Читать книгу GIS Research Methods - Steven J. Steinberg - Страница 34

A researcher can begin to understand a particular issue or problem by asking questions, reading the local newspaper, observing the community, or employing all of these methods while tying in a spatial perspective. Space can be thought of as the distance between places. What is place? Place can be thought of as “meaningful location” (Creswell 2004). In other words, place is a location that has some importance. This importance can vary by individual or by group. When you think about the way that different geographies are named by different groups, this makes sense. For example, many Native Americans and the US government refer to the famous battle fought between General Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho in different ways: many Native Americans refer to it as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, whereas those of nonnative descent refer to it more often as the Battle of the Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand. For the Native Americans who participated in the battle, it was a clear victory; for the losing side, the US Army, the battle was conceptualized as a great loss. Perhaps this explains why, for many years, many referred to the site as the “Custer Battlefield.” Place-names clearly depend on the group who is doing the naming. To be named and/or defined as a place, a location has to have some meaning.

Places can either be conceptual or real. An example of conceptual space is social status or hierarchy. You could be neighbors with someone in a different class or social circle than you, which may mean you have little to no interaction with the person. Real, physical space is easier to measure than conceptual space because it is more easily defined and demarcated as distances and directions between locations.