Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
humans. As corporeal beings, we all carve paths through space and time. Where
researchers have made individual movement paths manifest, they have sought to
identify them with Hägerstrand's concepts of time geography. Timelines have
been utilized in a range of customised applications to illustrate movements
including tourist movement (Zhao
2003
; Zhao and Forer
2003
), gender issues
(Forer and Kivell
1981
; Kwan
1999
), student lifestyles (Huisman and Forer
1998
),
accessibility (Miller
1991
), and activity-travel patterns (Kwan
2000
), usually to
underpin commentary on the nature and causes of the movement, particularly
where the notion of constraints as part of an organizing principle for the individual
is to the fore. With the generation of large GPS data sets and their simplified
import into 3-D viewers the generation of space-time aquaria has become popular,
but due to the visual overload in many such data sets, spaghetti in the aquaria, the
outcomes have not all been totally successful. Nonetheless, the timeline and its
conceptual foundation remain attractively powerful as a way of combining
knowledge of the individual and contextualizing it within their environment and its
potential to meet their needs.
The environment is the second missing item in our first two examples, but
features more in
Sect. 3.1
. We know that aspects of the urban ecology sustain
certain needs and generate certain movement patterns. To some degree we can add
value to movement paths by being able to infer what presence in a certain part of
the city implies. We can also use knowledge of the facilities' distribution in an
urban environment to generate synthetic measurements of space and proximity and
capability therein. We can also use that knowledge to test the reliability of
movement data in certain circumstances (Sun et al.
2012
). It is important to recall
that timelines, and Hägerstrand's theorizing, embrace the ideas of a choreography
(Pred
1977
) that is driven by motives that require specific environments for their
satisfaction and is subject to the availability of access to the environment's
capabilities at a practical time. Movement reflects activity, activity reflects envi-
ronmental capability, which in turn attracts movement. Ringmap seems to provide
some multi-faceted insights into rich movement data, but it has been tested only on
one idiosyncratic human movement data set. A number of issues arise in terms of
the general value of its individual or assembled components. Fortunately there are
quite a few contexts in which to explore this question further.
To that end discussion shifts into the animal kingdom for a comparison exer-
cise. Figure
3
illustrates the power of the timeline with small populations, and
introduces two anonymous albatrosses in a specific aquarium, one that covers New
Zealand and the seas around it (Stahl and Sagar
2000
). Seen as 2-dimensional
individual trajectories, or even plotted on a map together, the nature of the intricate
parenting dance that is taking place is hard to discern. Visualising the same data in
time and space, and with a knowledge of the environment, unpacks that tale clearly
and quickly. There are cycles of shared duties, individual parenting, and feeding
voyages occurring which meet a series of quite complex goals all tied in with
environmental cycles.
Figure
3
vividly illustrates aspects of the relationship of a breeding pair of
albatrosses in the Snares Islands, New Zealand between 18th of March and 17th of
