Week 1 Lecture @ UMBC

What will we discuss…?

The ‘[Spatial] Social Revolution’

…a state of the discipline talk;

Geography…but, how did things get so bad?

The ‘Classic Debate in Geography’

Richard Heimann © 2013

Thursday, January 31, 13

SocSci vs. Spatial SocSci
Social Science Spatial Social Science
Individual Observation Observations in space
Random sample Entire population
Normally distributed Spatially dependent - skewed distribution

Independent Observations Dependent observations
Little or No contextual information Contextual information
Individual level analysis Aggregate analysis or multi-level
analysis
Examples Examples
Survey analysis of voting behavior Ecological analysis of voting behavior

Individual responses on neighborhood Actual residential decisions
choice
Methodological approach Methodological approach
Multivariate linear regression or Spatial regression (SAR, CAR & GWR)
ethnographies


Spatial Social Science

Crisis in Geography



Crisis in Geography (1940’s & 1950’s)
The crisis occurred for several reasons:

The closing of many geography departments and courses in universities e.g.
the abolition of the geography program at Harvard University in 1948. [1]

Continuing division between Human and Physical geography - general talk of
Human geography becoming an autonomous subject. [2]

Geography was seen as overly descriptive and unscientiﬁc- there was, it was
claimed, no explanation of why processes or phenomena occurred [3]

Geography was seen as exclusively educational - there were few if any
applications of contemporary geography

After World War II technology became increasingly important in society and as
a result nomothetic based sciences gained popularity and prominence [4]



Crisis in Geography (1940’s & 1950’s)

In 1982, Jean Gottmann called the
elimination, "a terrible blow…to
American geography" and one from
which "it has never completely
recovered."



What was wrong with Geography?
Geography had a number of problems, including:

1. It was overly descriptive
Geography followed a set format for the inventory of physical and
cultural features
2. It was almost purely educational
Regions don't really exist
3. It failed to explain geographic patterns
Geography was descriptive and did not explain why patterns
were the way they were
Where attempts at explanation did exist, they favored historical
approaches
4. The biggest problem of geography was the fact that it was
unscientiﬁc

…the Nomothetic & Idiographic debate in geography begins!



Advanced Placement Human Geography

This college-level course introduces Score Percent
students to the systematic study of patterns 5 11.6%
and processes that have shaped human
understanding, use, and alteration of Earth's 4 16.7%
surface. Students employ spatial concepts
3 21.9%
and landscape analyses to analyze human
social organization and its environmental 2 16.6%
consequences. They also learn about the
methods and tools geographers use in their 1 33.2%
science and practice.
In the 2009
administration, 50,730
students took the exam
and the mean score
was a 2.57.

Human Geography



Human Geography

http://www.benjaminbarber.com/bio.html



Words of Wisdom…

“…the alternative to good statistics is not “no statistics,”
it’s bad statistics. People who argue against statistical
reasoning often end up backing up their arguments with
whatever numbers they have at their command, over- or
under-adjusting in their eagerness to avoid anything
systematic” Bill James



How bad was it…

Chapman 1977: Geography has consistently &
dismally failed to tackle its
entitative problems...the root of so many of its
problems.



Geography wakes up!!

All of these events presented a great threat
to geography’s position as an academic
subject and thus geographers began seeking
new methods to counter critique. …the
quantitative revolution begins.



The Quantitative Revolution
The revolution led to an increased use of computerized
statistical techniques in all sciences as well as computer
mapping and spatial statistics in geography.

Some of the techniques of the revolution included:
Spatial statistics
Geographic Information Systems
New & Improved research methods for geography(ers)
Basic mathematical equations and models, such as gravity
models and agent based modeling and later spatial
econometrics (among other techniques).
Stochastic models using concepts of probability



…the Revolution Continues!
In 1964, Howard T Fisher formed the Laboratory
for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at the
Harvard Graduate School of Design (LCGSA
1965-1991), where a number of important
theoretical concepts in spatial data handling were
developed, and which by the 1970s had distributed
seminal software code and systems, such as
'SYMAP', 'GRID', and 'ODYSSEY' -- which served as
literal and inspirational sources for subsequent
commercial development.
By the early 1980s, M&S Computing (later
Intergraph), Environmental Systems Research
Institute (ESRI), CARIS (Computer Aided Resource
Information System) and ERDAS emerged as
commercial vendors of GIS software, successfully
incorporating many of the CGIS features, combining
the ﬁrst generation approach to separation of
spatial and attribute information with a second
generation approach to organizing attribute data
into database structures.


