Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and Vardigan, 2005). However, this approach can only succeed if the DDI framework is
also adopted by those who originally create data, especially those who plan and carry out
censuses and large-scale surveys. It will only fully succeed if it is also adopted by those who
analyse and visualize social science data. So far, most geographers, even highly quantitative
ones, know little of statistical metadata frameworks, but this chapter has argued we have
much to gain from not just learning about this field but contributing to it.
Acknowledgements
Ian Turton and James Macgill, then of the Centre for Computational Geography at the
University of Leeds, made a large contribution to the visualization facilities within Vision of
Britain . Thanks to Wendy Thomas of the University of Minnesota and Mary Vardigan of the
University of Michigan for comments on a draft version of this paper. Development of the
Vision of Britain web site was supported by the Big Lottery Fund under award DIG/2000/147.
References
Blank, G. and Rasmussen, K. B. (2004) The Data Documentation Initiative: the value and sig-
nificance of a worldwide standard. Social Science Computer Review , 22: 307-318.
Gregory, I. N. and Southall, H. R. (1998) Putting the past in its place: the Great Britain Historical
GIS. In Carver, S. (ed.), Innovations in GIS 5 . London, Taylor & Francis, pp. 210-221.
Miller, D. W. and Modell, J. (1998) Teaching United States history with the Great American
History Machine. Historical Methods , 21(3): 121-134.
Miller, K. and Vardigan, M. (2005) How initiative benefits the research community - the Data
Documentation Initiative, paper presented at the First International Conference on e-Social
Science , Manchester, June 2005; www.ddialliance.org/DDI/papers/miller.pdf
Openshaw, S., Charlton, M., Wymer, C. and Craft, A. W. (1987) A mark I geographical analysis
machine for the automated analysis of point data sets. International Journal of GIS , 1: 335-358.
Southall, H. R. (2001) Defining census geographies: international perspectives. Of Significance. . .
(Journal of the Association of Public Data Users) , 3: 32-39.
Southall, H. R. and White, B. M. (1997) Visualising past geographies: the use of animated
cartograms to represent long-run demographic change in Britain. In Mumford, A. (ed.),
Graphics, Visualization and the Social Sciences. Loughborough, Advisory Group on Computer
Graphics, Technical Report Series no. 33, pp. 95-102.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search