Computing Place: Part I

By Karl Grossner | Published April 28, 2013

All places are small worlds: the sense of a world, however, may be called forth by art…as much as by the intangible net of human relations.
— Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective (1974, p246)

Geography is the science of place, having three high-level intertwining branches: physical geography, human geography, and geographical information science (GIScience). It seems fair to say that physical geography, like environmental sciences, encompasses or overlaps with several earth and biological science fields (geomorphology, hydrology, oceanography, meteorology; ecology, biogeography), that human geography has close associations with many of the social sciences and with urban and regional planning, and that GIScience incorporates several computational and cognitive science fields as theoretical underpinnings for geographic information systems.

Sauer_300h

Carl O. Sauer, geographer

Calling geography the science of place is somewhat provocative. Disciplinary debates over the past century have agonized over whether regional and cultural geography were too descriptive of the particularities of places (idiographic); whether we should be concerned only with the nomothetic search for general laws. As a late arrival to the debates I confess to being somewhat mystified by them. Doesn’t the analysis involved in searching for laws require rigorous description? I enjoy speculating about how Carl Sauer, the Berkeley geographer who conceived “cultural landscapes” (1925) in the 1920s, would have used today’s computational tools to describe and analyze them.

It is natural to differentiate place from space, as Yi-Fu Tuan has done in a spiritual, even mystical sense by discussing place as experiential space (Tuan 1974). There has been an unfortunate tendency amongst some critical theorists to conflate space and place in discussions of “constructed spaces;” I submit they are referring to place and that we need the two words to have distinct meanings. Spatial analysis refers to mathematical operations performed upon representations of space, conceived as objects in a void or continuous surfaces. Humanistic interpretations of space are just that, and the term place works wonderfully. Our “sense of place” is a well-known if not easily articulated concept.

So is the humanistic, experiential place computable? The name of this blog suggests my answer. I don’t think commercial geographic information systems (GIS) are especially well suited to it yet, but they can play an important part and will evolve over time. Yes, places have spatial locations—perhaps vague or contested—but that is only one of their attributes. Their other attributes  are how we know and describe them, formally or informally as containers of things (cf. Winter and Freksa 2013) or sites of events (Ibid; Grossner 2010), how we group or differentiate them, and in the case of regions or neighborhoods, how we define them.

At this stage of my research and software development adventures in computing place, I am thinking about what the measurable (computable) dimensions of place are. There are several categories of dimensions I view as equally important. The first three are commonplace; the fourth is not: (1) physical geographic settings such as land cover, terrain, and climate; (2) population characteristics like distributions of wealth and ethnicity; (3) significant human artifacts, including cities, buildings, monuments, and earthworks (“public symbols” for Tuan, which can be places themselves); and (4) activity and events.

Activity from Events of Text-making

If, instead, we conceive of a meeting-up of histories, what happens to our implicit imaginations of time and space?
— Doreen Massey, For Space (2000, p4)

For many studies, places will be most effectively described and understood in terms of what happens there and what has happened there. That is, activity and events. Certainly this seems like the most effective way to join human experience to spatial entities. The third category of dimensions listed above is directly related to events in that all artifacts are products of human acts. Among the artifacts people create are texts and images, which may be explicitly descriptive of places. Less obviously, the creations of people living in a place can be descriptive of it. Arguably, an important dimension of places like Paris, Vienna and Saint Petersburg is the conceptual content of literature emitting from their cafes and salons. Both are an excellent source for understanding places as the human experiences of space. In fact our understanding of concepts held in minds is constrained by what we can derive from language and imagery.

All texts related to places are candidates for analysis. For the recent City Nature project at Stanford (citynature.stanford.edu), we developed a topic model for the comprehensive plans of 37 large U.S. cities, to study both existing circumstances and design intent. In recent exploratory work aimed at developing a taxonomy of cultural activity, I analyzed parts-of-speech in descriptive text for UNESCO-listed intangible cultural heritage practices. Interestingly, nouns and noun phrases were a much richer source of lexical markers for activity than verbs.

chweb_words

Adams and McKenzie (2013) have developed a topic model for a large corpus of travel blog posts and Wikipedia articles about places, and demonstrated place similarity in an interactive web application, Frankenplace. Cooper and Gregory (2011) “map out the qualitative ‘data’ provided by the articulation of subjective spatial experiences” in an analysis of accounts of tours of the English Lake District by the poet, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1769 and 1802 respectively).

The relation between artifacts and activity is nowhere more evident than in archaeological studies. In upcoming work on knowledge representation for the Çatalhöyük project in Turkey (led by Stanford’s Ian Hodder; www.catalhoyuk.com), colleague Elijah Meeks and I will use topic models of excavation diaries and grey literature to explore the ways ancient activity is inferred from material evidence.

In forthcoming posts, I’ll elaborate on these and other projects, and discuss formal models of events and activity in places for representing cultural landscapes more explicitly.

References

Adams, B. and McKenzie, G. (2013). Inferring Thematic Places from Spatially Referenced Natural Language Descriptions. In: D. Sui, S. Elwood, and M. Goodchild (Eds.), Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, pp. 201-221.

