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Analysis) – and centres have been established
(such as Qualidata, part of the Data Archive at
the University of Essex) to promote the shared
use of qualitative data. rjSuggested reading
Crang, Hudson, Reimer and Hinchliffe (1997);
Gibbs (2002); Richards (2005). For CAQDAS,
see http://caqdas.soc.surrey.ac.uk/resources.htm
and http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ research/mmethods/
research/software/caqdas_primer.html. For Qua-
lidata, see http://www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/.software for quantitative analysis Soft-
ware, a term invented by the statistician John
Tukey, refers to the instructions executed by a
computer, as opposed to the hardware, the
physical device on which the software runs.
Over the past 40 years, statistical software
has revolutionized the way in which we
approach data analysis, by allowing a much
more computationally intensive approach.
This has led to working with much larger data
sets; using more realistic models (e.g.cat-
egorical data analysis; geographically
weighted regression;multi-level models);
and better ways of visualizing data sets and
models (see visualization) as part of an
exploratory data analysis approach.
However, Ripley (2005) argues that ‘software
availability now drives what we do, probably
much more than we consciously realize’: if
it is not readily available, we tend not to do
the analyses. This has been particularly
problematic in holding back development
and adoption of geographical modeling and
spatial analysis, because the widely used and
otherwise reasonably comprehensive software,
such as the Statistical Package for the Social
Sciences (SPSS#), has limited capacity in this
area. This is finally changing and a new gen-
eration of software (much of it ‘freeware’)
has these capabilities, as in the table on page- kj
Suggested reading
Anselin (2000).South, the Invoked implicitly or explicitly in
relation to its assumed opposite (theNorth),
the idea of theSouthemerged as an alternative
to the termthird worldfor distinguishing
former colonies and less industrialized nations
from countries of the more affluent and indus-
trialized North.Southis preferred by those
who see Third World as connoting third-
ranked, rather than its original meaning of a
non-aligned or third path, independent of thecapitalistFirst Worldand the socialistSecond
World. However, the term ‘South’ is also prob-
lematic in that the countries of the South are
(a) defined through their location with respect
to the USA and Western Europe, and (b)
concentrated in the tropics and sub-tropics
of both the Northern and the Southern
Hemispheres. To avoid such binaries, some
scholars deploy the language of a ‘One Third
(1/3) World’ - typically in conjunction with the
notion of the ‘First World/North’ – and a ‘Two
Thirds (2/3) World’ in conjunction with a
‘Third World/South’ to represent the relative
fractions of global population based on quality
of life (Mohanty, 2003).
The popularization of the terms ‘South’ and
‘North’ is sometimes attributed to the
publication of two reports by the Brandt
Commission: North–South (1980) and The
common crisis (1983). Convened by Willy
Brandt of the then West Germany to study
critical issues arising from the economic and
social disparities of the global community, this
self-appointed commission highlighted a co-
dependent relationship between the northern
nations, which relied on the poor countries for
their wealth, and the southern nations, which
depended on the wealthier North for their
development. With food, agriculture, aid,
energy,trade, financial reform and global
negotiations as their focus, the Brandt
Reports sought to promote ‘adequate solutions
to the problems involved indevelopmentand
in attacking absolute poverty’, while also
addressing issues concerning the environment,
the arms race, population growth and the
uncertain prospects of the global economy that
the commission viewed as common to both
North and South (Brandt Commission, 1980;
Porter and Sheppard, 1998, p. 26).
However, it is in the post-Cold War era that
the idea of the South became significant as a
metaphor to define the global landscape of
political and economic power. Throughout
the 1980s, the two rivalcold warmilitary
and political systems shaped development
possibilities in the Third World. While rela-
tions between either superpower bloc and
the Third World frequently provided only lim-
ited development opportunities for recently
decolonized nations and latin america,
Third World leaders did have some choice of
political economic system. This room for
manoeuvre was at times exploited by Third
World elites to resist capitalist or communist
incursion, and to develop social democratic
andwelfare statesystems (seecapitalism;
communism). The period after 1989Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 704 1.4.2009 3:23pmSOFTWARE FOR QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS