World Regional Geography

Instructor: Afton Clarke-SatherTA: Stephanie Booker

Today in Geography

Obama sits down with someone clearly uncomfortable in his chair

AFP Getty Images

Today in Geography

Protests in Xinjiang

705px-China_Xinjiang.svg.png

Please fill out an index care with:

1.Name, age, hometown

2.Major ( and minor / concentration) + year in school

3.Academic Strengths (2 - 3)

4.Academic Weaknesses (2 - 3)

5.Why are you taking this course?

6.Your expectations of the course?

7.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.png

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 ProjectionsMap projection is used to portray all or part of the round Earth on a flat surface. This cannot be done without some distortion.

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)

ScaleA 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

•Spt

Space tells us where things are, but not all things space can mean many different things

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