Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science

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Over recent decades, major advances in three sets of technologies (geographic information systems, the Global Positioning System, and remote sensing) have provided dramatic new insights into patterns, processes, and changes on the Earth's surface. Although many disciplines have adopted these technologies and use them successfully for a variety of inquiries, fewer social and behavioral scientists have begun to use them on a significant scale. To accelerate the adoption and use of these technologies, a national center based at the University of California-Santa Barbara will focus on the methods, tools, techniques, software, data access, and other services needed to promote and facilitate a novel and integrating spatially enabled approach to the social and behavioral sciences. The center will build on the efforts of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, engaging in six core programs that are targeted across the full spectrum from inductive, exploratory science to theory-based, confirmatory science. Center activities will include: (1) Development of a collection of learning resources covering core concepts, examples, references to be made available via the World Wide Web. (2) Conduct of intensive national workshops to introduce social and behavioral scientists to the methods and tools of spatially enabled social science. (3) Sponsorship of best-practice examples of the use of spatial approaches in the social and behavioral sciences. (4) Development of services to facilitate place-based searches for information resources on the World Wide Web and in digital libraries. (5) Further development and dissemination of a powerful and easy-to-use suite of software tools for analysis in the presence of spatial effects, in collaboration with industrial partners. (6) Initiation of an open virtual community to share software tools, modeled on the highly successful communities defined by Linux and GRASS. Through these and other related activities, many individuals and groups working in the social and behavioral sciences will find their capabilities to use new technologies greatly enhanced. Among major research areas that will benefit as a result of these efforts are human-environmental interactions, urban studies, social and economic inequality, social and business networks, health and disease, criminal justice, and community-based grassroots organizations.