Spatial ‘Turn’ in the Social Sciences…
The category of space long played a subordinate role in sociological
theory formation. Only in the late 1980s did it come to be realized that
certain changes in society cannot be adequately explained without taking
greater account of the spatial components of life. This shift in perspective
was referred to as the topological turn and now more commonly as the
spatial turn. The space concept directs attention to organizational forms
of juxtaposition. The focus is on differences between places and their
mutual influence. This applies equally for the micro-spaces of everyday
life and the macro-spaces at the nation-state or global levels.

The theoretical basis for the growing interest of the social sciences in
space was set primarily by sociologists, philosophers, and human
geographers…and begins to solve the ‘classic debate’ in geography.



Spatial ‘Turn’ in the Social Sciences…




In 1998, the National Science Foundation undertook a
program designed to develop the infrastructure for social
science research. In the ﬁrst round of competition one of the
outstanding proposals was for a Center for Spatially
Integrated Social Science (CSISS), submitted by the
University of California, Santa Barbara, with Professor
Michael Goodchild as the Principle Investigator. CSISS was to
develop new computational and analytic tools for spatial data,
facilitate the development of social science data achieves
based on geographic data, train scientists in the use of the
most advanced tools, and foster the development of the
emerging community of social scientists who integrate spatial
data into their research.



Do spatial perspectives draw on and contribute to
theory in the social sciences?

Why should social scientists accept that variance
across space really matters?

What structures in the social sciences have
emerged in support of spatial analysis/thinking?

Is there a community of spatial social science and
can its growth be measured?



Building on the numbers…
$30 billion industry (U.S. Labor Department)

Robert M. Gates in September 2007 authorized a $40 million
expansion of the program

Signiﬁcant NSF Funding (e.g. CSISS)

Demand for Spatial Analysis expertise in social sciences:

Growing volume of social science research in GIS, Spatial Statistics &
Spatial Analysis (Changing academic landscape)

Similar (to CSISS) programs being developed at Brown, Harvard, &
Arizona State University



Building on the numbers...

http://www.ocpe.gmu.edu/programs/gis/human_terrain.php




http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/Default.aspx




http://geodacenter.asu.edu/




Citations using GeoDa increased from 42 in 2004
to 70 in 2007-08 and to 567 in 2009-10

ESRI introduces regression tools at v 9.3,
including Geographic Weighted Regression (GWR)

GeoDa with more than 85,000 downloads (Jan.
2013)



Building on the numbers....

GeoDa with more than 85,000 downloads (Jan. 2013)



Building on the numbers....



Spatial Demography (1990-2003) 3yr rolling average

21% increase



Attended Applied
Anthropology / Archaeology 59 123
Criminology 21 45
Demography, Population & Health 98 227
Economics 63 192
Environmental Studies 18 33
Epidemiology 11 27
GIS 30 75
History 7 10
Human Geography 123 422
Political Science 55 95
Public Policy 17 80
Regional Science 5 6
Sociology 115 200
Statistics 9 22
Urban Studies & Urban Planning 44 133
Other 31 99
Totals: 706 1789

Non - Geography Ratio:
N= 553 (Attended) 69.2%
N = 1292 (Applied) 60.5%

CSISS Residential Workshops (2000-2007)


Classical Examples…

Spatial Social Science before it was Spatial
Social Science, before it was Spatial Social
Science.



Mapping the Human Terrain…
Here the
different
Tribes meet
in Friendship
and collect
Stone for
Pipes.

Yanktons a
Band of
Sioux - 1000
Souls


Dr. Snow maps cholera in Soho



F. Ratzel, C. Wissler, & C. Sauer: Culture Area



Henry Mayhew: London Labor & London Poor



André-Michel Guerry’s (1833) Essai sur la Statistique Morale de la
France



Charles Joseph Minard: Mapping Napoleon's March (1861)

Minard Map - French Invasion of Russia http://www.khanacademy.org/video/french-invasion-of-russia?playlist=History



Maps Descriptive of London Poverty (1899)

“No. 34 is occupied by the widow of a boatman. He committed suicide and left her with eleven children.
Some have died, and she has five here now, two of whom go to work, and three to school. She makes
sailor jackets, but is nearly blind. Struggles hard for her children…”


Slums of the Great Cities Survey Maps, Florence Kelley



Ellen Semple: The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains
(1901)



Contemporary Examples…

‘Spatial’ turn in the Social Sciences…as we
know it today following the ‘Social’ turn in the
DoD, IC, and Big Data.




The Geography of the Nazi
Vote: Context, Confession,
and Class in the Reichstag
Election of 1930 Author(s):
John O'Loughlin, Colin
Flint, Luc Anselin Source:
Annals of the Association
of American Geographers



LISA Maps for St. Louis Region
Homicide Rates, 1984-88 (left)
SPATIAL ANALYSES OF HOMICIDE and 1988-93 (right). Counties
WITH AREAL DATA with signiﬁcant Local Moran
Steven F. Messner & Luc Anselin
statistics are highlighted by the
type of spatial association.



