This document sets out my expectations of the report you are required to write on spatial analysis as it has been applied in some field of interest. I am happy to meet to discuss your plans and thinking; make an appointment here.
The final written report should be 2,000 to 3,000 words in length (inclusive of references).
The goal is to demonstrate your ability to critically evaluate the usefulness, potential, and limitations of spatial analysis techniques in a particular subfield of interest.
I like to imagine you are undertaking graduate study at some level because you are interested in subject areas in and around geographical information science and its fields of application. So the first thing to say about choosing an area of interest, is that it should be an area that is interesting to you (the clue is in the name: area of interest).
Relatedly, if you are considering further study after this year (i.e. a Masters thesis), then this is an opportunity to do some wider reading in that area (or perhaps to find out that it's not something that interests you enough).
A couple of things to start:
- Geography or earth science or ecology or similar would be much too broad an area. There are literally thousands of articles deploying spatial analysis methods in each of these topic areas, and you can't hope to do them justice in a meaningful way.
- Something broad but more specific, such as health geography, historical geography, exploration geology, or plant ecology, will work fine. However, that's really just a starting point, an initial filter.
Having selected a general area you will need to do some digging, to identify useful general resources in the topic area. Some of the handbooks and encyclopedias of geography and/or GIScience that have appeared in recent years should be helpful here. The library has many of these in online form. I can probably also provide some pointers in some topic areas (if I don't know much about a particular topic area, you will see me google the topic, so please only come to talk to me about your topic area after you have at least done that and come up with some leads for us to discuss).
You will almost certainly find that top level readings (in encyclopedias or textbooks) will direct your interest and attention to further refine your focus—perhaps emphasising only a narrow range of methods in the field, or taking a look at applications of spatial analysis in that topic area in New Zealand. Try to keep things focused, rather than including lots of disparate and only loosely related materials.
How many references are required to accomplish this task will be dependent on the topic area and the nature of the materials used (whether research papers, books, unpublished reports and studies, student theses and dissertations, etc.).
However, it would be surprising if you can meaningfully evaluate the application of spatial analysis in a subfield drawing on fewer than 15 items. Equally, the challenge is not to assemble a vast number of reference items (a quick trip to google scholar will do that for you), as then you will not be able to give them each the attention they deserve. The point is not the number of references you use, but how you assemble them through your evaluation of them into an overall picture of the usefulness (or not) of spatial analysis in your chosen focus area.
I'm not providing one of these. Each report is likely to be different, and I think you've written enough essays and project reports and so on over the years to be trusted to put together your own report structure.