Seeing, Believing, and Feeling: The Relationship between Sense of Place and Geovisualization Research

Advancements in GIS and media technologies have created opportunities for developing realistic and geographically-accurate representations of the environment that can be recognized and related to as “real places.” In turn, these “geovisualizations” can connect with the meanings, values, beliefs, and/or feelings people associate with places, i.e., their “sense of place,” which positions them as powerful place-based tools for inclusive and collaborative environmental management efforts. However, despite their place-based applications, geovisualization studies rarely explicitly incorporate place theories and concepts. This lack of integration is reflected in the current state of knowledge, as much of geovisualization research has advanced knowledge on technological capacity for processing and rendering images from spatial data, whereas knowledge on how people interact with and use these tools in collaborative management strategies has lagged behind. This research effort serves as a move toward addressing this knowledge gap by explicitly illustrating the relationship between sense of place and applications of geovisualizations in collaborative management. The paper employs ideas from research on human-media interactions and conceptual models from research on sense of presence to synthesize a coherent theory on how geovisualizations can function as place-based tools. The paper then reviews landscape visualization studies to provide evidence that geovisualizations can operate as place-based tools. Such evidence includes observations on geovisualizations’ ability to communicate “meaningful information” on places, elicit responses reflective of particular place-based values, and evoke emotional responses associated with