{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019465648854961833, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004961832061068702, 'mean_word_length': 5.330917874396135, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A CIESIN Thematic Guide to Social Science Applications of Remote Sensing

Remote sensing has traditionally been the province of Earth scientists and the national security community. Early civilian satellite instruments were designed largely to meet the needs of weather forecasting, earth systems science and natural resource management. Social science applications were, generally speaking, not even considered. However, since the late 1980s, this began to change as a number of social scientists began to apply remote sensing imagery to understand the underlying social processes behind diverse phenomena such as deforestation, desertification, and urbanization. Since that time there has been a dramatic increase in the quantity and breadth of research that can be broadly categorized under the umbrella of “social science,” with newer applications in the fields of archaeology, demography, and human health and epidemiology. Chapter 3 of this guide provides an introduction to remote sensing for nontechnical audiences. Chapter 4 addresses fundamental issues in the application of remote sensing to social science research questions. Finally, Chapter 5 provides examples of social science applications in six different fields, and Chapter 6 provides a table listing the characteristics of major sensors. How to Use this Guide Note: Readers using the PDF version of this Thematic Guide may be interested in the additional functionality, described below, which is provided solely in the HTML version available through: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/tg/guide_frame.jsp?g=48. The richness of this guide resides in the many and varied links to bibliographic resources, many of which are available on-line. Readers are encouraged to toggle between the written sections and the references and related resources to gain a better sense of the breadth of research in this important area of study. Note that references are dynamically linked to sections of the guide. The Reference section in the table of contents provides references for the entire guide, but by toggling to references from a particular chapter or section, only references for that chapter or section will appear. The full bibliography of the Social Science Applications of Remote Sensing Guide exceeds 600 entries, many of which were not specifically cited in the text. To access the larger bibliography, users are encouraged to use the bibliographic search page. A full description of CIESIN Thematic Guide functionality can be found by accessing the help page from the navigation bar. CIESIN Thematic Guides Social Science Applications of Remote Sensing