Cultural and Linguistic Variation in (Geo)Spatial Conceptualization

1. Cultural and Linguistic Variation in (Geo)Spatial Conceptualization David M. Mark University at Buffalo

2. Categories • "Of all the countless possible ways of dividing entities of the world into categories, why do members of a culture use some groupings and not use others? What is it about the nature of the human mind and the way that it interacts with the nature of the world that gives rise to the categories that are used?”(Malt, 1995, p 85)

3. (Geo)Spatial Categories • The question applies both to categories for spatial relations and to categories for spatial objects • It also applies to the delimitation of object-like features from continuous geospatial fields

4. Where are the categories? • Categories in the world (“Cutting nature at its joints”) or • Categories from the mind: "When I use a word, … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." (Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”)

5. Categories: concepts or sets? • Malt points out that psychologists usually define categories in terms of "concepts", "the mental representation that underlies the observed categories", but anthropologists tend to see categories as "sets of objects that are treated as equivalent and given a common name." (Malt, 1995, p. 134)

6. Biological Taxonomic Categories • Biological classes may form a ‘source domain’ for category systems for other domains • For example, ‘sea food’ can be classified into several phyla, classes, and families:

7. Trattoria Corte Sconta

11. Class Chordata

12. Class Molusca

13. Class Arthropoda å

14. Semantics • “What do you mean by semantics?” • The meaning of “meaning” • The ‘meaning’ (referent) of words? • or • The meaning of things?

15. The Semiotic Triangle Concept Symbol Referent

16. Geographic Categories: Dividing a Continuum? • How are spatial relations, that form a (metric) continuum, grouped together into qualitative relations and considered to be equivalent? • How are sizes and shapes, that form a (metric) continuum, grouped together into shape classes and considered to be ‘equivalent’? • How are feature instances such as hills and valleys delimited from continuous elevation fields?

17. Schematization • Len Talmy’s “How Language Structures Space” described how spatial situations are schematized (modeled?) in various ways before spatial terms are chosen • The same continuous subset of reality can be schematized in different ways, leading to different conceptualizations, and different equivalences

18. (The scope of the remainder of this talk is narrowed by my own interest) • Natural phenomena • Natural language • General speakers of the language • I do not fully trust the results of introspection • No immediate goal of engineering or building systems

20. Remainder of this Presentation • History of the “cognitive thread” in geographic information science • Spatial relations in language • Ontology • Geographic entity types • Concluding remarks

21. History of the Topic, Part 1 • In 1987, the U.S. National Science Foundation requested proposals from Universities that wanted to operate a “National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis” (NCGIA) • UC Santa Barbara, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Maine submitted the winning proposal

22. The NCGIA solicitation • The NCGIA described a research agenda using five bullet points • Bullet #2: • General theory of spatial relations and database structures

23. “NCGIA Proposal Team” at work in Santa Barbara, December 1987

24. NCGIA Initiative #2 • Our proposal outlined 12 Research Initiatives • NCGIA Research Initiative 2 was entitled “Languages of Spatial Relations” and had Andrew Frank and David Mark as co-Leaders

25. Evolution of the topic: • The topic evolved through several stages: • “General theory of spatial relations” • “Languages of spatial relations” • “Cognitive and linguistic aspects of geographic space”

26. NATO ASI and Book • To close Initiative 2, Mark and Frank obtained a grant from NATO to conduct an “Advanced Study Institute” • Two weeks in a castle near Avila, Spain, July 8-20, 1990 • Produced an edited book • Established foundations for the cognitive stream within GIScience research

27. COSIT(Conference on Spatial Information Theory) • In September 2002, Andrew Frank and colleagues organized an international symposium entitled “GIS From Space to Territory: Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning” in Pisa, Italy • Papers were published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science

28. COSIT(Conference on Spatial Information Theory) • In September 2003, Andrew and colleagues organized another international symposium entitled “Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS” on Elba, Italy • Papers again published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science • COSIT became a conference series, meeting every second year

29. COSIT’93 included: • D. M. Mark: “Toward a Theoretical Framework for Geographic Entity Types.” Spatial information theory: A theoretical basis for GIS (COSIT’93), edited by A. U. Frank and I. Campari. • (Topic not followed up until 2002!)

