CoSSI_17: Cognitive Scales of Spatial Information |
Website | http://spatial.ucsb.edu/cosit2017/home |
Submission deadline | May 26, 2017 |
COSIT 2017 Workshop on Cognitive Scales of Spatial Information
Call for Position Papers
Please submit 2-4 page position papers, discussing any of the above or related questions, by May 26 to this CoSSI_17 EasyChair call. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers for topical fit and innovativeness. Workshop proceedings will be open access and published at http://ceur-ws.org/, and in the eScholarship archives of the University of California, Santa Barbara (http://escholarship.org/). If the position papers contain enough novel material and the discussions suggest further development after the workshop, a call for full papers to a special journal issue will follow.
Important Dates
Position papers due: May 26
Notification of acceptance and workshop duration: June 16
Camera-ready position papers due: June 28
Workshop date: September 4
Submission: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cossi-17
Webpage: http://spatial.ucsb.edu/cosit2017
Program
The workshop is meant to attract participants with backgrounds in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, geography, engineering, architecture, geology, chemistry and more. The organizers will set the stage from cognitive and computational perspectives, followed by participant lightning talks (5-7 minutes each) and extensive discussions of topics emerging from the position papers. Our goal is to make this a full day workshop, but this depends on the quantity and quality of submissions.
Topic
At what scale are we thinking when we read a map, get directions from a navigation system, or do spatial analysis using a GIS? This workshop will investigate whether the concepts underlying external spatial representations (such as fields or objects in a GIS) and computations (such as buffer or overlay) can be assigned a cognitive scale and what that would be. By “cognitive scale”, we refer to the size or extent of spatial phenomena as conceptualized by and in relation to human beings and their perceptual-motor mechanisms (following Montello’s 1998 taxonomy and the 1997 discussion by Freundschuh and Egenhofer).
Maps represent environments at a more or less fixed scale and require operations at the figural (more specifically, pictorial) cognitive scale. GIS and related technologies, while clearly not scale-free, offer much more flexible ways of dealing with scale. Are errors like the Economist’s erroneous map of North Korean missile ranges evidence for inadequate ways of dealing with cognitive scale, not just for ignoring the effects of map projections?
Discussion Questions
The workshop will take a fresh look at the various notions and components of scale of digital spatial information and questions they raise. For example,
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How can we organize spatial information in a way that relates to cognitive scale taxonomies? Can and should we organize spatial information in scale-agnostic ways? Are certain kinds of spatial information limited to certain scales or scale ranges?
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What about scale in the sense of granularity (referring to the smallest units of study)? How is granularity tied to perceptual and cognitive processes?
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Has the evolution of scale on paper maps caused particular problems of human understanding? Do operations such as buffering suggest pictorial rather than environmental space thinking?
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What are the roles and consequences of intentional scale distortions, for example in cartograms or fisheye maps?
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What are the cognitive implications of the nearly continuous scale changing (zooming) found in modern GIS?
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What is the role of cognitive scale in virtual reality and other immersive environments?
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How do findings about geographic information map onto non-geographic spaces (of atoms or galaxies, for example)?
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How are measurement scales (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio,...) related to spatial scales?
Organizers
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Werner Kuhn, Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara – http://spatial.ucsb.edu - kuhn@spatial.ucsb.edu
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Dan Montello, Professor of Geography, Affiliated Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara – http://geog.ucsb.edu/~montello/ - montello@geog.ucsb.edu
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Scott Freundschuh, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of New Mexico – http://www.unm.edu/~sfreunds/Research.html – sfreunds@unm.edu
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Crystal Bae, Graduate Student, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara - cbae@geog.ucsb.edu
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Thomas Hervey, Graduate Student, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara - thomas.hervey@geog.ucsb.edu
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Sara Lafia, Graduate Student, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara - slafia@geog.ucsb.edu
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Daniel Phillips, Graduate Student, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara - dwphillips@geog.ucsb.edu