Geography Midterm
Scale
"large-scale": large units or areas studied. "small-scale": small units or areas studied. Cartographic sense: scale tells us the ratio between the length of physical distance on a map and the actual length of the mapped distance on the surface of the Earth. Whatever the scale of a map, it is a feature of every map and important to recognizing the areal meaning of what is shown on that map.
Absolute location is unique to each described place, is independent of any other characteristic or observation about that place, and has obvious value in the legal or scientific description of places, in measuring the distance for separating places, or in finding directions between places on the Earth's surface.
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All major culture hearths were centered around relatively urbanized landscapes, the indisputable mark of civilization first encountered in the Near East 5,500-6,000 years ago, but the urbanization of each was somewhat differently arrived at and expressed. In some hearth areas, the transition from settled agricultural village to urban forms was gradual and prolonged.
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Cultural differences in space result in human landscapes with variations as subtle as the differing "feel" of urban Paris, Moscow, or New York or as the obvious as the sharp contrasts between Zimbabwe and the U.S. midwest
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Culture is a complexly interlocked web of behaviors, attitudes, and material artifacts.
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Culture is transmitted within a society to succeeding generations by imitation, instruction, suggestion, and example. Culture is learned. As members of a social group, individuals acquire integrated sets of behavioral patterns, environmental and social perceptions, and knowledge of existing technologies.
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Each new settlement or city, each agricultural assault on forests, each new mine, dam , or factory changed the content of regions and altered the temporarily established spatial interconnections between humans and the environment.
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Economically, spaces vary depending on how much money it costs to get from one place to another.
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Environmental circumstances directly affect agriculture potential and reliability; indirectly they may influence such matters as employment patterns, trade flows, population distributions, and national diets.
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Geologic time is long, but the forces that give shape to the land are timeless and relentless.
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Human Geography draws on other social sciences in the analyses identified with its subfields, such as behavioral, political, economic, and social geography.
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In both senses of the word, scale implies something about the degree of generalization involved. Generalization is averaging over details, so that a large-scale unit of study (and a small-scale map) generalizes more than a small-scale unit of study (and large-scale map). Geographic inquiry may be broad or narrow; it occurs at many different size scales. Climate may be an object of study, but research and generalization focused on climates of the world will differ in degree and kind from study of the microclimates of a city.
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It helps us to understand the world we occupy and to appreciate the circumstances affecting peoples and countries other than our own.
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Many people think of time distance rather than physical distance in their daily activities: downtown is 20 minutes by bus, the library is a 5-minute walk. Money rather than time may be the distance transformation
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Maps allow spatial distribution and interactions of whatever nature to be reduced to an observable scale, isolated for individual study, and combined or recombined to reveal relationships not directly measurable in the landscape itself.
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Maps are geographers' main tool of spatial analysis. All spatial analysis starts with locations, and all locations are related to the global grid of latitude and longitude. Since these lines of reference are drawn on the spherical Earth, their projection onto a map distorts their grid relationships. The extent of variance between the globe grid and a map grid helps tell us the kind and degree of distortion that the map will contain.
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Movement, connection, and interaction are part of the social and economic processes that give character to places and regions. Spatial interaction is not just an awkward necessity but a fundamental organizing principle of human life on earth.... which is globalization
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Physical characteristics refer to such natural aspects of a locale as its climate and soil, the presence or absence of water supplies and mineral resources, its terrain features, and the like. These natural landscape attributes provide the setting within which human action occurs. Help SHAPE how people live.
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Places interact with other places in structured and comprehensible ways. In describing the processes and patterns of that spatial interaction, geographers add accessibility and connectivity to the ideas of location and distance.
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Several culture hearths emerged in the Neolithic period. Prominent centers of early creativity were found in Egypt, Crete, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, northern China, southeastern Asia. fjslk
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Subcultures are groups that can be distinguished from the wider society by their cultural patterns. ex: ethnic groups; gay and straight; urban and rural.
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Survey systems such as the township, range, and section description of property in much of the US give mathematical locations on a regional level, while street address precisely defines a building according to the reference system of an individual town.
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The distinction between objects and fields is abstract, and there are features like water bodies that can readily be thought of in either way, or as a combination of the two. Human population is an intriguing example: at one scale, people are discrete objects; but at another scale, we can treat populations as a density field that may be said to have a nonzero value anywhere that is inhabited.
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The impact of humans has been so universal and so long exerted that essentially no purely "natural landscape" any longer exists. One can even find human-made debris in the middle of the ocean and air pollution in the Arctic.
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The larger the places and the close their distance, the greater is the amount of interaction.
