1.5: Geography is a Way to Solve Problems – Jedi Weapons

Geographers have a very powerful toolbox of problem-solving tactics and strategies. The tools in the geographer’s toolbox are our methods and most of our methods are dependent upon our spatial epistemology, or way of knowing. There are dozens of methods used by geographers today. This is partly because geographers have adopted many methods used by scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. The scientific method is widely used by geographers, but humanistic methods, like those employed by historians or even art critics, are also used by geographers. Generally, geographers alter these borrowed methods so we can use them effectively alongside our discipline’s spatial epistemology. Taken together, the methods and the epistemology provide geographers with a series of methodologies; or set of rules that govern the collection and analysis of a wide variety of data.

For example, if a geographer were to survey students about a new campus policy, many of the questions included in the survey would be the same as those used by a political scientist, historian or sociologist. However, a geographer would insist that the survey include a spatial question among the demographic questions. Instead of simply asking about each survey respondent’s age, gender, and ethnicity; the geographer would likely insist on asking about each respondent’s address, ZIP code, or at least “hometown”.

Like many other disciplines, geographers use statistics. Often, we use statistics in a manner indistinguishable from the way they are used in other disciplines. Other times we have found a need to develop separate geography-friendly statistical tools more suited to answering spatial questions. For example, social scientists from other disciplines might start a statistical inquiry by calculating the mean, median and standard deviation of some data points. Geographers, on the other hand, might first plot the data on a map, and then calculate a spatial mean, spatial median and the standard distance of the same data. That’s because geographers want to know where and why. There are a vast number of spatial statistics. Some are exceptionally complex and some quite simple. Spatial Analysis is the name of a subfield of geography which applies advanced mathematical analyses to spatial data. There are a lot of good jobs for people who can do spatial analyses of data.

For the past few decades, the primary tool in the geographer’s toolbox has been a suite of software products known as Geographic Information Systems or GIS. GIS is the “lightsaber” of the modern geographer. Like the lightsaber used by Jedi in Star Wars movies, GIS is used by a select few (Jedis), and in the hands of a “master”, GIS is both amazingly powerful and versatile. GIS software allows geographers to analyze data in a unique fashion, permitting geographers to ask spatial questions and solve problems using our special methods and while engaging our peculiar spatial epistemology. GIS allows geographers to sometimes solve problems that have proven intractable to those without GIS. People from other fields begun to embrace GIS, but the techniques for using GIS have begun to emerge as foundational tools for modern geographers.