Search

This article outlines the context in geography and statistics in the mid 1960s, at the height of geography's so-called “quantitative revolution,” that led us into a long-term collaboration about spatial statistics, which has continued in surges and lulls for some 40 years. We focus upon problems in spatial autocorrelation, including the measurement of autocorrelation, distribution theory, and variable geographical lattices. This narrative may not describe how it was, but it does describe how we remember the events of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowing about the challenges and opportunities of spatial autocorrelation is one thing, but applying the measures to one's own data is another matter entirely. While manual computation of the measures for toy data sets is possible, applying them to small data sets required the use of computers and thus software. This article will shed some light on how the measures were and are implemented in software and on implementation issues that are still not fully resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impetus for Cliff and Ord's landmark article, “The Problem of Spatial Autocorrelation,” was to avoid the problem of topological invariance in the spatial weights matrix. The problem and three points of view on it – theoretical, topological, and empirical – are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]