Analysing data across geographic scales in Honduras: detecting levels of organisation within systems

摘要

There is a growing disparity between the disciplines that aim to understand and explain the phenomena and relationships that characterise the environment. Social physics leads towards finding universal relationships in data on the basis of well-understood and statistically robust methodologies. Recent trends in quantitative geography have focused on empirical, visual, exploratory and local methods to reveal patterns that can subsequently form part of a model specification to design experiments and test hypotheses. The information technology data explosion during the last two decades has increased differences between the social physics and the quantitative geographical paradigms.