This blog takes an informal look into the debates and methods related to business GIS and mapping
Author: Dr. Murray Rice
Now that we are into this blog with some specific examples of business geographic analysis, I want to shift our perspective to address one of the big questions surrounding the practice of geography in modern society. Namely, what is geography?
Many people don’t see this as a hard question to answer. From this perspective, it seems obvious that geography is a framework for collecting, categorizing, and recalling vast amounts of factual knowledge about the world. What is the largest city in the world? By population? By land area? What are the 20 largest cities in the world? Where are they? How has this list changed over the past decade?
Same kind of thing for world rivers. What’s the longest river in the world? The largest flow rate river? What about mountain ranges? Capes and bays? Places with the highest tides? Most polluted cities? Most congested cities? From this perspective, geography is obviously a discipline that organizes our memorized facts about the world and provides people playing trivia games an endless supply of facts and basic maps about the world and its places.
Such a popular view of geography is prevalent in society today because professional geographers have not provided an alternative vision that resonates with the general population. The "geography is about facts" crowd has won the day because this trivia narrative is easy to understand and seems to make sense. After all, National Geographic magazine has done a superb job for decades painting a picture of a wide range of places around the world. For all the rich detail and commentary provided by this publication, to the general public the magazine’s existence bolsters the "geography is about facts" view by supplying more raw material to feed society’s itch for information.
People who practice geography recognize a few things here. First, while there is a veneer of seemingly straightforward, fact-centric presentation in popular publications such as National Geographic, in the articles in such publications there is also usually a thoughtful core that is more challenging for the general public to recognize or categorize. So it would be unfair to blame National Geographic for geography’s public understanding problem. Second, it is also important to see that a knowledge of geographic facts is not a bad thing in itself. We need geographic facts to provide illumination and context for the conversations that we have about the world. For example, discussions about urban transportation in America need to be informed by a knowledge of the differences that exist between public transportation in relatively young Sunbelt cities like Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles, versus cities that are older and more dense, like New York, Chicago, and Boston. A knowledge of facts on the ground does contribute to the narrative when discussing real-world issues.
The key dividing point here is the emphasis of the conversation. The kind of conversation driven by an overwhelming factual emphasis reduces to a "who knows more trivia" contest. The conversations driven by use of a higher view of geography allows the narrative to use geographic facts to supplement the discussion instead of forming its core.
The distinction I’m getting at here can be perhaps best explained by reference to two distinctive terms that are commonly used in conversation, but are not commonly truly reflected upon or understood.
1. Information
The first term, "information", can be thought of as raw output. Walmart is a good example of this. Every day, Walmart captures information that summarizes its sales of every product that it sells across every story that it operates, all in real time. In so doing Walmart collects terabytes of information about its operations, the complexity of which easily overwhelms the human mind. No one looks at Walmart’s raw sales databases directly. Walmart’s executives get plenty of support in finding out what the data are actually saying.
Another good example is the information collected by automated roadside sensors positioned throughout modern highway systems. These sensors collectively assemble a blizzard of information on the travel time, location, size, and speed of vehicles travelling throughout the highway network. This complexity is multiplied further for the information collected along toll roads, where each car may be linked via car-based sensors or license plates to information about individual drivers, addresses, and even automated payment information.
Such a database provides a couple of key insights.
For example, in our roadside sensor database, if a vehicle is tracked as being in a place where it has never been before, and an early morning time it is never driven, and at a speed much faster than it has ever been driven, the raw data points suddenly provide a picture of tremendous concern. So thinking of this situation, let’s define the second term.
2. Insight
Insight is the result of intense analysis and attention by people especially skilled at using and understanding complex information. In our era, advanced computing capabilities including artificial intelligence (AI) take the best human insights and power them for deployment across our modern data sets. The result: a refined set of summaries and recommendations based on deep analysis and attention to the trends, patterns, and correlations buried in the original, complex data. This unlocks applications that a straightforward analysis of the original data sets would never have supported. Insight is what helps us identify the car who’s tracking data have come together to indicate a reason for concern.
The Bottom Line
So, what about our initial question? What is geography? And how is geography as practiced by professional geographers different from the popular, fact-centric view of the field?
Geographers see the world from a perspective powered and enabled by maps and spatial thinking. This perspective is of great utility for advanced decision-making. Geography supplements this perspective with use of computer mapping and analysis technologies to produce insight no one else can uncover. Applications for geographic thinking and analysis exist in a wide range of fields, including:
Earlier we discussed one prominent view of Geography as focusing on memorized facts and basic maps. These elements have been assessed by the general public as being of low interest and minimal value. From the terminology discussion we just completed, such basic activities most properly fall in the information category. But in reality, the vast bulk of the contribution of geography accurately understood comes in the insight category. Information category activities are top of mind for geography with many in the general public, but the insight category contributions and their much higher value-added are where geographers actually work.
This is the crux of geography’s problem: people connect the discipline with simple-minded facts and insights when, in reality, geography is home to some of the most sophisticated analytics humans have invented.
So, the next time someone asks you what geography is, you can say with confidence that geography is a discipline at the forefront of helping make better decisions for the future. Which is something we can all agree is of great importance for the outlook of our planet.
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