STRUCTURAL COVARIATES OF U.S. COUNTY
HOMICIDE RATES: INCORPORATING SPATIAL
EFFECTS*
ROBERT D. BALLER



The Spatial Turn...
Paul Krugman loosely deﬁnes economic geography as the
study of economic issues in which location matters. Economic
theory usually assumes away distance. Krugman argues that
it is time to put it back - that the location of production in
space is a key issue both within and between nations.



The Spatial Turn...
Paul Krugman loosely deﬁnes economic geography as the
study of economic issues in which location matters. Economic
theory usually assumes away distance. Krugman argues that
it is time to put it back - that the location of production in
space is a key issue both within and between nations.

New Economic Geography implies that instead of
spreading out evenly around the world,
production will tend to concentrate in a few
countries, regions, or cities, which will become
densely populated but will also have higher levels
of income.



David Harvey – Spatial Fix
Harvey developed the idea of spatial fix and the second the idea of
accumulation by dispossession.

The spatial fix consists in the geographical
expansions and restructurings used as temporary
solutions to over accumulation crises. As Harvey
points out, spatial fixes are available even in a
world that is more or less fully incorporated in
capitalism. Spatial fixes make use of geographical
unevenness, but unevenness is not simply a
product of "underdevelopment". Capitalism
produces its own unevenness, often plunging
already “developed” regions into destructive
devaluations. The idea implied here is that
processes of primitive accumulation are turned
not only against the remaining few non-capitalist
formations but also against parts of capitalism
itself.



David Harvey – Spatial Fix



David Harvey – Spatio-Temporal Fix



David Harvey – Spatio-Temporal Fix
Harvey has deployed a complex conceptual apparatus, the center-piece of
which is the notion of spatio-temporal fix. In his argument, the term “fix”
has a double meaning.

A certain portion of the total capital is literally
fixed in and on the land in some physical form
for a relatively long period of time (depending on
its economic and physical lifetime). Likewise,
Social expenditures (such as public education or
a health-care system) also become
territorialized and rendered geographically
immobile through state commitments. The
spatio-temporal ‘fix’, on the other hand, is a
metaphor for a particular kind of solution to
capitalist crises through temporal deferral and
geographical expansion. (2003: 115)



The Spatial Turn...
Paul Collier in his book The Bottom Billion argues that being landlocked in a
poor geographic neighborhood is one of four major development "traps" that a
country can be held back by. In general, he found that when a neighboring
country experiences better growth, it tends to spill over into favorable
development for the country itself. For landlocked countries, the effect is
particularly strong, as they are limited from their trading activity with the
rest of the world. "If you are coastal, you serve the world; if you are
landlocked, you serve your neighbors.”



The Spatial Turn...
In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy
(1987), William Julius Wilson was an early exponent, one of the ﬁrst to
enunciate at length the spatial mismatch theory for the development of a
ghetto underclass in the United States. Spatial mismatch is the sociological,
economic and political phenomenon associated with economic restructuring
in which employment opportunities for low-income people are located far
away from the areas where they live.




Questions??



What will we discuss…?

Laws of Spatial Social Science!!

…what are they and why are they important?

…how do we begin to measure and quantify the
existence of such laws?



The value of Laws
Teaching

Laws allow courses to be structured from
ﬁrst principles

Laws provide the basis for predicting
performance, making design choices

An asset of a strong, robust discipline



Analogy to Statistics

Statistical Packages

GIS




Statistical Packages Statistics

GIS




Statistical Packages Statistics

GIS X



Are Laws of Social Science…

Deterministic?

Does a counterexample defeat a law?

Empirical statements?

Veriﬁable with respect to the real world?

Do the Social Sciences have Physics Envy?


Candidate for the First Law of

Can there be laws in the social sciences?

Ernest Rutherford: “The only result that can
possibly be obtained in the social sciences is:
some do, and some don’t”



Social Science Laws can be:

Anyon (1982): social science should be
empirically grounded, theoretically
explanatory and socially critical.



Social Science Laws ought to be
Anyon (1982): [T]hat one collects data and uses it to
build one's explanations. Ideally one's explanations are
related to the data in that they emerge from it. Yet, they
attempt to explain it by recourse to categorically
different types of constructs: not by other data [...] (p.
35)

It is not sufficient to 'explain' patterns in data using a
method that was designed to define patterns in data.

Are SISS patterns socially or statistically significant?