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The physical and cultural content of an area and the dynamic interconnections of people and places show patterns of spatial similarity.
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The realities of connectivity and accessibility clearly change over time (technology)
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The user must consider map scale in evaluating the reliability of the spatial data that are presented.
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The visible and invisible parts of culture-buildings and farming patterns, language, political organization, and ways of earning a living, for example- are all parts of the spatial diversity that human geographers study.
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Tobler's First Law of Geography tells us that in a spatial sense, everything is related to everything else, but that relationships are stronger when items are near one another. Interaction between places tends to diminish in intensity and frequency as distance between them increase.
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a culture displays a social structure- a framework of roles and interrelationships of individuals and established groups. Each individual learns and is expected to adhere to the rules and conventions not only of the culture as a whole, but also of those specific to the subculture to which he or she belongs.
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human choice in the use of landscapes are affected by group perception of the feasibility and desirability of their settlement and exploitation.
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maps are a type of model, representing reality in an idealized form to make certain aspects more clear.
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Geography is characterized by three dominating interests
1) the areal variation of physical and human phenomena on the surface of the earth 2) a focus on the spatial systems that link physical phenomena and human activities in one area of the Earth with other areas 3) Geography studies human-environment "ecological" relationships and spatial systems in specific locational settings.
Place stereotype
A simplified belief or set of beliefs about a place that often reflect actual characteristics of the place somewhat inaccurately.
Longitude
Angular distance of a location east or west of a designated prime meridian, measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds. Grid lines marking longitude are called meridians.
spacial similarities permit us to recognize regions...
Earth areas that display significant elements of internal uniformity and external difference from surrounding territories. Places are both unlike and like other places, creating patterns of areal differences and of coherent spatial similarity. ~The region is the geographer's equivalent of the historian's era.
Stone Ages
Mesolithic-- middle stone age Neolithic-- new stone age (more a stage of cultural development than a span of time)
placelessness
The loss of of locally distinctive characteristics and identity and replacement by standardized landscapes. ex: fastfood outlets, national retail store chains- with all of these spread nationally or even internationally, they reduce or eliminate the uniqueness of formerly separated locales and cultures.
Accessibility suggests the idea of connectivity-
a broader concept implying all the tangible and intangible ways in which places are linked: by physical phone lines, street and road systems, pipelines and sewers; by unrestrained walking across open countryside; by radio and TV broadcasts beamed outward from a central route.
Cultural system
a broader generalization than a culture complex and refers to the collection of interacting culture traits and complexes that are shared by a group within a particular territory. ex: "Americans"
reference maps
a general-purpose map that attempts to show geographic features such as roads and landforms accurately and in detail. ex: highway maps, city street maps, atlas maps.
culture region
a portion of the Earth's surface occupied by populations sharing recognizable and distinctive cultural characteristics. ex: the optical organizations societies devise, the religions they espouse, the form of economy they pursue, and even the type of clothing they wear.
globalization
a reference to the increasing interconnection of all parts of the world as the full range of social, cultural, political, and economic processes becomes international in scale and effect. One result of space-time compression.
Culture complex
a related set of culture traits descriptive of one aspect of a society's behavior or activity. Culture complexes may be as basic as those associated with food prep, serving, and consumption, or as involved as those associated with religious beliefs or business practices.
Culture traits
a single distinguishing feature of regular occurrence within a culture, such as the use of chopsticks or the observance of a particular caste system. A single element of learned behavior. Range from language spoken to the tools used or the games played. most elementary expression of culture, the building blocks of the complex behavioral patterns of distinct people.
Thematic maps
a specific-purpose map that shows the distribution of one or a few themes or variables, such as unemployment rates by county. qualitative- shows the distribution of a particular class of information. ex: distribution of US national parks. quantitative- shows the spatial characteristics of numerical data. ex: population, average rainfall, etc
Dispersion
a statement of the amount of spread of a phenomenon over area or around a central location. Dispersion in this sense represents a continuum from clustered, concentrated, or agglomerated to dispersed or scattered.
Choropleth map
a thematic map that shows the values of a quantitative variable for each region by shading or coloring the regions to correspond with the variable's value. ex: in the US, population densities by individual townships within counties.
Remote Sensing
allows the collection of vast amounts of geographic data; detects the nature of an object and the content of an area from a distance.
the word spatial
always carries the idea of the way items are distributed, the way movements occur, and the way processes operate over the whole or a part of the surface of the Earth. for geographers- the Earth; the surface area occupied or available to be occupied by humans.
