GIScience of Human Dynamics

Human dynamics, which encompasses all forms of human activities and interactions, plays critical roles in the economic, social, cultural, and political systems of human societies around the world. Understanding human dynamics therefore is an important research topic that has been pursued in many disciplines. Human dynamics evolves with the changing environments, cultures, and technologies over time. With the rapid technological advances since the late 20th century, we have observed increasing human activities and interactions taking place in a hybrid physical-virtual world, such as online shopping in virtual space coupled with deliveries of the purchased items in physical space. Although geographic information systems (GIS) have been used extensively to study human activity patterns such as urban growth and traffic flows, there remain many challenges of addressing both the “human” aspect and the “dynamic” nature of human dynamics in a GIS environment. First of all, human dynamics research must consider space, time, and humans at the same time. In spite of significant progress in the development of space-time GIS, current GIS and geographic information science (GIScience) falls short of properly considering humans in a GIS environment. There is an urgent need of developing a theoretical framework of integrating space, time, and humans in GIScience. Second, human dynamics can be studied at a disaggregate level or at an aggregate level that requires different conceptualizations, models, and methods to understand individual versus group behaviors. Next, locations in physical space, which are frequently represented as coordinates in an absolute space, have been the cornerstone of conventional GIS. As human activities and interactions in virtual space (e.g., e-commerce, e-government, online social networks) have become common practices in our daily lives, the conventional approach of using coordinates in absolute space to build GIS databases is insufficient to support various kinds of human dynamics. For example, the concept of relational space that emphasizes connections rather than locations can be a useful way of studying online social networks. Finally, we need to keep in mind that a key reason of pursuing human dynamics research is to gain better understanding of human behaviors, such that we can improve the quality of life through better designs of the built environments and services to meet various human needs. This article presents relevant research work related to these challenges of GIScience of human dynamics research.