GEOG 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Geovisualization, Geographic Information System, Human Geography
23 Jan 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Chapter 1a: Geography matters
Readings – focus on pages 2-17
Key themes
• What is geography? What is human geography?
• What do human geographers do?
• What are maps?
• How are they social products?
Human geography is part of a broader discipline.
What is a discipline? An institutional branch of knowledge.
• The word, geography, was invented by ancient Greek scholar, Eratosthenes.
• Geo means earth
• Graphy means to write.
• Therefore, Geography can be thought of the discipline charged with the task
of writing about and analyzing the phenomena spatially distributed on Earth
– i.e. looking at how social processes are ‘written’ on the earth; and engaging in
the ‘writing’ of the earth through forms of representation, including map-making.
• Human Geography is a subdiscipline of the larger discipline of geography.
• Physical Geography is concerned with Earth’s natural processes and their spatial
outcomes – for example, tracing the ways in which rivers shape the earth’s land-
surface.
• Human Geography is concerned with the spatial organization of human
activities, including people’s relationship to their environments, including natural
environments.
• Spatial Information Science: includes the sub-disciplines of cartography, spatial
analysis, spatial modeling, geocomputation, geosimulation and geovisualization –
bridges the two.
Human geography: ‘What is where, why there, and why care?’ Gritzner 2002
Every exercise in HG begins with the spatial question, where?
Once these are established, the geographers seeks to understand or explain; why there?
What difference does this spatial distribution or arrangement make to social processes?
HG has a practical quality to it – spatial facts matter because they reflect and affect
human life: what are the policy or practical considerations that can be learnt from the
previous questions?
Geography matters:
• Where things are, why they are there, and how they effect things elsewhere.
Document Summary
Human geography is part of a broader discipline. Human geography: what is where, why there, and why care?" gritzner 2002. Geography matters: where things are, why they are there, and how they effect things elsewhere, human geography is the study of the spatial organization of human activity. Brings a particular attention to the where" of human life. Argues that the where" makes a difference to how societies are organized. The contribution of geography is to show how and why geographic relationships and distributions matter. : focus on space, places and regions. Human societies organize themselves in space in a number of ways: e. g. through spatial distributions and patterns, or through places and regions. Interdependence: mutual dependence (though not always equal: human geography is about recognizing and understanding the interdependence of places and regions, without losing sight of the uniqueness of each place.
