Leveraging big (Geo) data with (Geo) visual analytics: Place as the next frontier

A tension exists in the discipline of Geography between the concepts of space and place. Most research and development in Geographical Information Science (GIScience) has been focused on the former, through methods to formally structure data about the world and to systematically model and analyze aspects of the world as represented through those structured data. People, however, live and behave in socially constructed places; what they care about happens in those places rather than in some abstract, modeled ‘space’. Study of place, by human geographers (and other social scientists and humanist scholars), typically using qualitative methods and seldom relying on digital data, has proceeded largely independently of GIScience research focused on space. There have been calls within GIScience to formalize place to enable application of Geographical Information Systems methods to place-based problems, and some progress in this direction has been made. Here, however, a complementary view is offered for treating ‘place’ as a first class object of attention by capitalizing on the combination of “big data” and new human-centered visual analytical methods to enable understanding of the complexity inherent in place as both a concept and a context for human behavior.