Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture - Ninth Edition, Chapter 1 Geographic Concepts

Human Geography

Focuses on how people make places, how we organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places across space, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our localities, regions, and the world.

Globalization

A set of processes that are increasing interactions, deepening relationships, and heightening independence without regard to country borders.

Physical Geography

The study of physical phenomena on Earth

Spatial

The arrangement of places and phenomena, how they are laid out, organized, arranged on Earth, and how they appear on the landscape.

Spatial Distribution

How something is distributed across space.

Pattern

Regular manner of distribution among space.

Medical Geography

Mapping the distribution of a disease, and is the first step in finding the cause.

Pandemic

A worldwide outbreak of a disease.

Epidemic

A regional outbreak of a disease.

Spatial Perspective

It brings the many subfields of human geography together to explain multitudes of phenomena.

Five Themes

The Five Themes of Geography. Derived from the spatial perspective.

Location

How the geographical position of people and things on the Earth's surface affects what happens and why.

Location Theory

An element of contemporary human geography that seeks answers to a wide range of questions - theoretical of practical.

Human-Environment

Their interactions decipher the reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment

Regions

Places which features tend to be concentrated in particular areas.

Place

An area on Earth's surface that has unique human and physical characteristics.

Sense of Place

Infusing a place with meaning or emotion, remembering important events that occurred in a place.

Perceptions of Places

Ideas of places we get by books, movies, pictures, or videos.

Movement

The mobility of people, goods, and ideas across the surface of the planet.

Spatial Interaction

The interaction of people across space.

Distance

The measured physical space between two places.

Accessibility

The ease of reaching one location from another.

Connectivity

The degree of linkage between locations in a network.

Landscape

The material character of a place, the complex of natural features, human structures, and other tangible objects that give a place its particular form.

Cultural Landscape

The visible imprint of human activity on the landscape.

Sequent Occupance

Refers to the sequential imprints of occupants, whose impacts are layered one on top of the other.

Cartography

The art and science of map making.

Reference Maps

Show locations of places and geographic features.

Thematic Maps

Tell stories, typically showing the degree of some attribute or the movement of a geographic phenomenon.

Absolute Locations

Use a coordinate system that allows you to plot precisely where on Earth something is.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Allows us to locate things on earth with extraordinary accuracy.

Geocatching

When people use their GPS units to play a treasure hunt game all over the world.

Relative Location

Describes a place in relation to other human and physical features.

Mental Maps

Maps in our minds of places we have been and have merely heard of.

Activity Spaces

Those places we travel to routinely in our rounds of daily activity.

Generalized Map

Maps across the whole world are generalized because of the spatial view.

Remote Sensing

Using technology that is a distance away from the place being studied.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

An application to both human and physical geographic research.

Scale

The distance on a map compared to the distance on Earth, and the territorial extent of something.

Rescale

To involve players at other scales and create a global outcry for their positions.

Formal Region

A region with a shared cultural trait or physical trait.

Functional Region

Defined by a particular set of activities or interactions that occur within it.

Perceptual Region

Intellectual constructs designed to help us understand the nature and distribution of phenomena in human geography, impressions and images of various regions.

Culture

The music, literature, arts, dress, living habits, food, architecture, systems of education, government, and a law of society.

Culture Trait

A single attribute of a culture.

Culture Complex

When more than one culture will exhibit a particular cultural trait.

Cultural Hearth

An area where culture traits develop and form which the cultural traits diffuse.

Independent Invention

The term for a trait which many hearths that developed independent of each other.

Cultural Diffusion

The process of the spread of an idea or innovation from its hearth to other places.

Time-Distance Decay

When the innovation decays more and more the farther away the place is from the hearth of an innovation.

Cultural Barriers

Traits in a culture that prevent other ideas from being adopted from another culture.

Expansion Diffusion

When an innovation or idea develops in the hearth and remains strong there while also spreading outward.

Contagious Diffusion

When nearly all adjacent individuals and places are affected by an innovation.

Hierarchal Diffusion

A pattern in which the main channel of diffusion is some segment of those who are susceptible to what is being diffused.

Stimulus Diffusion

An adaptation that was stimulated by the diffusion of one innovation that was simply too unattainable, but that which takes on a new innovation in that culture that doesn't allow the original innovation.

Relocation Diffusion

Requires the actual movement of people who have already adopted the idea, and who carry it to a distant locale.

Geographic Concepts

These bold-faced words in the textbook. :)

Environmental Determinism

Says that human behavior, individually and collectively, is strongly affected by the physical environment.

Isotherm

Lines connecting points of equal temperature values.

Possibilism

The argument that natural environment merely serves to limit the range choices available to a culture.

Cultural Ecology

An area of inquiry concerned with culture as a system of adaptation to an alteration of environment.

Political Ecology

An area of inquiry fundamentally concerned with the environmental consequences of dominant political-economic arrangements and understandings.

Fieldwork

When geographers go out in the field and see what people are doing, and how people's actions and reactions vary across space.

