Geographie's topics - tribe.net

Geographer maps terrain of the soul

2007-06-28T10:01:04Z

Adrift in the world, professor Yi-Fu Tuan anchored himself as a pioneer in his field

By MARK JOHNSON
markjohnson@journalsentinel.com

Posted: June 23, 2007

The young geographer would tell strangers he was hunting uranium. In 1952, that explanation seemed more understandable than the truth about what he was doing in the desert.

Who would believe the broad, flat rocks called pediments had led this slender man, 98 pounds, into Arizona's San Pedro River Valleyto map remote country under a blazing sun? At night, he camped out in a beat-up Ford coupe, and read by Coleman lamp until, tired, he pulled down the seats and slept with his head by the steering wheel, his feet stretched back into the trunk.

Decades before Yi-Fu Tuan became one of America's pre-eminent geographers, before he came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught students to think about landscape in new ways, the Chinese native slept outside ghost towns. The dark outlines of buildings, human places eerily devoid of humans, sometimes scared him. He dreamed of ghostly figures wandering toward him.

One night he heard hooves.

Twin shotgun barrels poked through the Ford's window and a rancher on horseback demanded: What are you doing on my property? The startled geographer apologized and told the rancher his business - not the story about uranium hunting. He was just a graduate student from California come to learn from the desert. The rancher let him stay.

The truth was Tuan loved it there, the miles of mesquite and cactuses, the clean, sweet smell of sun-baked desert plants. People speak of "love at first sight," and mean another human.

Tuan fell in love with a place.

The geographer would talk about loving places; when it came to loving people, he kept silent.

* * *

Today, at 76, Tuan has officially retired from the field he helped to pioneer, humanist geography. During a long career, he broadened the study of places by leading geographers back to the human eyes that see and interpret those places.

But it was a lonely quest. In one of the few articles ever written about him, The Chronicle of Higher Education said Tuan "may be the most influential scholar you've never heard of."

In retirement, he still writes books (one was published in March, and two more are in various stages). Every day, even Christmas and New Year's, he walks the mile from his Madison apartment to his office on the third floor of Science Hall. He trudges through snow, a backpack slung over his narrow shoulders as if he were a student, and not a white-haired professor emeritus.

And he still uses geography to delve deep into the mind, somewhere the old textbooks with their lists of cities, crops and mountain ranges never went. The mental landscape he travels has no boundaries.

"In my 16 years as a resident in Madison I've sat almost daily in the lakefront café of the Memorial Union and watched the changing scenes over Lake Mendota ," he wrote in a letter from a 2002 collection. "Only yesterday, however, did it occur to me to wonder what I would see if I were a submersible at the bottom of the lake's cold, murky depths where sunlight never penetrates. And I'm a geographer! How extraordinarily limited and conventional one's perception is. We are very much creatures of the surface, condemned to superficiality (even in the imagination and thought)."

In fact, Tuan never let himself rest at the surface.

A half-century ago he ventured into the desert and met what he would call "my geographical double," a place of uncluttered beauty and open space, but also of barrenness and isolation.

There, Tuan found his inspiration for ideas on the human response to landscape: the fear or comfort that wells up inside us at the sight of a dark forest or a wide open plain. He began to create his own vision of geography, blending philosophy, art, psychology, religion and other disciplines to produce books with grand themes such as "Place, Art and Self."

"To Yi-Fu, geography is about a set of moral questions: who we are; how we should live in the world; how we should relate to the natural world and to ourselves; and what constitutes the good life," said Denis Cosgrove, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Such moral questions are not to be confused with issues such as global warming, the domain of environmental geographers. Tuan focused instead on subtler ways in which man transforms the natural world to suit his tastes. Humans shape garden hedges into swans. They raise animals as pets and force water to dance in fountains.

With such an approach, Tuan plowed new territory, largely by himself. Though admired by many geographers (this spring, colleagues named one of his articles the most significant in the 90-year history of the journal Geographical Review), he was imitated by few.

"I've developed my own way of thinking, but I'm always looking over my shoulder at what he's doing," said David Harvey, perhaps America's best-known geographer, now a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York.

In his own thinking, Tuan displayed unusual rigor, copying quotations and ideas from the books he read into elegant hardcover journals. Over the years, he filled 42 of these journals, each containing more than 200 pages of meticulous script and as precious to him as a wedding ring might be to a colleague.

"One of the things I fear losing the most is one of these books," he said, "because it's a whole life of reading and thinking that's gone."

But living so completely in a world of ideas proved a hard bargain. For one part of life to be so full, another had to go empty.

"There are two Yi-Fu Tuans," said Kevin Warnke, a former UW student who lived with Tuan for five months. "The brilliant, courageous, revolutionary professor. And the shy, lonely, anxious, hurt man who hates the thought of growing older alone, more isolated from society, no longer capable of remembering anecdotes, names, events, and eventually no longer able to take care of himself."

