Methods and methodologies

Landscape research borrows from geography, ecology, history, planning, anthropology, art and design, and it has never settled on a single way of working. This theme is about that problem: how landscape is studied, what counts as evidence, and what each method makes visible or leaves out.

Work here covers field survey and mapping, archival and documentary research, interviews, walking and other embodied methods, participatory and community-led approaches, visual and photographic analysis, and newer digital techniques from GIS to immersive modelling. It also takes in the practical business of doing research at all: designing a project, funding it, working across disciplines whose vocabularies do not match, and reporting honestly on what did not work. Methodological writing tends to be the most portable material the group publishes, useful to researchers whose subject matter is nothing like the author’s.