Unit 1 - Thinking Geographically Flashcards
What is the emphasis of spatial perspectives?
The importance of location and spatial relationships in understanding human behavior and societal trends.
How can analyzing spatial patterns be beneficial?
It can help identify correlations between human activities and their environmental contexts.
What are the key components of spatial perspectives?
Distribution, Density, Clustering, Dispersal, Elevation
What is remote sensing?
Any technique used to determine characteristics of Earth’s surface from long distances, especially from airplanes and satellites.
What is GPS?
The Global Positioning System (GPS) gathers navigational information from satellites to provide an absolute location.
What is GIS?
A geographic Information system (GIS) represents multiple data sets as different layers in a map. It uses a combination of reference and thematic maps.
What is a toponym?
The name given to specific places or geographic features reflecting upon cultural, historical, and/or linguistic contexts. They serve as location identifiers and offer insight into the cultural landscapes they belong to and the regions they represent.
What is absolute location?
An exact and precise description of a location.
Ex: addresses, latitude/longitude
What is relative location
A description of a location in relation to another location.
Ex: next to my house, between Valley and West Point
What is site?
The specific physical characteristics and location of a place including its natural features, resources, and built environment.
What is situation?
The location of a place relative to other places and its surrounding environment including its accessibility and connections to larger networks.
What is cultural landscape?
The visible imprint of human activity on the natural environment, showcasing the interplay between culture and nature. How human practices, beliefs, and values shape the physical environment and reflect architecture, agriculture, and land use.
What is a formal region?
An area is defined by one predominant or universal cultural or physical characteristic throughout its entire area; everyone in that region shares common traits/attributes like language, climate, or political system.
Uniform Region, Homogenous Region
What is a functional region?
An area that has a social or economic function that occurs between a node or focal point and the surrounding areas.
Ex: the circulation area of the New York Times is a functional region; New York is the node
Nodal Region
What is a vernacular region?
An area that people believe exist as part of their cultural identity; they emerge from one’s informal sense of place rather than a scientific model
Ex: the South
Perceptual Region, Mental Map
What is a large scale?
The level of detail and scope in mapping or data representation that captures small areas while providing more information about specific details.
Ex: a map of streets may have a scale ratio of 1:24,000
What is a local scale?
The level of analysis that focuses on a specific, small area, such as a community, neighborhood, or town; these maps have a small scope but great details of the specific area it features.
Ex: a map of a city neighborhood may have a scale of 1:10,000
Ex: province, state, city, neighborhood
What is a small-scale map?
A type of map that shows a larger area with less detail.
Ex: 1:1,000,000 ratio map of a state
What is a global scale?
The largest of all scales and provides data from across the entire planet,
Ex: Mercator Map, Robinson Map
What is globalization?
A force or process that involves the entire world so the product is something worldwide; the expansion of economic, political, and cultural processes to the point that they become global in scale and impact.
What is culture?
A total way of life held in common by a group of people, including learned features such as language, ideology, behavior, technology, and government.
What is a cultural hearth?
A place of origin for a widespread cultural trend.
Ex: modern “cultural hearths” include New York City, Los Angeles, and London (b/c they produce a large number of cultural exports that are influential throughout much of the modern world)
What is acculturation?
The adoption of certain cultural and social characteristics of one society by another society; usually occurs when one society is controlled, either politically, economically, socially (or all) by another society.
Ex: Native American adoption of God as another deity of worship
What is assimilation?
The process through which individuals or groups from one culture adopt the customs, values, and behaviors of another culture, often leading to a loss of their original cultural identity.
Ex: Native American assimilation in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s
What is diffusion?
The spread of an idea or characteristic over time.
What is expansion diffusion?
The spread of innovations to new places while staying strong in their original locations.
Ex: Islam has spread throughout the world, but remains dominant in the Middle East, where it originated
What is relocation diffusion?
The spread of an idea or characteristic by moving or relocating people (when people move, they spread ideas along with them).
Ex: mass German immigration to the United States in the early 1800’s led to American classics of hamburgers (“frikadelle”) and hotdogs (“frankfurter”/”braturst”)
What is hierarchical diffusion?
Diffusion, usually from top to bottom; when an idea spreads by passing first among the most connected individuals, and then spreading to other individuals
Ex: political leaders, socially elite people, and businesses
What is contagious diffusion?
The rapid and widespread diffusion; the distance-controlled spreading of an idea through a local population by contact from person to person.