Cooper, D. and Gregory, I. N. (2011). Mapping the English Lake District: a literary GIS. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 89-108

Grossner, K. (2010). Event Objects for Spatial History. In R. Purves, R. Weibel (Eds.) Extended Abstracts Volume, GIScience 2010, Zurich. (PDF)

Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage

Sauer, C. (1925). The morphology of landscape, In J. Agnew, D.N. Livingstone, and A. Rogers, (Eds.). (1996). Human geography: an essential anthology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Tuan, Y. (1974). Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective. Progress in Geography, 6, 233-246

Winter, S. and Freksa, C. (2013). Approaching the notion of place by contrast. Journal of Spatial Information Science, Number 5, pp. 31–50

 

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City Nature launches

By admin | Published March 14, 2013
City Nature

We’ve just launched the City Nature web site (citynature.stanford.edu), presenting some early products of research in that project centered at Stanford and UCLA. The “we” includes the project’s principal investigator, Jon Christensen, and myself and colleague Elijah Meeks as researchers-slash-developers. The full team is listed on the site. Here is a sample of what you’ll see:

cn_screen01  cn_screen02

City Nature seeks to explain the enormous variation in quantity and quality of nature in US cities – seeking first to find correlations with demographic variables (we found no strong ones), then looking to planning documents such as Comprehensive Plans, and to historical texts describing individual cities’ planning priorities and processes over time.In the first case, computational methods like topic modeling were applied; in the latter case, traditional historical research methods are employed. The two are not mutually exclusive by any means.

What you see at the site are products of an initial phase of an ambitious long-term ‘umbrella’ project (my phrase), undertaken initially at Stanford University. The products are two datasets and some digital tools for exploring them. Jon Christensen has now moved on to UCLA where he continues this work among his several other initiatives. Jon and co-PI Michael Kahan were granted the research and software development attentions of myself and colleague Elijah Meeks, who are employed by Stanford University Libraries to work on digital humanities projects in intensive year-long engagements with faculty. A dozen Stanford undergraduates with many disparate majors spent the Summer of 2012 as research assistants on these and other aspects of City Nature.

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‘Alt-Ac’ Publication

By admin | Published February 5, 2013

By way of introduction, I am a Digital Humanities Research Developer employed by Stanford University Libraries. Although as a recent PhD (2010, U.C. Santa Barbara Geography) I would like to have time for writing papers for peer-reviewed journals, that activity isn’t really part of my job description. Also, because I don’t aspire to teaching positions, the tenure motivation is absent. But I do want to make the work I do known to those who might have an interest, so with this post I begin the practice of occasional blogging. This seems to be standard practice for many in alternative academic careers (“alt-ac”), and I can see the merit.

All that said, I am working on chapters for two books accepted for publication that were initiated before starting my current job (Jan 2011). That indicates the kind of time frame ordinary publication channels involve. For one of these, Space in Mind: Concepts and Ontologies for Spatial Learning, I am a co-editor, along with Dan Montello and Don Janelle, both of University of California, Santa Barbara. The book will be published by MIT Press in September, 2013. Don and I are also writing a chapter, titled Concepts and Principles for Spatial Literacy.

Spatial thinking capability is strongly correlated with educational and professional performance in STEM fields, but the systematic and integrative instruction of spatial concepts, principles and reasoning skills is not an explicit goal in K-12 or college curricula. Although educators do set standards for verbal literacy, numeracy and analytical reasoning generally, there has been no comparable articulation of what it means to be spatially literate. This chapter principally concerns one component of spatial literacy, spatial conceptual knowledge. We first  report on our recent work enumerating spatial concepts which are genral across multiple fields. We then present a new formulation of spatial principles as being “composed of” those elemental concepts, which in turn inform specific spatial learning objectives. Ultimately these could help in designing course modules and lesson plans. Finally, an outline for a hypothetical undergraduate course in spatial reasoning is presented.

A second chapter, which I am co-authoring with Krzysztof (Jano) Janowicz, also of UCSB, is titled The Place of Linked Data for Historical Gazetteers. A couple of excerpts:

The world needs a freely available comprehensive digital historical gazetteer. Or rather, we need enough of them to cover all places and historical periods, with unifying interfaces permitting human and programmatic access to them. As the digitization of texts and maps proceeds at a terrific pace, and algorithms for extracting place names from them improve markedly, the enormous potential for indexing our accumulated data and knowledge on the many dimensions of place becomes more and more evident. Expressions of this need have appeared with increasing frequency in various symposia and publications.

A list of requirements for digital gazetteers from humanities scholars’ perspective was outlined recently by historian Peter Bol (2011). In this chapter we show how a system using a Linked Data approach would address nearly all of these requirements, in a prospective system that could realistically be undertaken now by a consortium of interested organizations and individuals.

…we propose a couple of additions to the Bol list, concerning (i) representation and computation for imprecise data, and (ii) a prospective disambiguation service making use of any contextual information a user provides to improve results and assist in the identity challenge so common to historical work.

 

 

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