Capturing and using vernacular geography - obstacles and rewards
Andrew J. Evans

 Centre for Computational Geography
University of Leeds, Leeds,
West Yorkshire, LS29JT, UK
E-mail: geoaje@leeds.ac.uk
Tel. +44-113-34 33342, fax +44-113-34 33308

Abstract 
Every day, billions of people exist in a vernacular geography very different from that captured by standard geographical techniques. Millions of us “go uptown for the evening” or “go down the shops on Saturday”, meaning particular geographical areas, but without a clear definition of where or what they are. We avoid “the dangerous end of town” late at night or park away from “high crime areas” without clear definitions of what these terms mean geographically, despite their links with our behaviour. 
Such vernacular geographical terms are a good thing: the use of metaphors like “the horrible area down by the station” allows us to communicate geographical references that often include information on associated environmental, socio-economic, and architectural data, and they place us in a connected socio-linguistic community with shared understandings and, less fortunately, prejudices. These vernacular geographical terms are not simply communicative - they often represent psychogeographical areas in which we constrain our activities, and convey to members of our socio-linguistic community that this constraint should be added to their shared knowledge and acted upon. This private and shared vernacular geography influences billions of people every day, and yet, because of its difficult and subjective nature, it is hard to tie directly to objective data so we can use it to make policy or scientific decisions.
This paper will outline the kinds of decision-making problems where such data would be useful, and the kinds of data that such vernacular geography includes. It will then review some recent work to capture and analyze such entities, before looking at some of the very real difficulties involved in its analysis, and some of the potentially rewarding pathways for further exploration.
References
Jacquez, G. M., Maruca, S., and Fortin, M.-J. (2000) From fields to objects: A review of geographic boundary analysis. Journal of Geographical Systems, 2(3), 221-241.

Related Web links
Authors’ home pages: 
	Andrew J. Evans: http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans
Software used in the projects:
Tagger: http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/software/tagger
Project Web pages:
Leeds Online Democracy Group: http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/groups/democracy