Machines Learn the Chicago School
Modeling Neighborhood Dynamics with Spatial Markov Chains
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description “hard-core pornography”; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
—Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.
Quantifying the “I know it when I see it” doctrine
The Chicago School holds that a natural area involves:
The Chicago sociologists recognized change in local population composition as a major mechanism by which natural areas change. The terms “invasion” and “succession,” taken from plant and animal ecology, were used to describe the processes of neighborhood population alteration.
(poorly) Describing Types
https://github.com/spatialucr/geosnap
#1733705 Neighborhoods in Space-Time Contexts
#1831615 RIDIR: Scalable Geospatial Analytics for Social Science Research
Social Area Analysis
(Schwirian 1983)