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Methods of Geography

Physical geography has undergone two methodological changes since 1970: closer alliances with other sciences to understand physical processes, and advancements in field and lab measurements and data analysis. These technical developments have become core to the discipline. While physical geography relies on observation and measurement of the real world, human geography employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches, as theories of knowledge differ on the nature of reality and our ability to observe it objectively. Contemporary human geography uses various quantitative and qualitative methods across its subdisciplines, including analyzing datasets, interviews, participant observation, and interpretation of written texts and art to understand meanings and behaviors. Geographic information science now incorporates mapping with new technologies like GIS and remote sensing.

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ramyatan Singh
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198 views3 pages

Methods of Geography

Physical geography has undergone two methodological changes since 1970: closer alliances with other sciences to understand physical processes, and advancements in field and lab measurements and data analysis. These technical developments have become core to the discipline. While physical geography relies on observation and measurement of the real world, human geography employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches, as theories of knowledge differ on the nature of reality and our ability to observe it objectively. Contemporary human geography uses various quantitative and qualitative methods across its subdisciplines, including analyzing datasets, interviews, participant observation, and interpretation of written texts and art to understand meanings and behaviors. Geographic information science now incorporates mapping with new technologies like GIS and remote sensing.

Uploaded by

ramyatan Singh
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Methods of geography

Changes in what a discipline studies are closely interwoven with


changes in how its research is undertaken. Some substantive changes
have been technologically driven: without new facilities, advances
would not have been possible, perhaps not conceivable. In others,
technical developments were responses to the research questions.

Physical geography has experienced two parallel sets of


methodological changes since 1970. The first involved closer alliances
with other scientific disciplines, engaging with the physical, chemical,
and biological bases for understanding physical matter and processes
together with the mathematical methods necessary for their analysis.
The second involved technical developments in field and laboratory
measurement and data analysis. These two have come to pervade all
work in physical geography, which has become technically
sophisticated and whose progress has depended almost entirely on
such skills.

Virtually all work in physical geography shares a belief in what is


known as the “real” world—that which can be observed, measured,
and generalized upon, even if the appreciation of particular events and
landforms requires setting general principles within
particular contexts. The laws of physics can be used to generalize
about atmospheric processes, for example, but only an appreciation of
how they interact in specific, local circumstances can account for
the weather at a place on a given day. Immanent laws operate in
local, contingent circumstances, involving highly complex interactions
whose analysis requires sophisticated mathematical skills in analyzing
nonlinear, often chaotic, relationships.

A much wider range of approaches


is deployed within human geography; different theories of knowledge
and reality inspire different types of work. The tenets of positivism still
underpin some work in many areas: there is order in the world that
can be observed, measured, analyzed, and generalized, even if there
are no general laws of human behaviour awaiting discovery. Other
work is based on theories of knowledge that claim an inseparability of

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observer and observed (or subject and object) and dispute the
existence of real worlds independent of their inhabitants’ imagined
worlds. We cannot apprehend an external world but only perceived
worlds. Geographical research based on these premises deploys means
of identifying those worlds, the processes involved in their creation,
and the behaviour within them. It then has to transmit that derived
understanding to others—what is sometimes termed a “double
hermeneutic.”

These various approaches pervade most of contemporary human


geography. With the exception of cultural geography, quantitative
methods are used to analyze and identify regularities in data sets large
and small, taking advantage of technical advances, such as with
methods of artificial intelligence for classifying individuals and areas.

Nonquantitative approaches can be found throughout the various


subdisciplines. These involve obtaining information in rigorous ways
from individuals regarding their mental maps of the world and how
these underpin behaviour. Means of interviewing individuals and
groups to elicit information dominate the qualitative procedures that
involve interpersonal interaction. Research material is also sought in a
variety of other ways, through, for example, participant observation in
case studies of communities and events. But information gathering
extends well beyond interacting, directly or indirectly, with living
people. Learning about the roles of places, spaces,
and environments in the lives of individuals, groups, communities,
and even entire societies near as well as far and past as well as present
involves interrogating many information sources. Most common are
written texts, analyzed for the meanings they can reveal. Other
documents, such as maps, also reveal much, as do works of art. Ways
of deconstructing meanings are commonly used in cultural
and historical geography and in other subdisciplines too, as with the
meanings attached to exotic foods in economic geography.

Research involves not only observing, recording, and analyzing the


world but also transmitting acquired understandings and explanations
to others. In quantitative analyses, this involves using mathematical
notation and procedures—a language that many claim is unambiguous

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but whose use nearly always involves interpretation
in vernacular languages, with meanings often contested. In qualitative
work, nearly all of the reporting is done through the medium of
written language. Having studied texts to reach understandings,
researchers then deploy the same media to present them to others and
thereby place their readers in the same situation of having to derive
meanings from the textual material. The research process thus
involves continued interpretation and reinterpretation of textual and
other materials, including research reports. Unlike the apparently
incontestable clear statements of quantitatively expressed research
findings, research in much contemporary human geography involves
continued debate over meanings and interpretations.

One tool long considered central to geographical work is the map.


Automation of map production has been accompanied by a decline of
research in this area; one of the few continuing fields concerns map
legibility—the degree to which different symbols and shading succeed
in transmitting messages. Its replacement as a central tool is GIS, a
visualization medium with massive capacity for facilitating a wide
range of research investigations. It offers not only sophisticated
procedures for manipulating spatial data but also new ways of
presenting visual data, including three-dimensional images of the
world, at all scales. Geographic information science incorporates the
traditional disciplines of cartography, geodesy, and photogrammetry
with modern developments in remote sensing, the Global Positioning
System (GPS), geostatistics, and geocomputation in activities that
bring forward geographers’ eternal interest in maps as sophisticated
means of representing, analyzing, and viewing
the Earth’s great diversity.

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