Both personalities found expression in the desert: the inspiration for his ideas, but also the mirror revealing something barren and nomadic in himself.

Tuan would write: "Socially I am likewise adrift for a simple reason - I am single. The one portable soil - family - in which an individual is given natural grounding is not available to me."

Although the desert suited this solitary life, he finally settled in the rolling hills of the Midwest, a place he called "a family landscape." He last saw the desert 25 years ago.

After Tuan retired in 1998, he wrote his autobiography, "Who Am I?" He published a book of his letters to colleagues. He wrote a travelogue about a visit to China, published this year. He wrote a book on religion, not yet in print. And then he started what may be his final book, on human goodness.

Over the years the geographer's focus on place became for Tuan an image in the rearview mirror, receding gradually as he journeyed down other roads.

"This is how life progresses," he said recently. "We all end up abandoning place. We die."

* * *

In popular imagination, geographers embody what Cosgrove called "a hairy-chested masculinity." They are hale, virile types, men like Robert Peary, who discovered the North Pole and was awarded one of the American Geographical Society's highest honors, the Cullum Medal.

Tuan was the antithesis, a man so slight he was recruited by the rowing team at Oxford for the role of coxswain (though he lacked the other important qualification, a drill sergeant's gift for barking commands).

In 1951, he boarded a train in New York and headed west past the famed 100th Meridian , the invisible line in the Great Plains that separates the moist, closed-in landscape of the eastern United States from the arid, expansive West.

From the train window, Tuan not only saw the West's "Big Sky," he felt it liberating him.

"This is the American Dream that you go west," he said. "That's your future."

Bound for the University of California at Berkeley , he told himself he was finished with the Old World.

To that point, Tuan's life had been rootless, a series of new people in a string of new places his family called "home": Tianjin; Nanjing; Shanghai; Kunming; Chongqing; Canberra; Sydney; Manila; London; Oxford. The endless moving burned into Tuan a temperament suited to geography, and to the desert.

"I have a dread - more than other people - of disorientation," he said.

The dread gripped him the first time he entered the rain forest as a teenager in the Philippines. It grips him still some evenings as he drives through Madison's dark maze of streets, lost and on the verge of stopping the car in despair.

Geography gave him a context for these feelings. The desert answered them, providing the long, clear view that rain forests and city streets denied him. The place soothed his fears and nourished his appetite for deep, philosophical questions.

The interest in philosophy stretched back to childhood when he'd had an unusual dream. In the dream, he was not being chased by monsters or fighting dragons. He was thinking. He was thinking that he was alive, and that being alive had one consequence. It meant he would die. The knowledge made him sweat and struggle until he woke up.

A decade later in the desert, Tuan came across cattle skulls, bleached white and smoothed by sun and sand.

"If that's what death means, so clean," he said, "I don't mind it so much."

* * *

In the San Pedro River Valley, rattlesnake country, Tuan found himself craving human contact. He could work alone in that "lunar beauty" for no more than five days at a stretch before returning to the run-down boarding house in Tucson that he used as his base in the early 1950s. Eventually, a colleague from Berkeley, David Harris, began accompanying him on his research.

Ten years passed. Tuan wrote his dissertation, taught at Indiana University , then moved to a job at the University of New Mexico . He went back into the desert with his old friend. Harris was now married and the father of two little girls. Except for the job, Tuan's circumstances were unchanged.

Watching Harris and his family, he observed that they were always "in place" in the world, because they had each other - they had "community."

"You can't have a community of one," Tuan said.

In the autumn of 1964, Landscape magazine published his first major article, "Mountains, Ruins and the Sentiment of Melancholy." Although mountains were a familiar subject in geographical journals, Tuan's opening sentences announced a new, literary approach. He focused on the way we view these dramatic features of the landscape and even use them in our poetry to evoke sadness.

"Mountains," he wrote, "are erosional ruins. They are the bare stumps of their former selves. They shall be leveled down."

Four years later, he examined another response to the natural world in his book, "The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God." The hydrologic cycle is the process by which oceans produce clouds that pass over mountains, depositing rain and feeding rivers that flow back into oceans. Tuan, now teaching at the University of Toronto, wrote of the cycle's "beautiful economy of means and ends," explaining why it made sense that men would view this as evidence of "a wise and provident God."

As his reputation flourished, he moved from Toronto to the University of Minnesota. There, Tuan resurrected an obscure word from a poem by W.H. Auden and made it the title of his best-known work, the 1974 book "Topophilia" (from the Greek words topos, meaning "place," and philia, meaning "love of"). The idea for a book about the love of place stemmed from the deep kinship he'd felt with the desert.

While writing "Topophilia," Tuan realized the existence of an equally powerful, but opposite force - a topophobia, or fear of places. This became the subject of his 1979 book, "Landscapes of Fear."

