Abstract:
The study of human activities and movements in space and time has long been an
important research area in social science. One of the earliest spatially integrated
perspective for the analysis of human activities patterns and movement in space-time
is time-geography. Despite the usefulness of time-geography, there are very few studies
that actually implemented its constructs because of a lack of detailed individual-level
data and analytical tools. With the increasing availability of georeferenced
individual-level data and improvement in the representational and geocomputational
capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the operationalization of
time-geographic constructs has become more feasible recently. This chapter illustrates
the value of time-geographic methods in the description and analysis of human activity
patterns using GIS-based three-dimensional (3D) geovisualization methods. These methods
are used to study gender/ethnic differences in space-time activity patterns using an
activity diary data set collected in the Portland (Oregon) metropolitan area. The study
shows that geovisualization methods are not only effective in revealing the complex
interaction between the spatial and temporal dimensions in structuring human spatial
behavior. They are also effective tools for exploratory spatial data analysis that can
help the formulation of more realistic computational or behavioral models.