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 Seán's Geography Page
JUMP INDEX
— Intro (follows directly below)
— Midwestern sites
— Great Lakes regional
— Southwest regional
— Geographic information systems
— Government sources
— Cartography and maps
— Link listing sites
— Links, other
— Geography departments, universities
— Scientific organizations
— Netnews designations
Geography, What is it?,   people would often ask me. This was the usual question I got when I was an undergraduate, and someone asked me what I was taking at the university. No easy answers can be provided. Certainly cartography is the most salient branch of geography — the branch that is geography's own. In a way, an obsession with maps is what got me started in geography. As a kid in Maplewood, Minnesota (a suburb of Saint Paul) I one day decided to go with my bicycle to every gas station on White Bear avenue and grab one of those free maps for every different place I could find — some maps of the same places by different makers. Cartography, tho, is just one line of study.

Another odd thing that lead me to geography was that my grade school teachers made me write out the fifty states and capitols for punishment for being a bad boy. I got into trouble enough to know them all by heart. (Most of them I could recount years later). That helped me in later days when we students had to memorize those, plus the largest city in each state too — all I had to add was the big cities. But geography is much more than memorizing place-names. Where-is-what is only a beach-head.

Other branches of geographic study are more difficult to label 'geography' outright. Lines of geographic study — at least those that started out that way — have become disciplines in their own right (e.g. meteorology, anthropology), and geographers deal with some aspects of established disciplines (e.g. history, economics). One of my professors (Larson) called geography something more akin to a "viewpoint" like, he said, history can be classified. Another of my professors (Solzman) would burn both ends of the candle by teaching us Astronomy on the one hand and Chicago neighborhoods on the other. Yet another (Tiedemann) taught us why Chicago was coal and steel capitol of the U.S.A. and also how to map census data on an IBM/VM mainframe. Wow. Still another (Soot) would make us gather actual data for papers and projects. OK, we are in college, after all. One theorist (whose name escapes me) we were told in History and Philosophy of Geography said, "Geography is what geographers do." This I find outlandishly vague, as most professors would also. Well, 'what geography is' is really too much ground to cover in this short space, so I'll just hit upon what I tend to.

Areal studies in geography is the study of places and their cultures — where things are and why they are there/came to be there. This often involves history; you can't box yourself into ignoring that (as if to try to discipline oneself to containing oneself in a "discipline"). The Roman Tacitus is one such Geo-historian, and he was a traveller as geographers often are. Focus and methodology, however, differ from history. Geography is usually closer to anthropology in the cultural case. One of my heros in the realm of geography (although he's usually called a "natural scientist") is Alexander von Humboldt. He has been called the father of modern geology and geography, as well as some other honors. He was a traveller, which is a common hallmark (like mentioned above) of certain, especially cultural geographers, and one tenets of the field (or branch of the field) I have always appreciated.

As far as "predictive" theory (that is what a theory should do), I still find Central Place Theory the most powerful. It does what a theory is meant to do, if one understands the limitations and theoretical constraints of the abstraction, particularly while the physical development is being played out (it may not look like it will turn out like the predicted event, but it will). Most of the rest I've encountered are more or less "descriptive" theories — "snapshots," if you will.

That's a short run-down of my view of geography, and until I get back to updating this page, that's all the verbiage I'm electing to offer. Below are some links. I apologize if they might be broken. I don't check them all that often these days.

Geographic Info, Servers, and Web Sites

---MIDWESTERN SITES---

---GREAT LAKES REGIONAL SITES---

---SOUTHWEST---

---GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) LINKS---

---GOVERNMENT INFORMATION RESOURCES---

---CARTOGRAPY AND COMMERCIAL MAP COMPANIES---

---GEOGRAPHY LINK LISTINGS---

---OTHER LINKS---


Links to University Departments of Geography

--GEOGRAPHY & PLANNING AT UIC--

--GEOGRAPHY DEPARTMENTS AT MIDWESTERN UNIVERSITIES--

--GEOGRAPHY DEPARTMENTS ELSEWHERE--

--ACADEMIC / RESEARCH / SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATIONS--

--NETNEWS / USENET NEWS GROUPS--




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Cornerstone: 1996
Last Modified: May 2008