GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

If you want your students to be able to laugh at other students that aren’t actually in your classroom, Jay Leno can always find a pool of people willing to embarrass themselves in front of the camera (mocking and being mocked was a major part of my junior and high school experiences).  This and about a dozen other videos are compiled together in this start-of-the-year video list. 

While this is ostensibly a map that would be great for a cultural geography unit, I’m also thinking about the spatial patterns that created this map.  What current or historical migrations account for some of the patterns visible here?  What would a map like this look like it it were produced 50 years ago?  Why are Vermont and West Virginia the only states without a county with over 10% of the population that speak another language at home?  

Tags: language, North America, mapping, regions, census, migration, population, historical, folk cultures, USA.

The quote above from Clement Valla shows some of the problems with trusting too completely in a form of technology if you are not sure how it works or what its limitations are.  What does he mean when he says “Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation?”  What does this have to do with the term metadata?   

Tags: cartography, visualization, mapping, art, google.

I recently got my hands on a fabulous atlas entitled Mapping Mormonism which shows the historical geographies of this particular Christian denomination.  I’ll briefly share just this one cartogram above that is from the atlas; it displays territory not by the size of the landmass but by the LDS population living within the given territory.  While we would expect to see Utah to be very large on this cartogram, are there other pockets of large LDS populations that are surprising to you?  What explains the small spatial distribution patterns of limited diffusion that you see?  The LDS church is well-known for its missionary program and proselytizing efforts—does that play a role in this map?

On a related side note I found a curious political/religious map of the United States (a map that is partially explained by understanding some of the patterns on the map above).  The most typical religious maps show where particular religions are pre-dominant.  This map shows territories marked not by the faith of the residents but by the religion of the local congressmen.  This make me wonder:  Is this map religious or political? Is there valuable information to glean from this maps or is it simply a fun curiosity?  How does the religious geography of the United States impact political geography (or vice versa)?   

Tags: religion, culture, diffusion, mapping, historical, cartography.

Who says teaching about geomorphology has to be boring?  This image of a dendritic drainage pattern beautifully shows the most common spatial pattern. 

Ramen is the most successful industrial food ever (100 billion serving yearly).  This NPR article acts as a book review for The Noodle Narratives which explores the global impacts of this massively important food source.  In developed countries, most food experts bemoan ramen’s lack of nutritional value and see it as a symptom/cause of larger issues of unhealthy diets and obesity.  At the global scale however, some anthropologists are seeing ramen as the ‘proletariat hunger killer’ as it becomes staple of the undernourished in megacities and less developed countries, and the poor in . 

Questions to Ponder: If the United States is only the 6th highest consumer of ramen, what does that say about the geogaphy of ramen?  Why and how did a post-World War II Japanese food come to be so crucial to the diets of those in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria?

Tags: food, agriculture, unit 5 agriculture, agribusiness.

Tags: physical, water, disasters, geomorphology, Philippines.