Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science

The objectives of this meeting were:(1) to demonstrate, showcase, and benchmark state-of-the-art tools and to facilitate interaction among specialized software developers; (2) to promote a dialogue among the wide range of developers about priorities and guidelines for software design, data and model standards, inter-operability, and open environments, including specific open source standards for spatial data analysis; and (3) to introduce CSISS' open source software development initiative, the "OpenSpace" project. A brief introduction is followed by position papers from meeting participants.

Using as motivation the recently collected large amounts of GPS data from a variety of transportation studies in the United States and Europe, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) funded a Peer Exchange meeting in Santa Barbara, CA (10-11 October 2005). The intent of this Peer Exchange was to assemble experts to discuss potential approaches on using GPS vehicle traces for defining space-time paths and prisms to be used in activity modeling and microsimulation for transportation analysis. This Peer Exchange brought together travel demand forecasters, experts in travel behavior and GPS data collection, and geographers to discuss different approaches to analyzing space-time prisms for transportation forecasting needs. This report documents the discussions and recommendations from the Peer Exchange.

This meeting (December 2001 in Santa Barbara), sponsored by CSISS and UCGIS explored the advent of location-based services and their implications and significance for the social sciences and for geographic information science. Specific issues considered included: the use of LBS to support primary data capture in the social sciences, requirements for new  analytic tools to visualize and investigate such data, privacy and related issues associated with LBS data, and new forms of social behavior enabled by LBS.

Spatial Social Science recognizes the key role that spatial concepts, such as distance, location, proximity, neighborhood, and region play in human society; promotes research that advances the understanding of spatial patterns and processes; and invokes powerful principles of spatial thinking.

The GIS Cookbook is a collection of simple descriptions and illustrations of GIS methods written with minimal GIS jargon. Recipes cover two GIS software platforms, ArcView 3.x and ArcGIS 8/9.x. The target users are social scientists with an interest in introducing spatial thinking into their current research and also having some experience with computers but little to no exposure to GIS. The GIS Cookbook was prepared in 2002–2005 to serve the expanding community of social scientists wanting to apply GIS for research and teaching. This archival resource is intended for historical documentaion.

Those interested in learning basic applications of GIS, geographical mapping, and spatial analysis are advised to seek more recent tutorials based on newer software advances and web-based mapping tools.

Users of the CSISS GIS Cookbook may wish to download the full documentation to allow for internal links from the Table of Contents.

NCGIA Core Curricula in GIS/GIScience are available at http://escholarship.org/uc/spatial_ucsb_ncgia

Geographical movement is of crucial importance. This is because much change in the world is due to movement; the movement of people, ideas, money, or material. One way of depicting and analyzing geographical movement is by way of geographical maps. In 2003 CSISS supported an effort to produce an interactive flow mapping program. The result is an updated Windows-based version of a program originally designed and programmed by Waldo Tobler in 1987. Tobler's original application was updated by David Jones using Microsoft Visual Basic.Net and SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) for map rendering. It requires as input locational coordinates and a table of interaction between places, place names,  and a file of boundary coordinates. The program allows for the production of a total movement map shown by volume-scaled bands, net movement given by scaled arrows, or simultaneous two-way moves. This FlowMapper document also includes a set of papers by Waldo Tobler:

FlowMapper Tutorials—p. 9

Movement Mapping—p. 104

On Viewing Flow Maps—p. 111

Optimal Parsing of Large Arrays—p. 124

Experiments in Migration Mapping by Computer—p. 128.

This document is a proposal submitted to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in 2008 to establish a training program in advanced spatial analysis in support of the population sciences and spatial demographic research. The proposal was funded, allowing for week-long intensive research training programs at Pennsylvania State University and UC Santa Barbara that served researchers and advanced students from institutions across the United States in the summers of 2008-2011. The program went beyond basic GIS training to focus on advanced spatial analysis, including spatial regression modeling, geographically weighted regression, multi-level modeling, and spatial pattern analysis.

This document is the proposal for an NICHD-supported training program on GIS and Population Science that was implemented by the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University and the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science at UC Santa Barbara in 2005-2007. Focused on early career scholars, 2-week-long workshops explored the practices and issues of using spatial data in such fields as demography, epidemiology, and public health.

This NSF Proposal (0231263: NSF 02-043 CCLI National Dissemination) helped launch a program to enhance the exposure of spatial analytic thinking and spatial technologies into the social science undergraduate curriculum. The proposal develops the goals, programs, and outreach initiatives associated with national professional development workshops for undergraduate faculty. Partner institutions included UC Santa Barbara (Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research and the Department of Geography), Ohio State University (Department of Geography), and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.

This poster summarizes the goals and workshop programs associated with SPACE and its approach to enhancing spatial perspectives in curriculum development for undergraduate social science education. The poster also presents a summary profile of more than 200 program participants by discipline, gender, and minority representation; and, it describes the results of entry and exit surveys.

Spatial Perspectives on Analysis for Curriculum Enhancement (SPACE) was funded under the national disseminationtrack of the National Science Foundation’s Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program. The objective of SPACE was to initiate systemic change in undergraduate education for the social sciences by focusing on the value of spatial thinking and associated technologies—geographic informationsystems (GIS) and tools for spatial analysis. The primary activities for achieving SPACE goals were eleven week-long residential workshops to provide undergraduate instructors with basic skills in GIS and spatial analysis, and to introduce them to the latest techniques,software, and learning resources. This report describes these workshops and the outcomes for enhancing undergraduate social science education through spatial analysis.

This report describes the research and instructional outcomes of the NSF-supported CSISS programs over the period 1 July 2001 to 30 April 2002. These programs initiated two new book projects on spatial econometrics and on best practices in spatially integrated social science. National workshops offered training to social science scholars in applications of spatial data analysis, and specialist research meetings featured spatial analytic software development and location-based services.

This annual report for year one of the NSF-sponsored CSISS program covers the period 1 October 1999 to 30 June 2000. It describes the initial set of workshops on spatial analysis, plans for research-oriented specialist meetings, spatial analytical tools development, publications, and outreach efforts in support of building national-level infrastructure in support of spatial thinking across the social sciences.

This report describes the results of a survey of social science jounals to document trends in the application of spatial approaches in different disciplines between 1990 and 2001. An appendix about the related CSISS web search engine and its controlled vocabulary is provided for those interested in the semantic and ontological foundations of this report regarding applications of geographical information science and  spatial analysis in the social sciences.

In 1826, Johann-Heinrich von Thünen published Der isolierte Staat ("The Isolated State") that included one of the first general models to describe the land use practices radiating out from a central market location in response to transport costs.  His approach became a foundation for research in regional economic geography and optimiztion modeling for understanding and predicting both agricultural and urban land-use change.

Kurath's primary goal was to use the Linguistic Atlas to map the evolution of American English from the relatively "pure" forms of English brought to the United States by early settlers to the regional dialects that existed in the contemporary United States. He saw language patterns on maps derived from field surveys as a living record of events related to the growth of trade and transport systems, urbanization, and population movements.

Finch played a major role in reshaping the way spatial information was cataloged and used piror to the development of computers. This essay details his uses of a fractional code for multi-variable mapping and land classification.