Spatial Concept Perspectives

We have gathered ~300 excerpts from published works about fundamental spatial concept terms. These have been cross-referenced with the concept lexicon appearing on the left. Those terms were drawn from the U.S.National Science Education Standards (NSES 1996) for topic areas B - Physical Science, C - Life Science, D - Earth and Space Science, as well as from the 1994 U.S. Geography Teaching Standards for grades 9-12. Those standards can be browsed here.

spatial concept terms

disciplinary perspectives on "scale"

grain

...measurements can be made of the influence of surrounding points on any given location. One such measurement is...grain. If (some characteristic) is discontinuous...then the measure is grain, or the fineness of the mix of diverse characters (p 355). See also, gradient.

Design (urban, architecture)
Architecture

Lynch (1984)

Good City Form

levels of scale

...objects which have life [for Alexander, the most desired quality of designed objects]...all contain different scales...the centers these objects are made of tend to have a beautiful range of sizes, and...these sizes exist at a series of well-marked levels, with definite jumps between them (p 145).

Alexander (2004)

The Nature of Order, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

scale

The geographical scale at which we examine a phenomenon can affect the observations we make and must always be considered in spatial analysis.... For example, at continental scale, a city is conveniently represented by a point. At the regional scale it becomes area object. At a local scale the city becomes a complex collection of point, line, area, and network objects (p.33).

Geography

O'Sullivan and Unwin (2002)

Geographic Information Analysis

scale

Determine how change is effected by altering the real world representations ratio (p. 92)

Geography

Golledge, et al. (2008)

Matching geospatial concepts with geographic educational needs

scale

The level of detail of a geographic data set is one of its most important characteristics, relevant to issues of extent and resolution, self-similarity (fractals), generalization and down-scaling, ecological inference, line and surface smoothing, recursive subdivision, variance decomposition, and multi-level analysis

Geography

de Smith, et al. (2008)

Geospatial Analysis: A comprehensive guide to principles, techniques, and software tools

scale

Understanding spatial scale and its significance. : The level of detail of a geographic data set is one of its most important characteristics. Definitions of scale embrace spatial extent and level of resolution. Generalization, downscaling, and self-similarity (fractals) are related, subsidiary concepts

Social Science

Janelle and Goodchild (2011)

Concepts, Principles, Tools, and Challenges in Spatially Integrated Social Science

scale

The SCALE schema is basic to both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of our experience. ...from one perspective, we can view our world as a massive expanse of quantitative amount and qualitative degree or intensity. Our world is experienced partly in terms of more, less and the same...this aspect of human experience is the basis of the SCALE schema (p 122)

Linguistics
Philosophy

Johnson, M. (1987)

The Body in the Mind

scale

...in order to use a map to learn about distances, viewers must appereciate the notion of scale. That is, they must understand that most maps evenly transform real-world distances into smaller ones and that this transformation rule can be used to judge real-world distance (p 151).

Psychology

Newcombe and Huttenlocher (2000)

Making Space

scale

In spatial reasoning, scale describes the dimensional relationship between a representation and reality. Due to the large variation of all space, scale is used to project reality to more useful and meaningful sizes. For large expanses, scale is reduced (e.g., fitting the entirety of earth’s surface on to a paper map), and for miniscule distances, scale is increased (e.g., enlarging and schematizing chemical reactions). Often, scale is denoted as a fraction where a unit of measure in reality is compared to the same unit on the projection. For instance, a paper map of a landscape showing a scale of 1:10,000, would mean that a drawn unit on the map represents 10,000 of the same unit in reality.

Bader, J. and Glennon, A. (2009)

Spatial Concepts