A New Semester, a New Kind of Reading
Sep. 9th, 2014 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdog(I need to do some thinking about how to express my research interests in my application letters to grad school. One of the best ways to think about things, at least for me, is to write about them. It helps make them a bit more concrete, and leads to an iterative process of refinement. So that's part of what I'm doing here. Forgive me if this is completely uninteresting to you!)
For quite a while in school, my reading has been focused on anthropological theory. Things like discussions of good ol' Durkheim, Weber, and Marx for instance. I wrote a paper reanalyzing the data in an ethnography written from one theoretical perspective from a second perspective, doing a compare and contrast. Very qualitative, humanities stuff.
This semester, I don't have any anthropology classes, unless you count a required research report writing class. The reading for classes like Introduction to GIS Analysis is in a *very* different vein. Paul Bolstad's "GIS Fundamentals", for instance, is well-characterized by sentences like "Topological vector models explicitly record the connections of a set of pathways and so facilitate network analyses." Rather different from a book full of more abstracted concepts like Franz Boas and the perils of not knowing when to say when in terms of data collection.
Yet this is a subject and field I enjoy too, and I'm enjoying reading this book. The archival map research I've done over the summer has been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to incorporating the data I have into a fuller GIS system instead of making a bunch of Google Earth overlays. Danae has suggested for a long time that if I want to be an academic in the humanities, I'd do well to include computational/digital approaches to things to give myself more appeal in a competitive and increasingly computer oriented field. I see so much opportunity for GIS-facilitated spatial analysis in the kind of research I want to do, even though I still don't know quite what that research will be! It's the most appealing method I've found for incorporating a more quantitative approach into my interests, which had been largely qualitative up until I really started looking at the field of human geography.
I'm considering talking to the GIS class professor about making term project a spatial analysis based on the Pike Creek waterway. I think it would be interested to see just how large a percentage of the population of Kenosha lives within a short distance of the creek and have no idea it's there!
For quite a while in school, my reading has been focused on anthropological theory. Things like discussions of good ol' Durkheim, Weber, and Marx for instance. I wrote a paper reanalyzing the data in an ethnography written from one theoretical perspective from a second perspective, doing a compare and contrast. Very qualitative, humanities stuff.
This semester, I don't have any anthropology classes, unless you count a required research report writing class. The reading for classes like Introduction to GIS Analysis is in a *very* different vein. Paul Bolstad's "GIS Fundamentals", for instance, is well-characterized by sentences like "Topological vector models explicitly record the connections of a set of pathways and so facilitate network analyses." Rather different from a book full of more abstracted concepts like Franz Boas and the perils of not knowing when to say when in terms of data collection.
Yet this is a subject and field I enjoy too, and I'm enjoying reading this book. The archival map research I've done over the summer has been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to incorporating the data I have into a fuller GIS system instead of making a bunch of Google Earth overlays. Danae has suggested for a long time that if I want to be an academic in the humanities, I'd do well to include computational/digital approaches to things to give myself more appeal in a competitive and increasingly computer oriented field. I see so much opportunity for GIS-facilitated spatial analysis in the kind of research I want to do, even though I still don't know quite what that research will be! It's the most appealing method I've found for incorporating a more quantitative approach into my interests, which had been largely qualitative up until I really started looking at the field of human geography.
I'm considering talking to the GIS class professor about making term project a spatial analysis based on the Pike Creek waterway. I think it would be interested to see just how large a percentage of the population of Kenosha lives within a short distance of the creek and have no idea it's there!