Anyon (1982): [T]hat one does not rely, for
one's reasons for things, on empirically
descriptive regularities or generalizations,
or on deductions or inferences there from
one's theory must be socially explanatory. It
must situate social data in a theory of
society. (p.35)

still theory-poor




Anyon (1982): To be critical will mean,
then, to go beyond the dominant ideology or
ideologies, in one's attempt to explain the
social world. To be critical is to challenge
social legitimations, and fundamental
structures [...] to seek to explicate, and to
seek to eliminate structurally induced
exploitation and social pain. (pp. 35-6)



Social Science Laws can be:
Based on empirical observation

Observed to be generally true

Sufﬁcient generality to be useful as a norm

Deviations from the law should be interesting

Dealing with geographic process rather than form

Understanding of social process in context

…the Nomothetic & Idiographic debate in geography is solved!!



Tobler’s First Law of Geography

TFLG: “All things are related, but nearby
things are more related than distant things”

W.R.Tobler, 1970. A computer movie simulating
urban growth in the Detroit region. Economic
Geography 46: 234-240




Teenage Birth Rates – US.



If TFLG weren’t true…
GIS would be impossible

Life would be impossible



A Second (ﬁrst) Law of




Globalization is thought of a homogenizing
the world, but it cannot and will not happen.
The underlying processes that drive these
systems both look for unevenness and
produce unevenness. Homogeneous processes
cannot happen, which necessitate the
development of methods to describe the
unevenness and account for it when
describing process.



Practical implications of Second

…a state is not a sample of the nation
…a country is not a sample of the world



Practical implications of Second
…no average person or place.

With the global
population
distribution being
~50% male and
~50% female
would the average
be a person with
one uterus and
one testis?



A Second (ﬁrst?) Law of
TFLG describes a second-order effect (Properties of places
taken two at a time)

…is there a law of places taken one at a time?



A Second (ﬁrst?) Law of
TFLG describes a second-order effect (Properties of places
taken two at a time)

…is there a law of places taken one at a time?

Yes, its named Spatial heterogeneity



A (Unofﬁcial) Second (ﬁrst) Law

LISA MAP | Crime Columbus, OH BOX MAP | Crime Columbus, OH



The geography of the 2004 US presidential election results (48
contiguous states)

Spatial heterogeneity
Non-stationarity / Regional Variation
Uncontrolled variance / Equilibrium




Total Fertility Rate – US.



Implications of Second (ﬁrst)

Stationarity Extreme Heterogeneity

Single Equilibria: A Multiple Equilibrium: One
singular process over process for every observation
space and across study over space.
area.



Candidate Laws

By adding demographics to Tobler’s law we
can deﬁne as the ﬁrst law of Spatial
Demographics:
“…people who live in the same neighborhood
are more similar than those who live in a
different neighborhood, but they may be just
as similar to people in another
neighborhood in a different place.”



Candidate Laws
All important places are at the corners of
four map sheets [1],[2]



Candidate Laws

Montello and Fabrikant, “The First Law
of Cognitive Geography”

“People think closer things are more
similar”



Cognitive Geography



Candidate Laws

Fractal principle: that geographic
phenomena reveal more detail the more
closely one looks; and that this process
reveals additional detail at an orderly and
predictable rate (Goodchild and Mark,
1987; Mandelbrot, 1982).



Candidate Laws
Fractal principle: that geographic phenomena
reveal more detail the more closely one looks;
and that this process reveals additional detail
at an orderly and predictable rate (Goodchild
and Mark, 1987; Mandelbrot, 1982).



The Noah effect

…describes discontinuity. Mandelbrot
found that when something changes, it can
change abruptly. For example, a stock
priced at $40 a share can quickly fall to $5
without ever being priced at $30 or $20, if
something signiﬁcant triggers its collapse.



The Joseph effect
…describes persistence: i.e. trends tend to persist; that
is, if a place has been suffering drought, it's likely it
will suffer more of the same. In other words, things
tend to stay the way they've been recently.

Healthy people tend to stay healthy;

Winning teams tend to keep on winning; and,

Products that have been successful for the past ﬁve
years will probably be successful next month.



SISS… Conclusions (Finally).

Laws do exist in Geography …but need to be stated.

Generalizations about the geographic world can be
blindingly obvious …but stating them is important.

Laws have practical value in GIS and Social Science.

Laws have more than just pedagogic value.



Where are we now with the
…SISS help(s) to resolve the timeless dilemma in
geography about whether to focus on the local (L) or
the global (G) – whether spatial science should be
idiographic or nomothetic. As [Phillips] suggests in
his discussion of L and G, there is increasing
sympathy in many disciplines, including geography,
for a middle position in which the speciﬁc details of
law-like statements are allowed to vary
geographically. Recent contributions to the tools of
such as Geographically Weighted Regression now
provide the techniques to implement this interesting
methodological position.




Questions??

Rich Heimann
heimann.richard@gmail.com
rheimann@data-tactics.com
rheimann@umbc.edu
Twitter: @rheimann



Week 1 Lecture @ UMBC

More Related Content

Similar to Week 1 Lecture @ UMBC

More from Rich Heimann

Recently uploaded

Week 1 Lecture @ UMBC