Thoughts on Class Places and Place Classes – Geodemographics and the spatialization of class (Parker et al. 2007)

First of all, after reading the whole article, I am very confused on the structure of it. It is not well-structured, from my personal perspective, which lead to some confusion of myself about the topic of geodemographics. Also, throughout the article, it is hard for me to get anything related to GIScience, since except of some hint of using information technology to classify population, the whole article focuses on sociology perspective of geodemographic rather than GIScientists view of the topic.

Part of the reason that this article is not that related to GIScience is probably the time they wrote it. 2007 seems in the period of transforming GIS to GIScience, while GIS itself were not strongly bonded to other disciplines as it is now at 2019. On the other hand, although the article focuses more on the classification methods, it is less concerned with existing debate from computational classification method, rather than discussing more supervised heavily human-intensive classification works.

However, the article definitely gives a brief introduction of what is geodemographics is. What the major debates is on the field of geodemographics, from the sociology perspective. I do wander how GIScientist sees their fellow sociologists’ classification methods, as well as ontologies for geodemographics derived from the sociological classification methods.

Furthermore, I wonder that in the age of big data analysis, how the combination of big data and GeoAI contributes to the field of geodemographics from a GIScientsts perspective. Since so far in this paper, the authors stated that sociological classification still heavily focus on Census and commercial data, which are specially designed to study demographics. On the other hand, I would like to learn more about what the reactions are, from included/excluded population in geodemographic classification. As well as some ethical discussion related to the process of classifying population.

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