Download Lecture 1 July 7 2009

World Regional
Geography
Instructor: Afton Clarke-Sather
TA: Stephanie Booker
Today in Geography
AFP Getty Images
Obama sits down with someone clearly uncomfortable
in his chair
Today in Geography
705px-China_Xinjiang.svg.png
Protests in Xinjiang
Please fill out an
index care with:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Name, age, hometown
Major ( and minor / concentration) + year in school
Academic Strengths (2 - 3)
Academic Weaknesses (2 - 3)
Why are you taking this course?
Your expectations of the course?
Travel Experience
Our Plan for Today
• Course Logistics
• Course Webpage
• What is world regional geography?
• Regionalization activity
Okay, lets take a
break and look over
the syllabus and
webpage
How Geographers
think
image: NASA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haer_PBG_erection_force_Diagram_part.pn
g
Abstraction
• Abstraction is how we tell
• Music from noise
• Ebola from a head cold
• A functional bridge from just some
stuff going over a river.
Abstraction
• The world contains too much
information for us to process
• Abstraction is the process of how we
make sense of this world by selecting
what is important
• What we remove in abstraction is a
necessary choice
• This choice shapes how we see the
world
•
•
Geographic
Abstraction
Geographical
Abstraction is the
process of using
geographical tools or
lenses to make sense
out of what we see in
the world.
So what are
geographical tools?
What is Geography?
• geo--earth
• graphy--writing
• Geography=Earth Writing
• logy--study
• Geology=earth study (rock, this is not
what we’re doing)
What is Geography
• Everything that economist ignore--Gary
Gaile
• What geographers do
• Geography is the study of the Earth as
created by natural forces and modified
by human action.
What is Geography
• Working Definition
• A process of abstraction which is
concerned with the location of human
and physical phenomena and the
spatial relationships between those
phenomena.
Tools of Abstraction
• Maps
• Regions
• Scale
• Space
Maps
Maps are representations
of the world
• They are not the world
Maps must include
• A projection (how is the round earth
made flat)
• Data (data what do you display)
• Symbology (how are things
represented)
•Map projection is used to portray all or part of the round
Earth on a flat surface. This cannot be done without some
distortion.
Map Projections
•Distortions: conformality, shape, distance, direction, scale,
and area
•Projections minimize distortions in some of these properties
at the expense of maximizing errors in others.
•http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj_f.html
•http://erg.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/MapProjections/projections.html
Cartograms
Symbology
•
•
How we represent
data has an effect on
what people think
about it.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=
225152&title=Snoutbreak-'09---The-Last-100-Days
Maps project a point of view
Regions
• Formal--A area sharing a common
characteristic (e.g. the corn belt, the
bible belt)
• Functional--Regions that are defined
and classified by by patterns of spatial
interaction or spatial organization. (e.g.
Newspaper distribution, state
government)
•
Vernacular Region--a region that exists
because we say it does (e.g. the South)
Scale
A level of abstraction or representation of
reality
In cartography: the relationship between the
distances show on the maps and the actual
distances on the earth’s surface. e.g.
resolution, relationships, level of detail
In human geography: a partitioning of space
within which human or social processes take
on particular characteristics, i.e., levels at
which social processes are occurring -- 2
people is a fight, 3 or more is a brawl, … riot,
… war
The Interdependence of Geographic
Scales
•
•
•
•
•
Geographic Scales - Global
Overlap
World Regions
States
Supranational Organizations
•
•
•
- European Union (EU)
- North American Free Trade
Association (NAFTA)
- Association of South East Asian
Nations (ASEAN)
Space
Space tells us where things are, but not all things
space can mean many different things
• Spt
What you should now
know
after
this
lecture
• What Geographic Abstraction is
• What differentiates if from other forms
of abstraction
• The use of and problems with
• Maps
• Regions
• Scale
• Space