What is Geography?

What is Geography?

• The study of spatial aspect of human existence.

• An integrative discipline that brings together the physical and human dimensions of the world.

• Subject matter is the Earth’s surface and the processes that shape it, and the relationship between people and environment.

• Asking and answering geographic questions (much more than rote memorization of isolated facts).

  
  

  Geographic Questions

  
  
  

  • Where?

  • What is there?

  • What spatial patterns exist?

  • Why there?

  • What has changed since ...?

  • What if …?

  
  
  
  

  • Location

  • Basic inventory

  • Patterns

  • Cause and effect

  • Trends

  • Modeling

  
  

  Five Traditions of Geography

  
  
  

  • Location (location/allocation analysis)

  • Place (site and situation)

  • Society and Environment (human ecology)

  • Movement (interaction between places)

  • Regions (similarity and difference)

    
    

    What is Human Geography?

    
    
    

    • Focuses on people: where, what, how to interact over space, and what kind of human landscapes.

    • A systematic subject (like physical geography) versus the regional approach (like regional geography).

    • A connector for all of the social sciences as with the necessary spatial and systems viewpoint.

      
      
      
      

      Five Geographic Skills

      
      
      

      • Asking geographic questions

        • ability and willingness to ask questions.

      • Acquiring geographic information

        • locate, collect, observe, read, record, interpret, etc.

      • Organizing geographic information

        • map, graph, tabulate, present, narrate, etc.

      • Analyzing geographic information

        • seek patterns, relationships, trends, and connections.

      • Answering geographic questions

      • development of generalizations and conclusions.

      
      
      
      
      

      Basic Geographic Concepts

      
      
      

      • Location, direction, distance of a place.

        • absolute versus relative.

      
      

      • Size and scale (the degree of generalization).

      
      

      • Physical/cultural attributes of a place.

      
      

      • Spatial interaction between places.

      
      

      • Spatial diffusion from places.

      
      

      • Density, dispersion, pattern.

      
      

      • Regions (formal, functional, perceptual).