Just! GIS

"ing at CHEJ, I had an incomplete understanding of environmental justice. I pictured the field solely as activists and victims opposing corporate polluters. Although I understood that research supports these organizing efforts, I never considered methods that scientists adopt to evaluate ecological data. One of these methods is GIS (geographic information systems), a computer program designed to collect, analyze, and distribute spatial data. GIS specialists create maps to interpret data across various disciplines. When appropriate techniques are applied, GIS can help solve geographically-related problems."

"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")"