Site
an absolute location concept, refers to the physical and cultural characteristics and attributes of the place itself. It is more than mathematical location, for it tells us something about the internal features of that place.
prime meridian
an imaginary line passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England (now a suburb of London), serving by international agreement as the 08 line of longitude.
Latitude
angular distance of a location north or south of the equator, measured in degrees, minutes, ad seconds. Grid lines marking latitude are called parallels.
Location, direction, and distance
are everyday ways of assessing the space around us and identifying our position in relation to other items and places of interest. Also essential in understanding the processes of spatial interaction that figure so importantly in the study of human geography.
Possibilism
argued that the natural environment constrains or limits culture, making some cultural variants more or less possible than others, but it does not strictly determine culture. the needs, traditions, and level of technology of a culture affect how that culture assesses the possibilities of an area and shape what choices the culture makes regarding them. Possibilism is a form of environment-culture interactionism
The Universal Transverse Mercator system
based on a set of 60 longitude zones, is widely used in geographic information system (GIS) applications and, with different notations, as a military grid reference system.
Absolute direction
based on global or macroscopic features such as the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, or on the directions to prominent stars. These appear uniformly and independently in all cultures, derived from the obvious "givens" of nature: the rising and setting of the sun for east and west, the sky location of the noontime sun and of certain fixed stars for north and south, or the direction toward or away from the center of an island.
Fields
continuously varying sufaces on the Earth that we think of as completely covering the space of the landscape they occupy without overlapping other fields. ex: average precipitation and landform elevations.
Culture Hearths
describe such centers of innovation and invention, from which clusters of key culture traits and elements moved to exert an influence on surrounding regions.
cultural convergence
describes the sharing of technologies, organizational structures, and even cultural traits and artifacts that is so evident among widely separated societies in a modern world united by rapid communication and efficient transportation. Convergence in those worldwide trait is, for many observers, proof of the pervasive globalization of culture.
Objects
discrete entities that we think of as having sharp boundaries and being separated by space that may be conceived of as empty. ex: mountain peaks or roads.
Multilinear Evolution
each major environmental zone- arid, high-altitude, midlatitude steppe, tropical rainforest, and so on-tends to induce common adaptive traits in the cultures of those who exploit it. Traits were founded on the development of agriculture and the emergence of similar cultural and administrative structures in the several culture hearths.
Absolute Space
fixed coordinate systems
Thematic regions
geographic region based on the pattern of one or more objectively measurable themes or properties, such as soil types or linguistic dialects. ex: the accent people have. boundaries can be fuzzy
administrative region
geographic region created by law, treaty, or regulation; includes political regions such as countries and states, and internal regions such as school and voting districts. They have uniform membership functions- everyplace within the region is fully and equally representative of the region. Sharp boundaries
perceptual regions
geographic region created informally to reflect the subjective beliefs and feelings of individuals or cultural groups. ex: "downtown" or "Dixie" in the south
functional regions
geographic region emerging from patterns of interaction over space and time that connect places. ex: a radio station; fuzzy boundary as well
Parallels
horizontal lines. they encode latitude, which refers to locations north or south of the equator.
Relative/relational direction
in the US we worry about the "near east" conflicts. This directional reference is culturally based and locationally variable, despite their reference to cardinal compass points.
GIS- geographic information systems
integrated computer software and hardware for storing, processing, analyzing, and displaying data specifically referenced to locations on the surface of the earth. used to explore models of regional economic and social structure; to examine transportation systems and urban growth patterns; and to study patterns of voting behavior, disease incidence, and accessibility of public services
Relative Space
measures space in other ways than a fixed layout. Can be mental or subjective. examples: different cultures think of space differently depending on their livelihood and travel habits; a route might seem longer because a person thinks that it goes through a dangerous area.
geographic features
natural features: mountains, rivers, forests, oceans, and atmospheric fronts. Cultural features: buildings, roads, cornfields, cities, and countries. It is important to recognize that the most appropriate way to think about a feature's dimensionality can depend greatly on the scale with which you examine it. A city may be appoint when looking at a map of an entire country, but it becomes much more like an sea when you zoom in on it.
Human Geography's emphasis is on...
people. Who they are, what they are like, how they interact over space, and what kinds of landscapes of human use they erect on the natural landscapes they occupy.
hunter-gatherers
preagricultural people dependent on the year-round availability of plant and animal foodstuffs that they could secure with the rudimentary stone tools and weapons at their disposal.
culture realm
recognizes a large segment of Earth's surface having an assumed fundamental uniformity in its cultural characteristics and showing a significant difference in them from adjacent realms. They are, in a sense, culture regions at the broadest scale of recognition.
