GeoAI and Cultural Geography

This chapter explores the emerging potential of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) in cultural geography, a subfield traditionally driven by qualitative methods. Cultural geographers focus on the meanings, identities, beliefs, and practices that shape places, landscapes, and material culture. While established approaches rely heavily on contextualized qualitative investigations, recent advances in AI and computational methods offer tools to enhance and expand the scale of cultural inquiries. GeoAI, encompassing machine learning, deep learning, and spatial analysis techniques, can uncover subtle patterns and relationships that might remain undetected through conventional methods alone. For example, computational approaches can identify emerging cultural trends in social media data, classify features of cultural landscapes in images, or predict shifts in cultural practices under changing environmental conditions. However, the integration of GeoAI into cultural geography also raises ethical considerations regarding data privacy, bias, and the risk of oversimplifying complex cultural phenomena. This chapter argues that cultural geographers need not abandon traditional qualitative methods. Instead, by thoughtfully combining GeoAI techniques with established approaches and community engagement, they can deepen understanding, broaden analytical scales, and discover new research frontiers in the study of cultural processes.