By Gerben Tiemens
Abstract:
This thesis explores a social maize seed exchange network in the highlands of Guatemala on a spatial way. Exploring a network on a quantitative spatial way is rather new and in this research faces some problems. As most primary source data is handwritten and direct from field, the preparation phase of this research is large. Also the data is not complete so the information has to be transformed and corrected to make a consistent network for analysis.
The maps that are the final result of digitising and processing the data are made in different views to correct for the incompleteness of the data. The whole network database is queried on different ways and the resulting maps show three different scales with the available information. Because of the low quality of available information a lot of concessions are made and a lot of errors are slipped into the network model. Consequences for this research are that the final conclusions about the subject are very weak. But taking into account many of these aspects with further research and gathering fresh information will uncover a lot of the seed exchange network. Spatial network analysis is very powerful and even on the low data quality shown in this research, some patterns and results can be seen.
Researching a social network in a spatial sense is a rather new method of looking into social networks. This new method therefore costs a lot of time to search for methodology on how the analysis can be done. In general, spatial network research will benefit from an easy to use tool for visualizing this type of data on geographical maps.