Perspectives on Space and Time in US and Chinese Science - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 9

a perspective termed idiographic . The nomothetic perspective lost further ground
when the promised empirical regularities failed to materialize, when many found
its version of explanation to be fundamentally weak, and when others saw it as
detached from the world, rather than engaged with improving the world. By the late
1970s the nomothetic perspective had lost almost all of the momentum it had gained
in the previous decade.
Maps have always been an important tool for explicit display of space for
research, both inside and outside the discipline of geography. Biologists have long
made maps of habitat and the distribution of species; sociologists have used maps
to record varying human conditions in urban environments; and political scientists
have used maps to study the dynamics of elections. In the 1960s it became possible
for the first time to store the contents of maps in computers, and to use them for
various purposes: editing the contents of maps prior to printing, making accurate
measurements of properties such as area and distance from maps, and performing
the detailed mathematical calculations needed to project the curved Earth onto flat
paper. By the 1970s these and other applications had coalesced into the concept
of a geographic information system (GIS), an integrated computer application for
capturing, editing, storing, manipulating, and analyzing the contents of maps. The
first commercially viable applications appeared in the 1980s, and GIS was well on
the way to becoming the multi-billion-dollar industry that it is today.
In the four decades since the initial development of GIS, its widespread adoption
has led to a profound reassessment of the nomothetic/idiographic debate, of the
nature of geography as a discipline, and of the significance of space and time in US
science. Much of the work in this area has occurred within the field of geographic
information science (GIScience), which can be defined as the scientific study of the
issues surrounding geographic information and its associated technologies.
First, there are two concepts that are now recognized as universal properties
of geographic information - spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity - and
several additional candidates (Anselin 1989 ; Goodchild 2004 ). Spatial dependence
is the foundation principle of the disciplines of spatial statistics and geostatistics,
and in its most conceptual form amounts to the observation that nearby things
are more similar than distant things, a statement often attributed to Tobler (Sui
2004 ). Spatial heterogeneity implies that the Earth's surface exhibits uncontrolled
variation, and that no place can therefore be representative of the whole. It has
led to recent interest in place-based techniques such as geographically weighted
regression (Fotheringham et al. 2002 ) that propose general principles, but allow the
specific parameters of those principles to vary spatially and temporally over the
geographic domain.
In a GIS the database captures and represents the properties of locations and thus
expresses the idiographic perspective, or Varenius's concept of special geography
(Warntz 1989 ). The software performs functions on the data, including analysis
and modeling, applying the same functions uniformly, and thus can be seen as
expressing the nomothetic perspective, or Varenius's concept of general geography .
In this sense GIS straddles the nomothetic/idiographic debate, unifying them in a
single structure.