Glossary of Terms

Captology Design

The field of captology and persuasive technology is growing quickly. Captology is a method with related tools for solving problems. As BJ Fogg, Ph.D. Director, Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University, puts it, captology is a way of thinking clearly about target behaviors and how to achieve those goals by using technology for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors. BJ Fogg derived the term captology in 1996 from an acronym: Computers As Persuasive Technologies = CAPT.

Cultural Mapping

Cultural Mapping is a process of identifying cultural assets, developing an initial database and maps that illustrate the scope and location of cultural assets. The focus is on laying the foundation for continued mapping efforts by capturing the “breadth” of cultural resources across the community, which in itself can be an extensive endeavor. As a result, the “depth” of information captured in a baseline database – or the level of detail included in each category – may not be as extensive as it could be.

Cultural Resources

Cultural resources encompass both tangible and intangible cultural assets that fuel local cultural vitality and contribute to defining the unique local cultural identity and sense of place. Intangible cultural assets are types of cultural expression that are not necessarily manifest in physical form.

Cultural Resources Framework

While this broad understanding of culture is important, the focus of cultural mapping is focused more concretely on a specific set of cultural resources illustrated in the diagram. The followings are the set of categories and disciplines categories of Cultural Resource Framework outlined in the Statistics Canada Canadian Framework for Culture Statistics.

Community Resources: Categories and Disciplines

Data architecture

Data architecture is the format chosen to organize a dataset. It involves choosing the names and order of data fields (categories of information), and the hierarchy within which they will be organized in a GIS database.

Data-set

A dataset is a collection of data, organized into a table where each column represents a category of information. A Cultural Resource Database is composed of several datasets, since it is assembled from various sources of existing data.

Geo-coding

Geo-coding is the process of linking resource data to locations in space for the purpose of geographic mapping. Resource data can be linked to GPS coordinates, street addresses or postal codes.