Navigating the Methodological Landscape in Spatial Analysis: A Comment on “A Route Map for Successful Applications of Geographically-Weighted Regression”

The development of “route maps” for spatial analytical methods is a pursuit with important ramifications. Comber et al. propose a route map to guide applications of geographically weighted regression consisting of a three-step primary pathway and a series of secondary arterials. This comment first highlights some concerns about the underlying “map” (i.e., experimental setup and assumptions) and then with the proposed “route” (i.e., core decisions and evaluation criteria). It closes by suggesting a more general focus on identifying modeling issues with the highest impact and facilitating consensus-building, which could improve the future production of route maps for navigating the methodological landscape in spatial analysis.     

The Right to Rule by Thumb: A Comment on Epistemology in “A Route Map for Successful Applications of Geographically-Weighted Regression”

Comber et al. provide an important contribution to the future of quantitative geography and Geographical Analysis. The contribution is chiefly in their development of a “GWR Route Map,” a diagram showing the sequence of analytical steps that “successful” specification searches in local modeling tend to follow. Geographically weighted techniques have been rapidly expanding, both in terms of complexity, users, and disciplinary reach. With geographically weighted methods now in so many more analysts' hands, any new rule of thumb will have a major imprint. But, by what right does the thumb rule the analysts? That is, what “counts” as valid knowledge about local models in general? In the following comment, I argue that we probably should use theory, not route maps to decide specifications. But, if we are pressed to build route maps, we sorely need better epistemological foundations for them. I discuss a few previous examples of strongly grounded route maps and offer a few paths to these better grounds as well as two ways to the exit.     

Computerizing The Manuscript Census–A Comment

Abstract. After-death inventories are an invaluable source for historians of early modern Europe, with their trove of evidence being exploited for more applications all the time. They are fundamental to the emerging fields of the history of consumer culture, the arrangement of household space, the history of the so-called private life, and material life more generally. They also contribute to our understanding of the distribution of wealth and patterns of wealth holding. The author documents a data-collection project based on over one thousand after-death inventories drawn up by the Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam between the 1740s and 1780s. Given the wide patronage of this institution among the citizen working poor and middling shopkeepers, and the gender-neutral rules for inclusion, this collection of inventories represents an unusually broad sample along three different axes: gender, marital status, and household wealth. The source is described and the data files documented so that they may be used by scholars widely.