Talk and workshop in Salzburg

The Graduate School ‘Language, Society and Digital Life’ at the University of Salzburg organised a lecture series on the topic of ‘Language, Society and Everyday Life’. The aim of this series was to examine the interrelationship between these three elements, including questions of representation, operationalisation, modelling and analysis. René Westerholt has offered a talk titled "Analysing everyday geographies – methodological tensions between geometry and geography" in which he discussed how geodata produced in non-scientific contexts (e.g. social media, crawled websites, blogs) challenge the common geometric conception dominating spatial analysis. The everyday phenomena underlying such types of geodata often cannot be easily and unambiguously assigned to specific geometric units. If classical approaches to spatial analysis are applied to this data, misinterpretations are to be suspected. The presentation first examined the challenge outlined in more detail and then presented ideas on how the effects of non-scientific data generation contexts on spatial analyses can be understood and taken into account. Finally, the talk concluded with an outlook on approaches for shifting statistical perspectives from abstract space to meaningful places. In addition to this talk, René Westerholt also offered a two-day workshop introducing the participants to principles and methods of statistical spatial analysis. Entailing both theoretical inputs and hand-on components, the workshop addressed the following questions: 1. What is spatial analysis and in which situations do I need it? 2. How can I integrate models of geographical space into statistical routines? 3. What types of spatial estimators and hypothesis tests exist for which purposes?