  Methods for the statistical characterization of the large-scale structure in
the Universe will be the main topic of the present text. The focus is on
geometrical methods, mainly Minkowski functionals and the J-function. Their
relations to standard methods used in cosmology and spatial statistics and
their application to cosmological datasets will be discussed. This work is not
only meant as a short review for comologist, but also attempts to illustrate
these morphological methods and to make them accessible to scientists from
other fields. Consequently, a short introduction to the standard picture of
cosmology is given.
