The way people interact in the physical and virtual world is constantly evolving. In order to better understand this, The University of Tennessee is researching ways to make a more comprehensive framework on how these interactions take place.
A $210,000 grant from the National Science Foundation was recently awarded to Shih-Lung Shaw, associate professor of geography, to continue his work with geographic information science.
“It appears that we have much more freedom than we used to,” Shaw said. “We can reach people and people can reach us. This gives us additional freedom in both space and time.”
The research will involve two points. It will first develop a series of concepts about people’s interactions in the physical and virtual world. The next step is to implement these concepts into Geographic Information Systems that can help researchers study large groups of people and their activities in a space-time context using computer models.
New location technologies that have made locating people anywhere in the world easier facilitate this technology. Examples include the Internet, cell phones and global positioning devices.
Shaw and his former Ph.D. student, Hongbo Yu, wrote the research proposal and out of around 111 proposals submitted to the NSF, only 11 were finally considered.
“It’s very competitive,” said Bruce Ralston, head of the geography department.
“It’s on the front end of both theory and practice on GIS,” he said. “They really pushed each other to the forefront of research. They’re going to develop some new software and some new theory.”
Among other things, the grant money will help fund graduate assistants, salaries and traveling expenses to lectures and meetings among researchers and scientists.
According to Shaw’s grant proposal, in the past, human activities were mainly conceptualized in a physical sense. In 1970, Torsten Hägerstrand developed the concept of time geography that studied these actions in a space and time sense.
Shaw hopes to improve this research by adding interactions with the virtual world into the time-space geographic model. For example, when someone buys an item online it involves both the physical and virtual world. The person will make a search and transaction in the virtual world, but the delivery is made in the physical world.
“Because these technologies are changing the way we live, our traveling patterns will be different,” Shaw said. “Internet. Cell phones. How are these technologies changing the way we behave?”
By implementing these new concepts into new GIS designs, both virtual and physical activities can be studied. This will help researchers more easily find the hidden relationships between human interactions.
“What he’s trying to do is capture and analyze how we move and communicate,” Ralston said.
Because GIS can display the movements and interactions of individuals or large groups of people, the impact is potentially huge, Shaw said. GIS could potentially be used to track people for homeland security purposes or track the way viruses spread for epidemiological studies.
“One of the important issues is how to protect privacy,” Shaw said. “The purpose is not to monitor you. The purpose is to better understand how individuals carry out their activities in physical and virtual space.”
