What Is Geography In Social Science

Geography, History and Social Sciences

GIS and the Social Sciences

GIS and the Social Sciences offers a uniquely social science approach on the theory and application of GIS with a range of modern examples. It explores how human geography can engage with a variety of important policy issues through linking together GIS and spatial analysis, and demonstrates the importance of applied GIS and spatial analysis for solving real-world problems in both the public and private sector. The book introduces basic theoretical material from a social science perspective and discusses how data are handled in GIS, what the standard commands within GIS packages are, and what they can offer in terms of spatial analysis. It covers the range of applications for which GIS has been primarily used in the social sciences, offering a global perspective of examples at a range of spatial scales. The book explores the use of GIS in crime, health, education, retail location, urban planning, transport, geodemographics, emergency planning and poverty/income inequalities. It is supplemented with practical activities and datasets that are linked to the content of each chapter and provided on an eResource page. The examples are written using ArcMap to show how the user can access data and put the theory in the textbook to applied use using proprietary GIS software. This book serves as a useful guide to a social science approach to GIS techniques and applications. It provides a range of modern applications of GIS with associated practicals to work through, and demonstrates how researcher and policy makers alike can use GIS to plan services more effectively. It will prove to be of great interest to geographers, as well as the broader social sciences, such as sociology, crime science, health, business and marketing.

Geography, History and Social Sciences

Georges Benko «Societies are much messier than our theories of them» Michael Mann The Sources of Social Power 1 Towards a unified social theory Why are there communication problems between the different disciplines of the social sciences? And why should there be so much misunderstanding? Most probably because the encounter of several disciplines is in fact the encounter of several different histories, and therefore of several different cultures, each interpreting the other according to the code dictated by its own culture. Inevitably geographers view other disciplines through their own cultural filter, and even a benevolent view remains 'ethnocentric'. It was in order to avoid such ethnocentricity that Femand Braudel called for more unity among the social sciences in 1958 : «l wish the social sciences . . . would stop discussing their respective differences so much . . . and instead look for common ground . . . on which to reach their first agreement. Personally I would call these ways : quantification, spatial awareness and 'longue duree'». In its place at the center of the social sciences, geography reduces all social reality to its spatial dimensions. Unfortunately, as a discipline, it considers itself all too often to be in a world of its own. There is a need in France for a figure like Vidal de la Blanche who could refocus attention away from issues of time and space, towards space and social reality. Geographic research will only take a step forward once it learns to address the problems facing all the sciences.