30. COSIT’95 included: • D. R. Montello: “How significant are cultural differences in spatial cognition?” • M. J. Egenhofer and D. M. Mark, “Naïve Geography” • D. M. Mark and others, “Evaluating and Refining Computational Models of Spatial Relations Through Cross-Linguistic Human-Subjects Testing” • Spatial information theory: A theoretical basis for GIS (COSIT’95), edited by A. U. Frank and W. Kuhn.

31. "Looking for (cultural differences in spatial cognition) in all the wrong places…" • In the early 1990s, Mark, Frank, and others speculated that GIS might be biased toward an Anglo-Germanic conceptual system and world view

32. "Looking for (cultural differences in spatial cognition) in all the wrong places…" • Mark & Egenhofer conducted research to calibrate the relationships between mathematical models of spatial relations and natural language expressions • “The road and the park” • Tested English, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Mandarin

33. Defining Spatial Relations • Following mathematical developments by Max Egenhofer and John Herring, we used the 9-intersection formalism to define what constitute different or same topological spatial relations • Note that real instances (such as roads and parks) must be schematized in a certain way before the formalism can be applied

34. In the 9-Intersection Model... • Each spatial object has an interior, a boundary, and an exterior • These three ‘parts’ of one object are tested for intersections with the three parts of the other object • The empty/non-empty status of these 9 intersections defines the spatial relation

35. Numbers of ‘Different’ Spatial Relations • The 9-intersection model defines • 8 distinct spatial relations between two regions • 33 distinct spatial relations between two unbranched lines • 19 spatial relations between an unbranched line and a region

36. 8 relations between two regions

37. The 19 line-region relations

38. Mathematics is Not Enough • Mathematically, each of these 19 relations is equally distinct from each of the others • Each is unique • The mathematical model does not help determine whether some relations are more important or salient than others

39. Mathematics, Cognition • However, data from human subjects suggests that some differences are more salient than others • Some adjacent pairs are kept in distinct linguistic spatial relations, while others, equally distinct mathematically, are often grouped together

40. Testing With ‘Human Subjects’ • Grouping Task • 40 diagrams, 28 subjects, 3 languages • Drawing Task • 32 English subjects drew for 64 sentences • 19 Spanish subjects drew for 43 sentences • Agreement Task • 64 diagrams, 11 sentences, 3 languages, 600 subjects, 36,000 judgments

42. Testing With ‘Human Subjects’ • Across languages, similarities were more striking that differences • Mark & Egenhofer published 9 papers on this topic and did not report significant cross-language differences

43. Agreement: ‘Cross’ and ‘Cruzar’ Each dot represents one road-park diagram; 135 to 144 subjects per language

44. Ontology • Around 1997, DMM started working with Philosopher Barry Smith • Smith’s approach focuses on realism, and reduces emphasis on language and cognition • EURESCO meeting at La Londe (France) in 2000, organized by Stephan Winter and Andrew Frank, led to IJGIS special issue on ontology edited by Stephan Winter • Andrew Turk attended that meeting

45. Geographic Categories • Geographic categories are often standardized in gazetteers and SDI • “Feature codes” in the US Geographic Names Information System • “Entity types” in the US Spatial Data Transfer Standard • Etc.

46. Here are some English-language descriptions of some landscape feature types that are referred to by a single word in some other language, but have no single word in English: • “An area from which you cannot see the sea” • “A landmass containing an area from which you cannot see the sea” • “An area of agricultural land reclaimed from a water body or wetland” • “An ‘island’ of land completely surrounded by one or more younger lava flows” • “An island of grassland left unburnt after a surrounding wildfire” …

47. Example: Hawai’ian has a word “Kipuka” • Kipuka: A Hawai’ian word for an ‘island’ of land completely surrounded by one or more younger lava flows

48. Icelandic has a Word for an ‘island’ in a lava flow too! • Óbrinnishólmi • Literally, “un-burnt-hill” • The Walmajarri (in Australia) language has a word with a similar meaning: • Nyirirr: anisland of grass left unburnt by surrounding fire • So, a ‘concept’ of a patch of habitat not destroyed, when general destruction sweeps through an area, might be a general ‘template’ that we find in several languages— but not in English, German, French, etc…

49. Yet current Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Data Infrastructures are based mostly on English and other dominant European languages… • If we based our ideas about geographic concepts only on the meanings of words in English (plus French, German, Spanish), we would miss out on a lot of conceptual variation!

50. French and English Categorize Standing Water Bodies Differently