Human Terrain Analysis at George Mason University (DAY 1)

Richard Heimann © 2011

Human Terrain Analysis GIS270

George Mason University !

Richard Heimann


What will we discuss…?

Laws of Spatial Science - the primitives of spatial analysis!!

!…what are they and why are they important?

!…how do we begin to measure and quantify the

existence of such laws?!


GIS270: Purpose of this lecture


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

GIS 270: LAWS


GIS

Statistics Statistical Packages

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GIS270: LAWS/Statistics


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?


ALL will know what is meant by an idiographic and nomothetic approach!

MOST will be able to say which approaches are idiographic and which are nomothetic!

SOME will consider the implications of a nomothetic and idiographic approach for geography as a science

GIS 270: LAWS


GIS 270: LAWSidios = private or personal!Idiographic: personal, few observations, exhaustive, “humanistic”!Idiographic Theories: Based on the assumption we are all unique and can only be understood by contemplating our uniqueness. !Idiographic Methodologies: Difficult to teach, tenuous to claim and lack all classical definitions of science.


GIS 270: LAWSnomos = law!Nomothetic: positivist, many observations, comprehensive, “dehumanistic”!Nomothetic Theories: Investigating the group (large scale) to find behavior shared by /everyone/ that apply everywhere over time and space. Goal to classify and develop theories principles and laws where. !Nomothetic Methodologies: Difficult to accomplish, tenuous to claim but conforms to classical definitions of science.


GIS 270: LAWS

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”


Can there be laws in the social sciences? !

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

GIS 270: LAWS


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/!!

GIS 270: LAWS can be…


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

GIS 270: The First Law of Geography (TFLG)


Teenage Birth Rates – US.



GIS would be impossible !

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!

!

!

Life would be impossible



S-ZAR RAN-VAR



GIS 270: The /Second/ Law of Geography (TFLG)!

TFLG describes a second-order effect (Properties of places taken two at a time)

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

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Total Fertility Rate – US.

GIS 270: The /Second/ Law of Geography (TFLG)


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

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



GIS 270: The /Second/ Law of Geography (TFLG)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.


With the global population distribution being ~50% male and

~50% female would the average be a person with one uterus and

one testis?



GIS 270: The Blended ApproachSmall (Local) Theory: Nomothetic laws are tenuous, nomothetic methodologies are difficult in geographic process but the goal is a good one.!Spatially Explicit Stylized Facts: is a simplified presentation of an empirical finding observed to be generally true. A stylized fact is often a broad generalization that summarizes some complicated statistical calculations, which although essentially true may have inaccuracies in the detail.!From the TFLG -> TSLG:

General truths, sufficient generality to be useful norms and deviations from these norms should be interesting.


Extreme Heterogeneity

Multiple Equilibrium: One process for every

observation over space.

!Harvey’s view

!Idiographic Laws

Single Equilibria: A singular process over space and across study area.!Smith’s view!Nomothetic Laws

Stationarity

Equilibrium < n: The number of processes under investigation are less than the number of observations.!/Sweet Spot/ !Blended Approach !Small Theory !Spatially Explicit Stylized Facts

GIS 270: The Blended Approach


“I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” attributed to Pauline Kael, movie critic for the New Yorker!Availability bias: the tendency to generalize based on nearby information

GIS 270: 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).



!

…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.



!…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.



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.

GIS 270: Conclusions


…HTA 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.

GIS 270: Conclusions


GIS 270: QUESTIONS?!


Spatial Thinking in Social Science (Lab 1: Spatial Thinking in the Social

Sciences)!

60 minutes…

GIS 270: LAB

Human Terrain Analysis at George Mason University (DAY 1)

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