Ex: new music, viral ideas (usually spread through the internet)
What is stimulus diffusion?
The idea that hen an aspect/idea from one culture spreads to another culture, that culture adapts that idea, but makes it their own.
Ex: fast food stems from the US but Asian fast food incorporates noodles and rice meals
What is time-space compression?
The phenomenon where the advancements in technology and communication reduce the perceived distance between places, making it easier and faster for people, ideas, and goods to move across space.
Ex: telephones, fax machines, internet
Ex: travel (planes, trains, cars)
What is time-distance decay?
The declining degree of acceptance of an idea or innovation with increasing time and distance from its point of origin.
Ex: people living/working close to a bakery are more likely to visit and purchase items from that bakery, but those who live/work further away from that bakery are less likely to do so because of the increased travel and time
What are reference maps?
Maps that show where something is in space; the purpose is to display geographical data (landforms, coastlines, waterways) and political data ( political boundaries, settlements, transportation networks).
What are thematic maps?
Maps that tell a story about a place; they portray physical, statistical, measured, or interpreted details.
Ex: weather, population density, geology maps
What is absolute distance?
An exact and precise measurement of the physical space between two places.
Ex: miles, kilometers, feet
What is relative distance?
The approximate measurement of the physical space between two places.
Ex: terms of time, effort, cost
Ex: Troup is about 15 minutes from my house
What is absolute direction?
An exact and precise measurement of direction, cardinal directions (N, W, E, S)
Ex: Columbus us South of Atlanta
What is relative direction?
A measurement of direction in relationship to something else uses terms like left and right.
Ex: “turn left out of the school”
What are map projections and distortions?
The method of representing the curved surface of the Earth on a flat map which always resorts in a distorted version of the Earth. This process involves systematic transformations that allow geographers to depict various geographic features, distances, and areas while attempting to minimize distortion.
What is the Mercator projection?
A map projection that fairly accurately shows shape and direction, but distorts distance and size of land masses.
What is the Peter’s Equal Area Map projection?
A map projection where the relative sizes of different land and water bodies are accurately represented, but angles aren’t.
What is the Robinson projection?
A map projection that shows the entire Earth and distorts both shape and size slightly to make the two-dimensional representation look the most like the three-dimensional reality of the Earth.
What are ways to gather data?
A few ways geographers gather data include surveys, interviews, field observations, census, and remote sensing technologies.
What is quantitative data?
Data that is numerical (statistical or expressed with numbers).
Ex: census data, land survey systems,, satellite programs
What is qualitative data?
Data that is descriptive and can be subjective.
Ex: field observations, media reports, travel narrative, photographic interpretations
What is space?
The physical gap or interval between two objects. They physical distance and arrangement of objects and places on Earth; encompasses how geographic data reveals patterns, relationships, etc.
What is place?
The areas that people create in their minds to segment locations they know; a place can be seen as a space.
Sense of place: factors that contribute to the uniqueness of a location connection made through personal experiences, social interactions, and beliefs.
What are spatial interactions?
The flow of information, products, and human beings from one location to another. The 3 main aspects, as proposed by Edward Ullman, are complementarity, transferability, and intervening opportunity.
Ex: international trade, radio broadcasts, telephone calls
What is flow?
The movements of people, resources, and culture; the flow of people, goods, money, ideas or materials between locations near or far.
What is spatial flow?
A mass movement of people, goods, or something intangible like an idea.
Ex: journey to work, daily commuter, traffic flows in cities
What is sustainability?
The use of Earth’s resources in ways that ensure their availability in the future.
Ex: solar energy produces energy to ensure that fuels like coal, gas, and oil are available in the future to produce energy
What is environmental determinism?
The theory that the physical environment determines society; climatic, ecological, and geographical factors influence human economic, cultural, and societal development.
Ex: the development of Inuit culture in response to the Artic conditions in which they live
What is possibilism?
The concept that the natural environment places constraints on human activity, but humans can adapt to some environmental limits while modifying others using technology.
Ex: the desert restrains humans from living there, but electricity allows this to be possible
What is scale of analysis?
The relative size of a map or lens we choose to use to observe geographical phenomena includes local, regional, national, and global sizes to consider when viewing maps of Earth.
Relative Scale
What is syncretism?
The creation of a new culture through the combination of aspects of multiple cultures or religions; the creation of a new culture by combining aspects of multiple cultures that have been adopted by a community.
Ex: the blend of African traditional religions with Christianity in various parts of the Americas (gospel music, worship)
