I really liked how in depth this article went, reviewing development of studies on scale that were outside of the author’s department/field of study. It really emphasizes that this is an issue that applies to both physical & human geography (and others who study geographic space), so it’s cool to see interdisciplinary efforts towards this. I think this article really could have benefited from a visual flowchart or something, just sketching out how these actions would actually work, since it would take me some time to think out how this would all actually work on a raster grid or with polygons or something. Also, I think this article provided some framework for how to consider scale in a research project, like by performing sensitivity analysis (p.7).
In 1999, when this was published, we didn’t have the geoweb, and I think it would be super interesting to learn about how scale issues have been solved/exacerbated by these new developments. Are there issues in this work that have actually been “solved” by the geoweb, or are there just an onslaught of new issues created (as well as the holdovers, like the ubiquitous MAUP)? Writing this blog post, I realize my work has been constantly plagued by issues of scale and yet it’s never required to be acknowledged in handing in an assignment (and therefore I have never really considered it in this depth/variety before). This is something I have to consider in my analysis of methods for my research project, so thank you (and interested in learning more on Monday)!