Human Terrain Analysis at George Mason University (DAY 1)

Richard Heimann © 2011
Human Terrain Analysis
GIS270
George Mason University
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Richard Heimann

What will we discuss…?
Laws of Spatial Science - the primitives of spatial
analysis!!

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…what are they and why are they important?

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

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GIS270: Purpose of this lecture

Teaching

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Laws allow courses to be structured from ﬁrst
principles

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Laws provide the basis for predicting performance,
making design choices

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An asset of a strong, robust discipline
GIS 270: LAWS

GIS
StatisticsStatistical Packages
X
GIS270: LAWS/Statistics

Are Laws of Social Science…
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Deterministic?

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Does a counterexample defeat a law?

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Empirical statements?

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Veriﬁable with respect to the real world?

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Do the Social Sciences have Physics Envy?

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

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

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SOME will consider the implications of a
nomothetic and idiographic approach for
geography as a science
GIS 270: LAWS

GIS 270: LAWS
idios = private or personal

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Idiographic: personal, few observations, exhaustive,
“humanistic”

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Idiographic Theories: Based on the assumption we are all
unique and can only be understood by contemplating our
uniqueness.

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Idiographic Methodologies: Difficult to teach, tenuous to
claim and lack all classical definitions of science.

GIS 270: LAWS
nomos = law

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Nomothetic: positivist, many observations, comprehensive,
“dehumanistic”

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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.

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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?

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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?

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Anyon (1982): social science should be
empirically grounded, theoretically
explanatory and socially critical.
GIS 270: LAWS

Based on empirical observation

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Observed to be generally true

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Suﬃcient generality to be useful as a norm

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Deviations from the law should be interesting

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Dealing with geographic process rather than form

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Understanding of social process in context

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…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”

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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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!
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Life would be impossible

S-ZAR RAN-VAR

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

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

Non-stationarity / Regional Variation

Uncontrolled variance / Equilibrium

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 Approach
Small (Local) Theory: Nomothetic laws are tenuous, nomothetic
methodologies are difficult in geographic process but the goal is
a good one.

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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.

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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.

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Harvey’s view

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Idiographic Laws
Single Equilibria: A
singular process
over space and
across study area.

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Smith’s view

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Nomothetic Laws
Stationarity
Equilibrium < n: The
number of processes
under investigation are
less than the number of
observations.

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/Sweet Spot/
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Blended Approach

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Small Theory

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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

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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).

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…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.

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…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.

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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.

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

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Laws have practical value in GIS and Social Science.

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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)

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60 minutes…
GIS 270: LAB

Human Terrain Analysis at George Mason University (DAY 1)

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