What’s geographic information?
Descriptions of places, or of relationships between places, at a point in time or over time
 

Two important uses of geographic information:

1. To relate information on different aspects, collected from different sources and with different spatial units – so long as each set of information has explicit geographical referents;
2. To propose or identify causal relationships based on spatial covariation or correspondence in phenomena (e.g., locational incidence of elevation, precipitation, and large bodies of water can help us uncover the principle of orographic precipitation)

What are some relevant distinctions among the types of information we’ve mentioned?

1. Relationships among places, characteristics of places, characteristics of sub-areas within places.
2. Qualitative or quantitative
3. Conforming to standard units (of distance, wealth, types of materials) or more individualized to the describer

Sources of geographic information?

• Direct observation:  from the street, from the air…
• Survey of people (self-reported):  universal (census) vs. sample
• Secondary sources:  Censuses, privately collected data, privately configured Census data, organizational data (e.f., for UW), maps

What if all of an area or subarea is not well-described by a certain summary measurement?  [for example:  the U-District is dominated by multi-unit residential structures and by students, but in fact there are lots of single-unit houses and lots of non-students here]:  ecological fallacy
 

Break Seattle into districts;  characterize each district (say, median household cash income per year).  Your household, located in a particular spot, would be categorized as the median, unless someone went through the trouble of asking you.  If we broke Seattle into districts using a different regionalization scheme, the location where your house is would have a different median income, and you’d be so categorized.  You haven’t moved;  your hh income hasn’t changed, but you’re categorized differently:  modifiable areal unit problem
[In two class meetings, we discussed ways of defending your analyses from charges that a different regionalization scheme would yield different and better results].
 

What are economic uses of geographic information?

• Transportation planning:  origin-destination projections
• Logistics planning:  routing
• Real estate:  relative location, zoning, and the innate capabilities of land parcels
• Marketing:  direct-mail advertising to the most likely households or businesses
• Retail location:  looking for the most promising market area with respect to customers, access, and competitors
• Service provision:  what services or products are most likely to be needed in which location?

What do we have to do to be able to use geographic information to answer economic questions? What operations might we perform on the information?

• Draft a table of Census tracts and median hh income.
• “How would this be useful for a real-estate developer, or a marketer, or a social-welfare agency?”
• This led us to a discussion of (1) transformations of the data:  e.g., to go from median hh income to the housing purchase price that the median hh could afford.
• “What’s missing?”  Where are these Census tracts relative to one another, relative to addresses of households, relative to addresses of potential lots to be developed, relative to the addresses of existing social-service stations.  “How do we get this?”  (2) Geocoding.
• “What if we want to develop a small shopping center;  what are other relevant considerations?”  Land prices, zoning, auto/ped/transit accessibility.  “We’d have to relate the hh-income information geographically to these other pieces of info:  what (3) parcels zoned for retail within which census tracts”.  The accessibility question might require (4) buffering.

We read from a handout containing many different definitions of GIS.  Which definition do you prefer, and why?
I added the definition:

GIS:  a system of hardware, software, data, people, organizations, and institutional arrangements for collecting, storing, analyzing and disseminating information about areas of the earth.  [Dueker & Kjerne 1989, in Chrisman (1997), Exploring GIS]

We reviewed a presentation based on the article by Brian Mennecke, on economic applications of GIS.
 

When you read the article by Sherwood:

1. Respond to her generalizations about the state of geographic education, about the linkages of geog education and of geography to business communities – from your own experiences and observations.
2. What does she mean by the phrase “business geographics”?
3. How does this differ from “economic uses of geographic information”?