The editors open with a deceptively simple premise: visualizations have always belonged to geography. A science whose original meaning is the description and naming of the Earth has never operated without visual media, whether maps, plans or illustrations. Quantitative image processing, particularly the analysis of satellite imagery in remote sensing, has a long institutional tradition. What has been missing, the editors contend, is a systematic overview of how visualization functions in qualitative research, where images serve not only as empirical material but also as tools for structuring data and communicating findings. The handbook grew out of a research network funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) dedicated to exactly this question.

Conceptually, the book positions itself firmly in the tradition of the linguistic turn and the subsequent critique of representation. Following that logic, a map or an image does not depict the world; it brings the world into being alongside other practices, though under rules and preconditions that differ from those governing texts. The editors describe visualizing as less an act of reproduction than a creative act, a form of world-making. Seeing and making visible, they argue, and the ordering of gazes, extend far beyond the biological act of vision and are embedded in structures of power. This framing sets the stage for a research process in which every visual choice, from the delineation of a study area on a map to the framing of a photograph, carries assumptions that demand reflection.

Structurally, the handbook is organized along the chronology of a research process, divided into seven chapters. It opens with an introduction containing short empirical vignettes, then moves through the theoretical lens researchers bring to their work, formal questions that arise before fieldwork begins, the diverse empirical tools used during research, and finally the communication of results and a reflection on the book project itself. The vignettes that frame the volume appear first in abbreviated form, serve as recurring references throughout, and return at the end in fully elaborated versions. The reviewer notes that this two-tiered presentation of the vignettes proved confusing rather than illuminating, one of the few structural missteps in an otherwise inviting design that supports both casual browsing and targeted searching.

The first substantive section, titled WOHER, interrogates the theoretical perspective from which researchers view their subject. Tilo Felgenhauer distinguishes three forms of visual knowledge in geography: cartographic-positivist visualization as technical knowledge, media analysis and deconstruction as critical knowledge, and the visualization of individual spatial images as participatory-reflexive knowledge. The historical arc he traces is striking. For centuries, progress in cartography was understood as an ever more accurate and correct representation of spatial reality, a supposedly objective depiction of space. Yet even a simple map template, with its drawn boundaries and chosen extent, produces space rather than merely recording it. Katharina Schmidt and Katrin Singer sharpen the point through an analysis of colonial photography, showing that such images reflected the imaginations of the photographers, shaped by discourse, far more than any external reality, and asking who holds the power to depict at all.

The chapter VORHER addresses what must be considered before data collection or visual presentation begins. Francis Harvey emphasizes clarifying the role of existing visualizations: who created them and with what intention, and whether they may legally be used at all. Cosima Werner examines copyright and data protection, while Carolin Genz presses the reflexive questions further, asking what interests lie behind the use of visual data and what power effects may arise when minorities are the subject of research. Genz proposes reflexive strategies for embedding ethical considerations into the research process when visual methods are deployed. Stella Schäfer closes the section by advocating reflection in the sense of situated knowledge, showing how techniques such as bodymapping can give researchers access to their own emotions and affections during fieldwork.

The central chapter, DABEI, reveals the breadth of what visual geographies can encompass: maps, bodies, drawings, plans, AI-generated images, films and photographs. Nora Küttel and Kristine Beurskens treat photographs as active tools of knowledge production and communication. Elisabeth Sommerland and Paul Hummel reframe filmmaking as a scientific practice in its own right, in which the finished film is the result of interaction with the research object, simultaneously method and communication. Verena Schröder shows that working with drawings is less about artistic competence than about accessing data that language alone cannot capture. Janina Dobrusskin and Lea Bauer demonstrate how collaborative mapping can strengthen the multiplicity of positioned perspectives and increase the visibility of grievances. Anke Strüver and Fabian Pettig contribute a vivid empirical example: a mapping exercise starting from the researcher’s own body produced a reversal of north and south, explicable only through embodied everyday experience. Ajith Singh and Kathrin Meißner turn to urban planning visions, examining the affective imagery of activist initiatives that seek to redefine the politics of planning.

Perhaps the most timely contribution comes from Boris Michel, who tackles research with artificial intelligence. AI can produce impressive visualizations, but the handbook insists these do not simply appear out of thin air, as the popular term hallucinating suggests. Rather, they are generated by socio-technical systems that produce plausible outputs on the basis of vast datasets, computing power and human classification labor. Such systems are entangled with the political economies of AI companies and with decades of classification and stereotyping embedded in visual data. The chapter on communication, DANACH, extends this critical stance to infographics and film. Frank Meyer warns that infographics, while offering accessible preparation of scientific content, risk being used as a substitute for text, forcing qualitative researchers to reduce complexity while preserving the strengths of their approach. Yannick Noah Layer stresses that filmic communication must always clarify how, what, for whom and with what goal content is prepared, given film’s capacity to deliberately evoke emotion.

The final chapter, WOHIN, looks to the future. Kimberly Coulter examines discovery interfaces, from streaming platforms to art archives, showing how these digital gatekeepers select, categorize, evaluate, limit and steer in the service of particular interests while other perspectives are excluded, and how geolocation can both empower and endanger people. Mirka Winkel and Jeannine Wintzer chart future possibilities instead, proposing dialogic encounters between science and the public built on aesthetic design that relates people and their knowledge systems to one another. An empirical example of an urban square redesigned against heat shows how open, aesthetically shaped exchange spaces can strengthen acceptance of transformative projects. Four of the editors report on a choreographic spatial exploration in which unusual bodily positions, such as hanging upside down on a playground, interrupt habitual patterns of thought, demanding the courage to start from radical not-knowing.

The verdict of the review is nuanced. The book is aimed at researchers who already work consciously with visual methods or plan to, but its deeper message concerns everyone: all geographers work with visual aspects, whether with their own eyes in the field, in producing maps and graphics, in using photographs, or in communicating results. Readers expecting concrete methodological instructions will not find them here, a limitation the introduction acknowledges by pointing to the separate VISQUAL Methodbox developed by the same DFG network. What the handbook offers instead is inspiration and reflection, opening spaces for critical, self-aware research, even if some chapters only scratch the surface of empirical practice. On one point the reviewer leaves no ambiguity, quoting Jeannine Wintzer’s closing appeal: people are reached through visualization, and researchers should engage with it.

Subject of Research: Visualization of qualitative geographical research and the role of visual methods in knowledge production

Article Title: Book review: Visualisierung Qualitativer Geographien – Ein Handbuch

Article References: Kuhn, L. (2026). Book review: Visualisierung Qualitativer Geographien – Ein Handbuch. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 305-309. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-305-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-305-2026

Keywords: cartography, qualitative geography, visualization, visual methods, critique of representation, book review, geography, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, film geography, participatory mapping, embodied knowledge