Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Furthermore, in forming the narrative the analyst also used knowledge about the
geopolitical situation of the world.
Summary Under dissection, all the insights broke down to basic relations in the
spatial and temporal dimensions. The diagrams presented in this section illustrate
how the insights were made up of several smaller insights, or cognitive concepts,
which in turn were, in the end, based on a basic relation in space or time. Most of the
cognitive concepts were given various context-dependent qualitative categorical
representations, such as
'
short
'
,
'
many
'
,or
'
close to each other
'
. These kinds of
representations cannot readily be dealt with by a computer. On the other hand, some
of the concepts, such as outside/inside, can be dealt with by computers through,
e.g., the 9-intersection model.
As an analyst watches the kind of animation used in the case study, innumerable
spatial and temporal relations are conveyed to him or her. The ones that reach
his/her consciousness and become a part of an insight, i.e., those that become
cognitive concepts, are those that merge together and form the normal behavior
and those that pop out in some way, that are anomalous. To judge from this study,
the anomalies were those that differed from the rest of the relations of the same type
in the scene or that differed from the knowledge about relations of this kind held by
the analyst. Other reasons were that they were of a certain sought-for quality
(top-down processes), showed a certain clear pattern (bottom-up processes), or
were intriguing in some other way, e.g., the first with a certain thematic value.
Discussion and Conclusions
The results support the hypothesis that the basic relations in the spatial and
temporal dimensions are of key importance to our analytical reasoning and
the dissection showed that insights can be broken down to, and derived from,
the level of basic relations (although direction did not play a role in any of the
insights dissected here it most probably plays a role in our analytical reason-
ing). Furthermore, the importance of the reference system and the previous
knowledge of the analyst became evident. Of the four insights dissected here,
chosen to give a good representation of different kinds of insights, two
included information from the reference system as key building blocks,
without which the insights would have been impossible. Previous knowledge
was of importance, especially when forming the narratives, but also in the
reasoning process prior to that. For example, it is very probable that in Insight
III knowledge about vacations in December and January made the empty
interval pop out more easily. In the same way, knowledge about the Cold War
made the analyst sensitive to interaction patterns between the U.S.S.R. and
U.S.A. in Insight II.
Also the framework of spatio-temporal cognitive concepts is a significant
outcome of this study. The framework gives a starting point to a better
(continued)
