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In 1995, Arthur Getis was honored by SDSU's Graduate Division and Research as the University's tenth University Research Lecturer — one of the university's highest scholarly honors. The lecture he delivered, “The Tyranny of Data,” is reproduced here in full, alongside his companion essay “Scholarship, Leadership, and Quantitative Methods,” which touches on many related subjects in the practice and politics of data-driven research.
This slim, sharp volume is Getis at his most direct: a working geographer's meditation on what happens when data itself begins to dictate the terms of inquiry, and what scholarship owes to a discipline once data becomes the master rather than the tool.
What makes this lecture worth reading today, decades on, isn't nostalgia — it's that the methods Getis was refining around this same period became foundational to how spatial data is analyzed everywhere. Working with statistician Keith Ord, Getis co-developed what's now known as the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic, the standard tool for hot-spot analysis built into ArcGIS, GeoDa, CrimeStat, and other GIS platforms used daily by epidemiologists, urban planners, and crime analysts around the world. This short book captures the thinking of the scholar behind one of the most quietly influential tools in modern data science, in his own words, at the height of his career.
About the Author
Arthur Getis (1934–2022) was Professor Emeritus of Geography at San Diego State University, where he led the university's PhD program in Geography beginning in 1990. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington in 1961 and his Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Pennsylvania State University.
Within GIScience, Getis's specialties included spatial statistics, pattern analysis, urban geography, and disease and crime clustering. He authored more than one hundred refereed journal articles and book chapters, and his most-cited paper — “The Analysis of Spatial Association by Use of Distance Statistics,” written with J. Keith Ord — has been cited nearly 7,000 times. He authored or edited eleven books, including Models of Spatial Processes (Getis & Boots, 1978), Point Pattern Analysis (Boots & Getis, 1987), and Spatial Econometrics and Spatial Statistics (Getis et al., 2004).
His honors include the Walter Isard Distinguished Scholarship Award from the North American Regional Science Association, the Regional Science Association International Founders Medal (2012), and Distinguished Scholarship honors from the American Association of Geographers. Following his passing in 2022, colleagues across geography and regional science described him as, in the words of one memorial tribute, a legend in geographical systems.
