Friday, July 10, 2009

'cogeographic' or 'cogneographic' - concepts situated and abstract

The term 'cogeographic' materialised while writing a short article for the nursing press on Hodges' model.

Searching SCIENCE DIRECT and similar academic resources I thought I had found the word relating to geography, borders, ethnic groups and geopolitics, but now it seems to have disappeared....?

So I am not 100% sure whether cogeographic is a neologism. In some ways cogneographic better suits my purpose. That Matrix associated addition is a rather bizarre coincidence given the word's status and so with that I should explain how my lexical arrival here came about. ...

I was focusing on two fundamental claims in Hodges' model. Namely:
  • The model is situated;
  • The model assumes that concepts can be located within its knowledge domains.
For me, cogeographic (cogneographic) conjoins the cognitive (cognition) involved in defining, representing and using concepts in conceptual spaces; AND the finding that knowledge is invariably situated - that is knowledge has a geography.

Philo and Pickstone (2009) highlight the work of Haraway:
No knowledge, however ‘scientific’ or prestigious, can ever truly come from nowhere; it can not but originate somewhere, being thoroughly situated, in Donna Haraway’s (1991) valuable terminology; and it commonly bears marks of that origin - situation wherever it might then travel. p.651.
This combination of physical and mental (abstract) location then supports the use of a metric or measure. I suppose what I am thinking about is GIS for concepts - which in turn is the semantic web?

Should I locate any sources I will update this post, or if you can direct me to any please let me know: h2cmng at yahoo.co.uk

Reference:

Philo, C., Pickstone, J. (2009). Unpromising configurations: Towards local historical geographies of psychiatry, Health & Place, 15, 3, 649-656.