Place
refers to the attributes and values we individually associate associate with a location. Our hometown, our neighborhood, the university we attend or the high school from which we graduated. Clearly, our sense of place- the impressions, feelings, and attitudes- is unique to each of us though we often share some aspects of our sense of place with other members of our culture or subculture. Also, we can even have a well-developed sense of place about locations we may never have personally experienced, such as Rome.
Situation
refers to the external relations of a locale. It is an expression of relative location with particular reference to items of significance to place in question.
Absolute distance
refers to the physical separation between two points on Earth's surface measured by some accepted standard unit such as miles or kilometers for widely separated locales, feet or meters for more closely spaced points.
GPS- global positioning system
rely upon a system of 24 orbiting satellites, Earth-bound tracking stations that control the satellites, and portable receivers that determine exact geographic locations based on the time delay in signals received from three or more satellites.
cultural autonomy
that cultures are equally likely to develop any particular set of cultural traits no matter what the environmental circumstances.
spatial systems
the arrangement and integrated operation of phenomena produced by or responding to spatial processes on the earth's surface.
Spatial distribution
the arrangement of things on the earth's surface; the descriptive elements of spatial distribution are density, dispersion, and pattern.
cartography
the art and science of maps and map-making.
environmental determinism
the belief that the physical environment exclusively shapers humans and their cultures. environmental factors alone cannot account for the cultural variations that occur around the world. Levels of technology, systems of organization, and ideas about what is true and right are not dictated by environmental circumstances.
Pattern
the design or spatial arrangement of phenomena on the earth surface.
cultural landscape
the earth's surface as modified by human action, is the tangible physical record of a given culture. house types, transportation networks, parks and cemeteries, and the size and distribution of settlements are among the indicators of the use that humans have made of the land.
Absolute location
the identification of place by some precise and accepted system of coordinates; it therefore is sometimes called mathematical location. ex: global grid of parallels and meridians. The absolute location of any point on the Earth can be accurately described by reference to its degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude and longitude.
cultural divergence
the likelihood or tendency for culture to become increasingly dissimilar with the passage of time.
Cultural Landscape
the natural landscape as modified by human activities and bearing the imprint of a culture group or society; the build environment.
networks
the patterns of routes connecting sets of place- determine the efficiency of movement and the connectedness of points.
Relative Location
the position of a place in relation to that of other places or activities. Relative location expresses spatial interconnection and interdependence and may carry social (neighborhood character) and economic (assessed valuations of vacant land) implications.
Spatial diffusion
the process of dispersion of an idea or an item from a center of origin to more distant points with which it is directly or indirectly connected.
Density
the quantity of some feature (people, buildings, animals, traffic, etc.) per unit area or size.
Accessibility
the relative ease with which a destination may be reached from other locations; the relative opportunity for spatial interaction may be measured in spatial, social, or economic terms.
Mental maps
the set of representations people hold in their mind that expresses their beliefs and knowledge about the layout of the environment at different scales, whether neighborhoods, cities, regions, countries, or the entire world. The representations are subjective and influenced by personal feelings, and may be quite incomplete and distorted as compared to the actual layouts. --use these in selecting our daily activities: selecting our destinations and the sequence in which they will be visited, deciding our own routes of travel, recognizing where we are in relation to where we wish to be.
Culture
the specialized behavioral patterns, understandings, adaptations, and social systems that summarize a group of people's learned way of life. Culture is an ever-present part of the regional differences that are the essence of human geography.
cultural ecology
the study of the relationship between a culture group and the natural environment it occupies.
regional concept
the view that physical and cultural phenomena on the surface of the earth are rationally arranged by complex, diverse, but comprehensible interrelated spatial process.
Graticule
to identify locations on the Earth surface in a precise and standardized way, a grid of lines is laid over the globe. The graticule identifies two dimensions of Earth-surface location with lines running horizontally in the direction of the equator and vertically from pole to pole.
Relative distance
transforms those linear measurements into other units that could be more meaningful for the spatial relationship in question.
Meridians
vertical lines. they encode longitude. express location east or west, but there is no natural vertical line equivalent to the equator to use as an origin line.
Spatial association
when the spatial arrangements of two distributions of features correspond or covary with each other in some way. ex: Counties in Texas where consuming alcoholic beverages is allowed by law tend to be the same countries that have a majority of Catholic residents, while so-called dry counties are more likely to have a majority of Protestant residents.
For New Orleans
while the flood-prone SITE makes it a challenging place to build a city, the incredible advantages offered by its SITUATION have inspired generations of residents to make it their home.
three interrelated geospatial technologies
~global positioning system ~remote sensing ~geographic information systems