Preface
The Handbook is written for academics, researchers, practitioners and advanced graduate students. It has been designed to be read by those new or starting out in the field of spatial analysis as well as by those who are already familiar with the field.
The chapters have been written in such a way that readers who are new to the field will gain important overview and insight. At the same time, those readers who are already practitioners in the field will gain through the advanced and/or updated tools and new materials and state-of-the-art developments included.
This volume provides an accounting of the diversity of current and emergent approaches, not available elsewhere despite the many excellent journals and text books that exist. Most of the chapters are original, some few are reprints from the Journal of Geographical Systems, Geographical Analysis, The Review of Regional Studies and Letters of Spatial and Resource Sciences.
We let our contributors develop, from their particular perspective and insights, their own strategies for mapping the part of terrain for which they were responsible. As the chapters were submitted, we became the first consumers of the project we had initiated. We gained from depth, breadth and distinctiveness of our contributors’ insights and, in particular, the presence of links between them.
The chapters were rigorously refereed blindly by the contributors to this volume. Referee reports were sent to each author and changes made accordingly. We supervised this process to guarantee that authors received reviews that would be useful for finalizing their chapters. The soundness of the comments and ideas have contributed immensely to the quality of the Handbook. Fortunately, we were dealing with truly exemplary scholars, the most distinguished and sophisticated representatives of the fields of inquiry.
We thank the contributors for their diligence, not only in providing extremely thoughtful and useful contributions, but also in meeting all deadlines in a timely manner and in following stringent editorial guidelines. Moreover, we acknowledge the generous support provided by the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Vienna University of Economics and Business. Thomas Seyffertitz greatly assisted in keeping the project well organized.
Last but not at least, we have benefitted greatly from the editorial assistance he and Ingrid Divis provided. Their expertise in handling several word processing systems, formatting, and in dexing, together with their care and attention to detail, helped immeasurably.
This Handbook brings together contributions from the most accomplished researchers in the area of spatial analysis. Each was asked to describe and explain in one chapter the nature of the types of analysis in which they are expert.
Clearly, having only one chapter to explain, for example, exploratory spatial data analysis or spatial econometric models, is a daunting task, but the authors of this book were able to summarize the key notions of their spatial analytic fields and point readers in directions that will help them to better understand their data and the techniques available to them.
Whether or not spatial analysis is a separate academic field, the fact remains that in the last twenty years spatial analysis has become an important by-product of the interest in and the need to understand georeferenced data. The current interest in environmental sciences is a particular stimulant to the development of new and better ways of analyzing spatial data.
Environmental studies have become either an important subfield of or a major thrust in such fields as ecology, geology, atmospheric sciences, sociology, political science, economics, urban planning, epidemiology, and the field that sometimes characterizes itself as the archetype environmental science, geography. There is no shortage of articles in the applied journals of these fields where the analysis of spatial data is central.
Many researchers are busy developing techniques for the study of georeferenced data, and many more use spatial analytic tools. Following the adage ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ very often the developers are also the users.
Thus, we see that in the fields mentioned above, new and tantalizingly imaginative techniques have been created for analytic purposes.
Handbook of Applied Spatial Analysis
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