Abstract
Understanding and modelling places is an interdisciplinary problem, and one relevant but easily overlooked discipline is cognitive science. Many of the findings and intuitions that geographers and geographic information scientists have developed imply that places (at least, those that subtend a geographic area and do not have sharply defined boundaries) have a specific role and structure in
human cognition: one of categorising contiguous and semantically related locations, to optimise cognitive economy and efficiency. Thus ’place’, in this sense, is a classification heuristic. This short paper will outline some of the new research questions that arise if we take this perspective on places, and suggest that computational and/or statistical models will need to be supplemented and ’ground truthed’ by human-participants work for useful progress to be made.
human cognition: one of categorising contiguous and semantically related locations, to optimise cognitive economy and efficiency. Thus ’place’, in this sense, is a classification heuristic. This short paper will outline some of the new research questions that arise if we take this perspective on places, and suggest that computational and/or statistical models will need to be supplemented and ’ground truthed’ by human-participants work for useful progress to be made.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | On the Way to Platial Analysis: Can Geosocial Media Provide the Necessary Impetus? |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the First Workshop on Platial Analysis (PLATIAL'18) |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- classification
- location
- place cognition
- semantic memory
- research agenda