Group items tagged

"and that (speaking of the broader field of human geography) "if we want to see where we have come from, what our intellectual debts are, there are few better places to start than Theoretical Geography." Bunge's work promotes geography as a science and mathematics as the most fruitful language and tool for its study. As the title makes clear, the author was concerned with theory, and believed that simple laws were discoverable about the patterns of social phenomena found on the earth's surface. In part, this was a reaction against the idiographic perspective then present in the discipline. Idiographic methods are concerned with describing the infinite variation in these social phenomena rather than discovering generalizable laws common to the entire surface. Bunge thought such an idiographic view would continue to marginalize geography as a science, but received much opposition from geographers who valued the traditional role of description in geographic practice. Later opposition formed against Bunge's conflation of geometric pattern with explanation; mathematical functions and simple geometric patters couldn't, in and of themselves, be said to explain anything. The ideas contained within are too complex and far outside my areas of expertise to cover here; for a better summary of the issues and debates involved, see Michael Goodchild's 2008 review (pdf). Though his book would become a classic, Bunge had a hard time getting it published stateside, and apparently Torsten Hägerstrand had a hand in its eventual publication by Swedish ("that freer place")"

"TL;DR. The goal of creating a system to organize papers and references is to be able to easily access them later. If you follow the steps above, it's relatively easy to keep track of and use what you've read - if you want to find a paper, you can search for a key word in your reference manager and/or in your running document of article summaries and then find a copy of the paper in the appropriate alphabetized folder. That said, there is no right way to organize references and I'm curious about how others manage their files. Chime in t"