The Dictionary of Human Geography

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‘culturally turned’geographiesare all exam-

ined, drawing from Anglophone and French

literatures, and questions are asked abouthow

andwhyparticular scholars on particular occa-

sions have chosen to talk about society or the

social, and with what consequences for the

varieties of human geography practised.

More overtly, it is now possible to identify

diverse strands within human geography over

the past quarter century that have been expli-

cit in seeking to theorize the relationsbetween

society and space. Following Soja’s (1980)

statement of the ‘socio-spatialdialectic’, a

range of contributions, at first chiefly based in

a Marxian tradition, but subsequently enriched

by insights from feminism, post-colonial the-

ory, cultural theory, psychoanalysis and else-

where, have illuminated the problematic of

simultaneously articulating ‘the societal con-

struction of space’ and ‘the spatial construc-

tion of society’ (seefeminist geographies;

marxist geographies; post-colonialism;

psychoanalytic theory). In so doing, the

very referents ‘society’ and ‘space’ have been

subjected to intense questioning, in some

literatures being deconstructed to the point

at which the terms appear to be under per-

manent erasure; but theywillpersist, their

names will be invoked, and the problematic

of ‘society-space’ will continue as an unavoid-

able challenge to generations of geographical

theorists to come. cp

Suggested reading

Giddens (1984); Philo and So ̈derstro ̈m (2004);

Smith (2005c).

software for qualitative research Some

qualitative research methodsgenerate large

quantities of ‘data’ for which computer-based

software has been developed. Most of the

available software packages focus on the analy-

sis of textual (including transcribedinter-

view) material and undertake various forms

of content analysis through a variety of user-

informed coding schemes. Among the early

such packages, NUD*ist (Non-numerical

Unstructured Data [for] index searching and

theory-building) was particularly popular: it

facilitates indexing and the structuring of

indexes as well as rapid searches for words

and phrases and producing statistical reports

on, for example, word associations and allow-

ing researchers to insert memos within the

text. More recent developments building on

that foundation include NViVo and XSight:

all privilege certain approaches to textual

analysis – focusing on associations and count-

ing – and thereby to some extent constrain

if not direct the enterprise. As withsoftware

for quantitative research, an increasing

number of freeware packages is available

for interrogating qualitative data – such

as those made available through CAQDAS

(Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data

Name Available from Comments

R http://cran.r-project.org. R is a general system for statistical computation and

graphics: it offers facilities for data manipulation,

calculation and graphical display either through

built-in functions or add-on packages contributed

by users – this includesspdep, which has facilities

to create spatial weights, tests for spatial

autocorrelation, and procedures for spatial

regression.

GEODA https://www.geoda.uiuc.edu/ This implements techniques for exploratory

spatial data analysis: descriptive spatial data

analysis, spatial autocorrelation tests, and some

spatial regression functionality.

GeoBUGS http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/

bugs/winbugs/geobugs.shtml

This is a Bayesian based package that fits spatial

models and produces a range of maps as output.

BAYESX http://www.stat.uni-muenchen.

de/bayesx/bayesx.html

This has a number of distinctive features including

handling structured and/or uncorrelated effects of

spatial covariates. It allows non-parametric, smoothed

relationships between the response and the predictors,

and does this for continuous and discrete outcomes:

it can manipulate and display geographical maps.

MLwiN http://www.cmm.bristol.ac.uk/ A comprehensive package for the analysis and display

of multi-level models, this uses likelihood and Bayesian

approaches to estimation: it includes spatial models.

software for quantitative analysis

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 703 1.4.2009 3:23pm

SOFTWARE FOR QUALITATIVE RESEARCH