Geography 364: "Spatial Analysis"

Geography 364 is an introduction to spatial analysis that focuses on statistical methods for geographers. You will have an opportunity in this course to:

learn how to use statistics in your own work
learn how to consume statistics in everyday life

The statistical methods you will learn to use are simple descriptive statistics that we use to summarize complex data, as well as the associated charts, diagrams and maps. From there, we will move on to look at chance and probability theory, and simple inferential statistics.

Throughout the course, we will be concerned with “everyday statistics”, primarily as it relates to geography. Contemporary media are saturated with statistics, from reports of climatic change, through latest presidential election polls, to batting averages and yards-gained statistics in sports. A lot of the presentation of these statistics is lazy or inaccurate, and often misleading (whether, deliberately or not), and a major theme of this course will be to look at the issues involved.

During most lectures we will spend some time working with sample problems, and to discuss practical applications. These activities are meant to build a deeper understanding of the subject matter but it also relies heavily on your active participation. You will often have work to prepare before lectures or other types of lecture homework. Labs will give you experience with statistics functions in Excel before moving onto SPSS as well as other statistical software, and also with mapping statistical data using GIS software.

Professor: Alexander Klippel