Geographies of Uneven Development – Working Papers

Publikationsreihe

Die Arbeitsgruppen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeographie veröffentlichen gemeinsam die Working Papers Reihe „Geographies of Uneven Development und stellen diese der Öffentlichkeit hier zur Verfügung. Diese Reihe dient dem Austausch voläufiger wissenschaftlicher Arbeiten der Arbeitsgruppen Sozialgeographie und Wirtschaftsgeographie der Universität Salzburg mit anderen Sozialwissenschaftlern sowie interessierter Leser.
Während die spezifischen Themen der Arbeitspapiere verschiedene Forschungsgebiete abdecken, sind gemeinsamer Nenner all dieser Papiere die Geographien ungleicher Entwicklung.
Zu den Working Papers.

Publikationsbeispiel

KOCH Andreas, (2014)Quod Erat Expectandum The Modus Operandi of Models and Quantifications University of Salzburg, Department of Geography and Geology, Geographies of Uneven Development – Working Paper, 11/2014, No. 4
Abstract
This paper is a plea for a computational social geography (CSG). It argues that neglecting quantitativeapproaches in social geography leaves empirical socio-spatial facts incomplete. Numbers and theiremergence through quantitative methods are indeed one possibility to raise a kind of uniqueness tofacts, phenomena, and events which cannot be realized by other approaches. CSG makes relationsvisible and comparable. It does so by applying the model approach adequately, i.e., to not equatemodels with reality and to explicate the model purpose. As is the case with all other scientificapproaches, computational or analytical social geography is inherently bounded by reductionism.Scale, entity, and context are the inextricable reductionist ingredients of modeling relationshipsbetween the social and the spatial. Recently, significant efforts have been put towards a criticalquantitative geography that takes past weaknesses seriously into account and delineates itsstrengths as a progressive social science.

Keywords: quantitative approaches in social geography, modeling and simulating socio-spatialprocesses, epistemology of models, critical quantitative geography