FC-03 - Philosophical Perspectives
This entry follows in the footsteps of Anselin’s famous 1989 NCGIA working paper entitled “What is special about spatial?” (a report that is very timely again in an age when non-spatial data scientists are ignorant of the special characteristics of spatial data), where he outlines three unrelated but fundamental characteristics of spatial data. In a similar vein, I am going to discuss some philosophical perspectives that are internally unrelated to each other and could warrant individual entries in this Body of Knowledge. The first one is the notions of space and time and how they have evolved in philosophical discourse over the past three millennia. Related to these are aspects of absolute versus relative conceptions of these two fundamental constructs. The second is a brief introduction to key philosophical approaches and how they impact geospatial science and technology use today. The third is a discussion of which of the promises of the Quantitative Revolution in Geography and neighboring disciplines have been fulfilled by GIScience (and what is still missing). The fourth and final one is an introduction to the role that GIScience may play in what has recently been formalized as theory-guided data science.
FC-04 - Perception and Cognitive Processing of Geographic Phenomena: a Choropleth Map Case Study
The near ubiquity of maps has created a population the is well adept at reading and understanding maps. But, while maps are familiar, understanding how the human brain processes that information is less known. Discussing the processing of geographic phenomena could take different avenues: specific geospatial thinking skills, general perception and cognition processes, or even different parts of the human brain that are invoked when thinking geographically. This entry focuses on tracing the processing of geographic phenomena using a choropleth map case study, beginning from perception — the moment the phenomena enter the human brain via our senses, to cognition — how meaning and understanding are generated.