Dear Colleagues,

The purpose of this Special Issue is to show progress regarding current research, literature, and practice in the distinctive theme of GIS and Linked Digitizations for Urban Heritage. Particularly, GIS has become an important technology to understand urban heritage as a spatial container for archaeological, historical, cultural, and social investigation. Documentation of cultural processes is one of the major principles for understanding urban heritage in its context. To do so, the approaches proposed by this Special Issue may include but not be limited to the following:

GIS and data

• Theoretical approaches: Qualitative data archiving of site-specific fieldwork need further discussion on the challenges it poses when using GIS. What data and who retrieves, collects, and analyzes the events in historical public spaces are essential to create a well-informed overview. In this regard, studying systems of activities leads to a site-specific view of culture and place as suggested by geography, sociology, ecology, and evolutionary psychology.
  
  
• Methodological approaches: Qualitative big data architecture and workflow used to download georeferenced messages on social media, store them in a database, analyze them using some kind of framework, and visualize the results. The possibility of including spatial and temporal information in the social media messages is generating a wide range of applications on urban heritage: disaster management for various types of hazards, such as earthquakes, floods, impacts on social behavior, social networks, activities and interactions in space and time, smart environments, dynamics, revitalization, marketing and promotion, impacts of events, etc.

GIS and fieldwork

• Fieldwork on narratives and facts: Building maps based on existing literary practices, and their social significance on transcendence are an opportunity to understand the city. Using experiences not only through narration and storytelling, performative or literary, but also by description and visualization can help to interpret the public space. Narratives (idealistic, fictional) and facts explain the peculiarity of the urban realm and the importance of arts and aesthetics of complex communities in acknowledging the culturally dependent experience of the city.

• Ethnographic methods: Registering, recording, and compiling narrative methods can be based on interviews, written literature, pictures’ visualization, and other methods of digital humanities such as artistic research practices, smell-escapes, remembrances, story maps, etc. These perceptive dimensions may add subjective information as they complete the usual objective data with other multiformat data sets that bring to investigation other important information, such as the urban soundscape or the historical memory of the users.

• Virtual Reality: Experiences in which a proper VR gear is employed allow users to view 3D city models from the viewpoint of local citizens. VR allows academics to construct, survey, and compare various urban heritage scenarios based on qualitative and quantitative fieldwork. This technological approach makes VR and GIS experiences available in all types of digital medium.

• Photogrammetry: Data on how the place is experienced and has been transformed can be collected through quantitative methods as photogrammetry or topographical measurements. The integration of data of 2D designs or 3D models in a GIS allows getting a wide range of information from urban heritage related to a GPS spatial reference.

Dr. Juan A. García-Esparza
Guest Editor

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• GIS and contemporary urban heritage
• GIS and data
• GIS narratives and facts
• GIS and ethnographic methods
• GIS and related digitizations