January 11, 2020
Welcome to the first week of class!
Our introductory week into this class presented the three GIScience pillars we will focus on in this course: landscape ecology, health geography, and crime analysis. Dr. Klinkenberg contextualized how these three distinct applications are linked by their common geographic elements including patterns, processes, places, people, and perspective, all of which are integral to identify as their variance will impact any spatial analysis. The bulk of this lecture highlighted each field’s main themes, typical analytical methods and approaches, and then identified their cross over in analytical procedures which emphasized how one method can be used for many applications. Finally, the importance of the geographical perspective and spatial thinking was revived because it is complex, requiring years of building skills in observation, technical GIS (defining, classifying, analyzing), and synthesis with another subject matter (for inferring, reasoning, integrating, and associating phenomena).
We also began our Tutorial for the course this week.