Geographic Concepts

Editor's Notes

• #2: Plan for today is to review syllabus, introduce ourselves to the course, and to start learning the geographic concepts that frame this course.
• #4: These are some of the key terms that we will be using throughout the semester. We’ll go over them in the slides that follow. Places and Regions are two ways we can discuss unique places.
• #5: Do you have a strong connection to a place? Have you ever been homesick? People get strong attachments to a place. Location is the position that something occupies on Earth’s surface. There are four ways to identify location. A toponym is a name given to a place on Earth. Site is the physical character of a place…climate, vegetation, water sources, topography,…important settlement factors, or things to consider if you want to start a new business. Sites can be altered. Situation is the location of a place relative to other places. It is helpful in identifying a new place and helping people find desired locations. It is also useful concept for understanding the importance of a place. Try this method in class: Ask students individually where they are from until a place name not in the immediate area is encountered. If you are not familiar with the place (or perhaps even if you are), ask “Where is that?” Explain that the students are using place names, or toponyms, to describe where they are from, but the place name is only useful as long as everyone knows where the place name is referring to. When a place name is unfamiliar, we then need to refer to situation factors (and sometimes site factors) to tell people where a place is.
• #6: Regions can be any size smaller than the planet and larger than a point. Geographers usually use it to describe a combination of countries or localities within a country. Places can be part of more than one region. Formal regions is an area in which everyone shares in a common one or more distinctive characteristics. It could be a shared language, type of industry, or an environmental characteristic. Some formal regions are easy to identify—states, for example. Can also think about formal regions in terms of voting. These types of regions help us understand patterns in the world. The problem with these kinds of reasons are that we tend to gloss over the diversity. Functional regions are organized around a focal point. Vernacular regions are places people believe exist as part of their cultural identity.
• #7: Both counties and states are formal regions. These are maps of 2008 presidential voting patterns by county and state. Notice that you lose variation when you go from the county to the state.
• #8: This is a map of television markets, which are groups of counties served by a collection of TV stations. Many cross state lines! An area organized around a node or focal point, tied together by communication or transportation systems or by economic or functional associations. Often used to share information about economic areas. One example is the reception area of a television station. The signal is strongest at the center and becomes weaker at the edge. Circulation of newspapers is another example. However, this is changing with cable and satellite, and with large market newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
• #9: Is a place people believe exists as part of their cultural identity. These types of regions come from people’s informal sense of place. The map from the textbook is an example of how we can think about regions in different ways.
• #10: Geographers identify the location of important places and explain why human activities are located beside one another in space, and organize material spatially because events in one place can impact another place. It is the physical gap or interval between two objects. The arrangement of a feature in space is known as its distribution…there are three properties of distribution. Density is the frequency with which something occurs in space. Arithmetic density is the total number of objects in an area, often used to note population in an area. We will learn more about physiological and agricultural density in chapter 2. Concentration refers to a feature’s spread over space. If they are close together they are clustered. If they are far apart, they are dispersed. Density and concentration are not the same. You can have a densely populated area that is dispersed or clustered. Pattern is the geometric arrangement of objects in space. Features are organized in a geometric patterns or distributed irregularly. There is a good discussion of gender and ethnicity and gender in relation to space. Where people are able to or choose to live, how they get from one place to another, where they feel safe or unsafe, are all things geographers spend time studying.
• #13: By now I am sure that most of you have heard the term globalization. What does this term mean? How does globalization happen? What happens in economic and cultural globalization? When we talk about economic globalization we’re thinking about the growing global nature of business. Transnational corporations, etc. When we’re thinking about the globalization of culture we’re talking about the increasing similarities of cultural preferences, which in turn create a more uniform global landscape.
• #15: When we are connected through a network- be it a transportation network or a communication network, we are involved in a spatial interaction. Have you ever looked in the flight magazines in a plane? The one here is for Continental Airlines. It is so much easier to keep up with news around the world. However, geographic barriers can still negatively impact interaction between groups. Barriers can be physical or cultural (language and traditions). One important geographic principle related to this is that the farther away one group is from one another the less likely they are to interact. Contact diminishes with increasing distance. This is known as distance decay. Technology can help us get past this. Does this mean that geography doesn’t matter anymore? Why or why not? Discussion: There are still differences in access between places. Just because places are more connected doesn’t mean they aren’t different .
• #16: Just because something spreads doesn’t mean it doesn’t change. People can modify ideas or products to serve their own culture. This idea is known as glocalization. Two main types of diffusion. Relocation diffusion—the spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another. We will learn more about this in Chapter 3. Language and currency are a couple different types of relocation diffusion. Disease can also spread this way. Expansion diffusion is the spread of a feature to another in a snowballing process. There are three types of expansion diffusion. Hierarchical diffusion is spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places. From politcally or socially elite. Contagious diffusion-rapid, widespread diffusion throughout a population. Like a wave. Stimulus diffusion is the spread of an underlying principle, even though a characteristic itself doesn’t diffuse. Example of the mac computer.
• #17: More rapid connections have reduced the distance across space between places, not literally, but in the amount of time it takes to get somewhere or to communicate with people far away. The term space-time compression describes the reduction in time it takes for something to reach another place. Other places around the world don’t seem as far. We know what is happening around the world much more quickly. And we can receive and share products and ideas so much more easily.
• #18: There are two ways you can think about scale-in relation to maps, and in relation to the level that a phenomenon is occurring. Both are important, but if we are going to understand patterns in phenomena, we want to think of scale as a concept.