Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography which studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment, examples of which include urban sprawl and urban redevelopment. It analyzes spatial interdependencies between social interactions and the environment through qualitative and quantitative methods.This multidisciplinary approach draws from sociology, anthropology, economics, and environmental science, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the intricate connections that shape lived spaces.
Physical geography is one of the three main branches of geography. Physical geography is the branch of natural science which deals with the processes and patterns in the natural environment such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. This focus is in contrast with the branch of human geography, which focuses on the built environment, and technical geography, which focuses on using, studying, and creating tools to obtain, analyze, interpret, and understand spatial information. The three branches have significant overlap, however.
The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), often shortened to RGS, is a learned society and professional body for geography based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1830 for the advancement of geographical sciences, the society has 16,000 members, with its work reaching the public through publications, research groups and lectures.
Regional geography is one of the major traditions of geography. It focuses on the interaction of different cultural and natural geofactors in a specific land or landscape, while its counterpart, systematic geography, concentrates on a specific geofactor at the global level.
The History of geography includes many histories of geography which have differed over time and between different cultural and political groups. In more recent developments, geography has become a distinct academic discipline. 'Geography' derives from the Greek γεωγραφία – geographia, literally "Earth-writing", that is, description or writing about the Earth. The first person to use the word geography was Eratosthenes. However, there is evidence for recognizable practices of geography, such as cartography, prior to the use of the term.
Torsten Hägerstrand was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography.
Michael Frank Goodchild is a British-American geographer. He is an Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After nineteen years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988, as part of the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, which he directed for over 20 years. In 2008, he founded the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies.
Geographic information science or geoinformation science is a scientific discipline at the crossroads of computational science, social science, and natural science that studies geographic information, including how it represents phenomena in the real world, how it represents the way humans understand the world, and how it can be captured, organized, and analyzed. It is a sub-field of geography, specifically part of technical geography. It has applications to both physical geography and human geography, although its techniques can be applied to many other fields of study as well as many different industries.
In geography, the quantitative revolution (QR) was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science.
Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography. Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early 20th century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying predetermined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by the "father of cultural geography" Carl O. Sauer of the University of California, Berkeley. As a result, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.
The Victoria Medal is an award presented by the Royal Geographical Society. It is awarded "for conspicuous merit in research in geography" and has been given since 1902, in honour of the late Queen Victoria. Up until then, the society's Patron's Medal had alternatively been known as the "Victoria Medal", and the new medal resembled its original design.
Andrew Shaw Goudie is a geographer at the University of Oxford specialising in desert geomorphology, dust storms, weathering, and climatic change in the tropics. He is also known for his teaching and best-selling textbooks on human impacts on the environment. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of forty-one books and more than two hundred papers published in learned journals. He combines research and some teaching with administrative roles.
Peter Haggett is a British geographer and academic, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Urban and Regional Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.
Geography is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be. While geography is specific to Earth, many concepts can be applied more broadly to other celestial bodies in the field of planetary science. Geography has been called "a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines."
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to geography:
Anne Buttimer was an Irish geographer. She was emeritus professor of geography at University College, Dublin.
Technical geography is the branch of geography that involves using, studying, and creating tools to obtain, analyze, interpret, understand, and communicate spatial information.
Qualitative geography is a subfield and methodological approach to geography focusing on nominal data, descriptive information, and the subjective and interpretive aspects of how humans experience and perceive the world. Often, it is concerned with understanding the lived experiences of individuals and groups and the social, cultural, and political contexts in which those experiences occur. Thus, qualitative geography is traditionally placed under the branch of human geography; however, technical geographers are increasingly directing their methods toward interpreting, visualizing, and understanding qualitative datasets, and physical geographers employ nominal qualitative data as well as quanitative. Furthermore, there is increased interest in applying approaches and methods that are generally viewed as more qualitative in nature to physical geography, such as in critical physical geography. While qualitative geography is often viewed as the opposite of quantitative geography, the two sets of techniques are increasingly used to complement each other. Qualitative research can be employed in the scientific process to start the observation process, determine variables to include in research, validate results, and contextualize the results of quantitative research through mixed-methods approaches.
William Pattison's four traditions of geography, often referred to as just the four traditions of geography, are a proposed way to organize the various competing themes and approaches within geography. Proposed in a 1964 article in the Journal of Geography to address criticism that geography was undisciplined and calls for definitions of the scope of geography as a discipline that had been ongoing for at least half a century, the four traditions of geography propose that American geographers work was consistent, but fit into four distinct traditions rather than one overarching definition. The original traditions proposed by Pattison are the spatial tradition, the area studies tradition, the Man-Land tradition, and the Earth science tradition. A theme among these traditions is interconnectedness, and it has been referenced in relation to the Tobler's first law of geography.
