Belfast Without Sight: Exploring Geographies of Blindness

In this paper (he transformed spaces of visually impaired and blind people is explored through a detailed analysis of interview transcripts with twenty seven visually impaired people living in or around Belfast. Data were collected using a structured open-ended interview and were analysed within NUD-IST, a qualitative data analysis package. Analysis revealed that visually impaired people become spatially confused (e.g. lost or disorientated) for two primary reasons. "Self-produced" confusion is spatial confusion caused by the misperception/miscognition of a route (e.g. miscounting intersections). "Situational" confusion is spatial confusion caused by a permanent or temporary localised occurrences such as road works, vehicles parked on pavements, and street furniture. Both types of spatial confusion were found to induce feelings of fear and anxiety, leading to a loss of selfconfidence, embarrassment and frustration, which in turn led to less independent travel and exploration, and constrained patterns of spatial behaviour. Respondents detailed a number of strategies for coping with spatial confusion. In addition, they assessed methods to make Belfast more navigable including environmental modifications and orientation and mobility aid

Belfast Without Sight: Exploring Geographies of Blindness

In this paper (he transformed spaces of visually impaired and blind people is explored through a detailed analysis of interview transcripts with twenty seven visually impaired people living in or around Belfast. Data were collected using a structured open-ended interview and were analysed within NUD-IST, a qualitative data analysis package. Analysis revealed that visually impaired people become spatially confused (e.g. lost or disorientated) for two primary reasons. "Self-produced" confusion is spatial confusion caused by the misperception/miscognition of a route (e.g. miscounting intersections). "Situational" confusion is spatial confusion caused by a permanent or temporary localised occurrences such as road works, vehicles parked on pavements, and street furniture. Both types of spatial confusion were found to induce feelings of fear and anxiety, leading to a loss of selfconfidence, embarrassment and frustration, which in turn led to less independent travel and exploration, and constrained patterns of spatial behaviour. Respondents detailed a number of strategies for coping with spatial confusion. In addition, they assessed methods to make Belfast more navigable including environmental modifications and orientation and mobility aid

The Effect of Spatial Tasks on Visually Impaired Peoples' Wayfinding Abilities

Thirty-eight people with visual impairments learned a 483-meter novel route through a university campus in four groups: verbalization, modeling, pointing, and control. The performance of all four groups improved with greater experience of the route, but the modeling group improved more than did the control group

Rapid development of cognitive maps in people with visual impairments when exploring novel geographic spaces

'Cognitive' map is a term that refers to a person's environmental knowledge. Anyone experiencing a new environment will, over time, develop a cognitive representation of that environment, including information derived from that environment (e.g., about places, routes and spatial relationships) and information about personal experiences (e.g. memories about events at locations and attitudes towards places). There is now a great deal of research into the cognitive maps of sighted people (see Golledge, 1999; Kitchin & Freundschuh, 2000; Kitchin & Blades, in press), but there is comparatively little research into the cognitive maps of people with visual impairments

Learning A Complex Urban Route Without Sight: Comparing Naturalistic versus Laboratory Measures

In this paper we report some of the results from a study of how people with severe visual impairments learn a complex route through an urban environment. Ten totally blind, ten partially sighted and ten sighted people learned a route 1600 meters long through a suburb of Belfast over four trials. On the first trial respondents were guided around the route. On the second, third and fourth trials respondents led the way around the route, pointing to the start, end, and three locations enroute from these locations. On completion of each trial respondents built a model of the route using magnetic pieces. Analyses of these tasks found no significance differences in pointing or model building between groups. Visually impaired and blind people did however make more errors when retracing the route although by the fourth trial the majority could retrace without error. The results, in combination, reveal that people with severe visual impairments can learn complex routes through a geographic environment both quickly and efficiently. The combined use of laboratory and naturalistic tasks indicated that levels of spatial knowledge do not necessarily predict the ability to use those knowledges effectively in everyday spatial behaviour. As such, the navigation problems facing visually impaired and blind people lie in learning new environments independently and in articulating their knowledges in wayfinding practice. These results led to the adoption of the difference theory of spatial cognition. This suggests that the cognitive map knowledge of adventitiously blind individuals are different from the sighted rather than underdeveloped or used inefficiently

The mirage of the metropolis: city imaging in the age of digital chorography

Even as cities evolved geographically, the basis of city imaging (as codified by Kevin Lynch) remained relatively stable for over half a century. More recently, digitally driven transformations in urban life challenge the continued relevance of established city-imaging paradigms. Although digital navigation and mapping devices are readily at hand to neutralize any disorienting predicaments, the ability to image cognitively the wider urban environment remains integral to the construction of a meaningful sense of place. Towards the objective of reconciling city imaging with the place-making challenges of the contemporary metropolis, this paper explores the potential for innovating modes of urban mapping and representation. Specifically, the digital re-envisioning of the historical mapping practice of ‘chorography’ is positioned within Fredric Jameson’s challenge for a new aesthetic of cognitive mapping that enables the situational representation of the individual within the vaster totality. In doing so, the paper contributes to the wider adaptation of urban discourse to digitally propelled shifts in urban life

Object-Oriented Dynamic GIS for Transportation Planning

Transportation planning has been concentrated on demand management as detailed in recent legislation such as the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). With the advent of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) and different management measures such as carpooling, vanpooling and telecommuting, transportation modeling needs to incorporate analyses on these policy measures. Recent computer technology offers versatile functionality to model and evaluate impacts of these policies Geographic information systems (GIS), as an integrating technology, has been increasingly used by DOT to handle transportation modeling and planning needs