Human Geography

Focuses on how people make places, how we organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places across space, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our localities, regions, and the world.

Globalization

A set of processes that are increasing interactions, deepening relationships, and heightening independence without regard to country borders.

Physical Geography

The study of physical phenomena on Earth

Spatial

The arrangement of places and phenomena, how they are laid out, organized, arranged on Earth, and how they appear on the landscape.

Spatial Distribution

How something is distributed across space.

Pattern

Regular manner of distribution among space.

Medical Geography

Mapping the distribution of a disease, and is the first step in finding the cause.

Pandemic

A worldwide outbreak of a disease.

Epidemic

A regional outbreak of a disease.

Spatial Perspective

It brings the many subfields of human geography together to explain multitudes of phenomena.

Five Themes

The Five Themes of Geography. Derived from the spatial perspective.

Location

How the geographical position of people and things on the Earth's surface affects what happens and why.

Location Theory

An element of contemporary human geography that seeks answers to a wide range of questions - theoretical of practical.

Human-Environment

Their interactions decipher the reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment

Regions

Places which features tend to be concentrated in particular areas.

Place

An area on Earth's surface that has unique human and physical characteristics.

Sense of Place

Infusing a place with meaning or emotion, remembering important events that occurred in a place.

Perceptions of Places

Ideas of places we get by books, movies, pictures, or videos.

Movement

The mobility of people, goods, and ideas across the surface of the planet.

Spatial Interaction

The interaction of people across space.

Distance

The measured physical space between two places.

Accessibility

The ease of reaching one location from another.

Connectivity

The degree of linkage between locations in a network.

Landscape

The material character of a place, the complex of natural features, human structures, and other tangible objects that give a place its particular form.

Cultural Landscape

The visible imprint of human activity on the landscape.

Sequent Occupance

Refers to the sequential imprints of occupants, whose impacts are layered one on top of the other.

Cartography

The art and science of map making.

Reference Maps

Show locations of places and geographic features.

Thematic Maps

Tell stories, typically showing the degree of some attribute or the movement of a geographic phenomenon.

Absolute Locations

Use a coordinate system that allows you to plot precisely where on Earth something is.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Allows us to locate things on earth with extraordinary accuracy.

Geocatching

When people use their GPS units to play a treasure hunt game all over the world.

Relative Location

Describes a place in relation to other human and physical features.

Mental Maps

Maps in our minds of places we have been and have merely heard of.

Activity Spaces

Those places we travel to routinely in our rounds of daily activity.

Generalized Map

Maps across the whole world are generalized because of the spatial view.

Remote Sensing

Using technology that is a distance away from the place being studied.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

An application to both human and physical geographic research.

Scale

The distance on a map compared to the distance on Earth, and the territorial extent of something.

Rescale

To involve players at other scales and create a global outcry for their positions.

Formal Region

A region with a shared cultural trait or physical trait.

Functional Region

Defined by a particular set of activities or interactions that occur within it.

Perceptual Region

Intellectual constructs designed to help us understand the nature and distribution of phenomena in human geography, impressions and images of various regions.

Culture

The music, literature, arts, dress, living habits, food, architecture, systems of education, government, and a law of society.

Culture Trait

A single attribute of a culture.

Culture Complex

When more than one culture will exhibit a particular cultural trait.

Cultural Hearth

An area where culture traits develop and form which the cultural traits diffuse.

Independent Invention

The term for a trait which many hearths that developed independent of each other.

Cultural Diffusion

The process of the spread of an idea or innovation from its hearth to other places.

Time-Distance Decay

When the innovation decays more and more the farther away the place is from the hearth of an innovation.

Cultural Barriers

Traits in a culture that prevent other ideas from being adopted from another culture.

Expansion Diffusion

When an innovation or idea develops in the hearth and remains strong there while also spreading outward.

Contagious Diffusion

When nearly all adjacent individuals and places are affected by an innovation.

Hierarchal Diffusion

A pattern in which the main channel of diffusion is some segment of those who are susceptible to what is being diffused.

Stimulus Diffusion

An adaptation that was stimulated by the diffusion of one innovation that was simply too unattainable, but that which takes on a new innovation in that culture that doesn't allow the original innovation.

Relocation Diffusion

Requires the actual movement of people who have already adopted the idea, and who carry it to a distant locale.

Geographic Concepts

These bold-faced words in the textbook. :)

Environmental Determinism

Says that human behavior, individually and collectively, is strongly affected by the physical environment.

Isotherm

Lines connecting points of equal temperature values.

Possibilism

The argument that natural environment merely serves to limit the range choices available to a culture.

Cultural Ecology

An area of inquiry concerned with culture as a system of adaptation to an alteration of environment.

Political Ecology

An area of inquiry fundamentally concerned with the environmental consequences of dominant political-economic arrangements and understandings.

Fieldwork

When geographers go out in the field and see what people are doing, and how people's actions and reactions vary across space.