, including text and imagery, offers a way forward in assessing collective and subjective experiences of place. Relatedly, the question of how to integrate the new types, and large quantity, of data obtained from multiple, disparate sources, such as electronic health records, and crowd-sourced and personal location data, remains a challenge.

The fifth challenge is associated with the scale of analysis in health research. A proper representation of space and time in spatial epidemiology is important for data collection and analysis, as it affects interpretations of findings. For example, how often and how long exposure measurements are collected will determine the spatial resolution of microenvironments over which personal exposure is assessed. While the issue of scale is widely recognized as one of the most fundamental issues in Geographic Information Science ( Goodchild, 2001 ), most GIS-based health research addressing issues of scale have focused on sparse data interpolation or missing data imputation, as with aggregate data made available only over aggregated time periods or coarser resolution. Perhaps involving Geographic Information Scientists during the design phase of health research may ameliorate some of the scale-related challenges that often are only discovered during the analysis phase of the project, after the data collection is competed. Research on the implications of the resolution and scope of spatial and temporal sampling frameworks on assessments of personalized environmental exposures to support place and health research is necessary. Simultaneously, a significant challenge of using/collecting personal location data is on the protection of individuals’ privacy. Geographical masking ( Armstrong, et.al., 1999 ) has been proposed to address the issue between data accuracy and personal privacy, but warrants further studies on more rigorous and reliable methods.

6 Beyond the Clerks of Science

In returning to Jerry Dobson’s concern about being the ‘clerks of science,’ we suggest that Geographic Information Science researchers interested in health should not limit themselves to the technical, algorithmic, or computational challenges of health data analysis, but also contribute to the development of theories of the definition and computational representation of place, itself, and its role in health outcomes. Indeed, Geographic Information Science researchers should recognize that substantive theoretical advances in place and health may be made possible by even incremental technological advances in Geographic Information Science, and also that theoretical questions in place and health may help drive advances in Geographic Information Science. Further, the operationalization of theories concerning place and health in novel data and analytical representations is a key contribution to place and health research to which Geographic Information Science researchers are uniquely qualified. Developing more sophisticated computational representations of place that incorporate the subjective and relational aspect of place-meaning would be a key advance in Geographic Information Science that would also contribute to a better understanding of how environmental characteristics interact with biological determinants to influence health outcomes – one of the most pressing contemporary questions in health science.

Importantly, the type of Geographic Information Science research advocated for here is not ‘applied GIS.’ Rather, we are advocating for the development of novel representational and analytical approaches in Geographic Information Science that are necessary to address research questions in the health domain that overlap with longstanding challenges in Geographic Information Science. We would also add that this type of research necessarily demands ‘deep’ collaboration with health researchers, by which we mean a collaborative environment where Geographic Information Science researchers are not the technical problem solvers, data handlers, or analysts on a health research team but actively contribute to the design of the study and the theoretical development of the domain under investigation itself. Conversely, domain health researchers should understand and appreciate that health research that uses cutting edge geospatial technologies can contribute to advancing Geographic Information Science. While admittedly it can take a long time to develop such collaborative relationships and domain knowledge outside of Geographic Information Science, interdisciplinary synthesis has often been at the heart of scientific innovation, Geographic Information Science included.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. John Wilson for the invitation to present the Transactions in GIS Plenary Presentation at the 2017 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, from which this paper was adapted, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. This research is partially supported by grant R01GM108731 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH/NIGMS) awarded to the second author.

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Scale matters in determining vulnerability of freshwater fish to climate changes

Context matters when it comes to evaluating climate change sensitivity, virginia tech researchers found.

The silver chub isn't considered sensitive to climate change on a national scale, but context matters. For example, if climate change sensitivity is evaluated in only one region of the United States, the freshwater fish appears quite a bit more susceptible.

"Relative to other species we looked at in the gulf region of the U.S., the silver chub occupied a pretty small geographic area," said Samuel Silknetter, a Ph.D. student in biological sciences. "If we didn't look at the climate sensitivity across multiple spatial scales, a regional analysis alone may miss the bigger context of why a species appears sensitive to climate change at some scales but not others, especially compared to other species."

Silknetter and Associate Professor Meryl Mims recently led a team that explored the influence the spatial extent of research -- the geographical coverage of data collected -- has on evaluating the sensitivity of different fish species to climate change. The findings were published in Ecosphere.

"The spatial extent can be really relevant for specific cases, especially when you've got a species that is widespread but might be identified as more vulnerable in one region than another due to differences in distribution," said Silknetter, who is also an affiliate of the Global Change Center's interfaces of global change graduate program.

Using open-source data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the U.S. Geological Survey, the team created a rarity and climate sensitivity (RCS) index for 137 freshwater fish species in the United States and then compared national scores with regional scores for each species. They found the relative sensitivity for species changed depending on spatial scale, and some species appeared more or less sensitive to climate change than the national index score indicated.

"Some species, like the elegant madtom, had high relative sensitivity across spatial extents yet had no state or federal conservation listings," Silknetter said. "Our assessment identified some species with high relative sensitivity to climate change but no current protected status. These species can be targeted in future studies to determine whether they are truly at-risk species that have been previously overlooked."

The research team sees relative climate change sensitivity rankings as another tool for conservation managers hoping to mitigate the effects of climate change.

"Some of the data we used dates back more than 100 years, providing information on historic as well as current distribution of freshwater fish species. But sometimes the data are few and far between, with only a few dozen documented occurrences for a species over that time period," said Mims, an affiliate with the Global Change Center and the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. "The RCS index, which allows relative sensitivity rankings to be calculated from a range of data types, can enable direct comparisons of species that have wide-ranging data availability."

In the hope of increasing the actionable nature of the findings, the research team has made the data accessible to anyone through the U.S. Geological Survey Science base.

"Ensuring that our methods follow best practices for open science is really important if we're going to be transparent in what we're doing," Silknetter said. "We need to be proactive in trying to identify vulnerable species early because at some point there are fewer options for a species if the damage has been done."

Going forward, the team hopes that its approach for assessing the vulnerability of multiple species can spur on additional conservation efforts.

"The increasing availability of public occurrence and trait data will improve our ability to identify species sensitive to climate change," Silknetter said. "I think approaches like ours will play an important role in shaping how future assessments consider spatial extent."

• New Species
• Endangered Animals
• Environmental Awareness
• Environmental Policy
• Global Warming
• Temperature record of the past 1000 years
• Attribution of recent climate change
• Global warming controversy
• Kyoto Protocol
• Global climate model
• Consensus of scientists regarding global warming

Story Source:

Materials provided by Virginia Tech . Original written by Felicia Spencer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Samuel C. Silknetter, Abigail L. Benson, Jennifer A. Smith, Meryl C. Mims. Spatial extent drives patterns of relative climate change sensitivity for freshwater fishes of the United States . Ecosphere , 2024; 15 (3) DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.4779

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