"In a sense," he wrote, "every human construction - whether mental or material - is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos. . . . Every dwelling is a fortress built to defend its human occupants against the elements; it is a constant reminder of human vulnerability."

After 15 years in Minnesota, Tuan moved once again, his own version of a midlife crisis.

"There is not a cloud in the sky, except for the distant thunder cloud of senility and death," he explained. "That, precisely, is the problem."

Other male faculty members dealt with midlife problems by divorcing their wives. Tuan viewed his move to UW in 1983 as something similar, a divorce in favor of a fresh, young partner - one who had been courting him.

With his next book, Tuan moved even further from conventional geography. "Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets" was a radical twist on the theme of man transforming nature. Geographers usually examine the ways we change nature for economic reasons, for example, digging into a mountain to extract coal. Tuan surprised colleagues by looking instead at the way humans adopt animals as pets - an act that shows our twin desires to dominate and love our fellow creatures.

Despite his penchant for working outside the mainstream, the mainstream embraced him. In 1987, the American Geographical Society awarded him its Cullum Medal, the same honor given to Peary, the polar explorer.

Tuan had come to embody an alternative to the rugged mountaineer geographer - the classroom sage. He wore a coat and tie to lectures. He played no music, showed no movies, displayed no visual images. In time, he even dispensed with maps. Students seemed to require no more of him than ideas.

Years later some would describe Tuan as almost an oracle.

"People never came in late, never left early. They never sat at the back of the class and chatted with their friends. He had their absolute attention," recalled Steven Hoelscher, a former student who now teaches in the departments of American studies and geography at the University of Texas.

"There was something about him that was distant. Students wouldn't dare interrupt him."

Outside class, Tuan was generous with his time, often sitting in coffeehouses with students, discussing the pianist Glenn Gould or his childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes.

Karen Till, one of his former students, recalled that Tuan often treated students to dinner and some, in turn, took him on outings to places such as Devil's Lake State Park in Baraboo. Students knew, she said, that "Yi-Fu doesn't get out." They felt protective of him.

"I did feel a sadness," said Till, who now teaches geography at the University of Minnesota. "I knew he wasn't married. It seemed to me he kept his personal life very private."

* * *

The man who knew and loved landscape was on shakier ground when it came to the landscape of the self.

He once wrote that he must have been quite lonely as a child, for he imagined often what it would be like to be someone else. In at least one sense, it could scarcely have been harder than being himself.

In adolescence, before he knew the word for it, Tuan noticed the first stirrings of attraction. But it was only later as a graduate student that he understood the way his heart leaned and the life it would mean. He knew how disapproving his father could be, had seen the old man's shock when a colleague took them to a play about Oscar Wilde.

To be homosexual, and especially to be labeled as such, "would make life difficult, if not miserable," Tuan thought. He felt love, but to act on it, he decided, "was out of the question." He could not be that person.

Decades passed, and he told no one his secret. He devoted himself to work, setting no boundaries there. Over the years, though, the cost of his choice became clear as one by one, friends settled into family life. No matter how close he felt to these friends, he knew that even in the smallest matters - whether to attend one of his lectures or help a son with homework - they would always choose their families over him.

In his office, Tuan kept a photo gallery of former students and their children.

"Like he'd adopted us," said Tim Cresswell, a former student who now teaches human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.

As the years went by, although attitudes toward homosexuality loosened, Tuan's self-imposed prohibition did not. In middle age, he felt it was too late to act. He would think himself no better than "a dirty old man." Moreover, there loomed the possibility he might fall in love with a student, something he feared would tarnish all he'd accomplished as a teacher.

In the end, he did what he'd always done. Each day he reported to the office decorated with photographs of other people's families. He taught. He wrote his books.

On Dec. 12, 1997, six months before his official retirement, Tuan taught his final class, telling friends that it was time to move aside and make way for younger geographers. Two years later he wrote his autobiography, choosing that moment to reveal his sexuality.

He did not wish to die carrying this secret, he explained. The life of the mind is about disclosure.

In Tuan's field, the disclosure "was commented upon, but didn't raise eyebrows or make people re-evaluate his work," Cosgrove said. Karen Till read her old teacher's book and found it "enormously brave," yet filled with sadness.

Tuan offered no cover stories, as he had years ago when explaining his presence in the desert. Faced with two complex loves, the geographer had chosen one.

"The flesh had its yearnings," he wrote, "but to an extraordinary degree the yearnings were subordinated to the charms and mysteries of the non-human earth."

A study of people and places

Humanist geography takes a broad approach to examining the way we relate to the world around us. The humanist geographer is interested in our cultural, social, psychological and moral behavior. In examining China, for example, a humanist geographer would go well beyond the traditional interest in economic factors to examine architecture, the aesthetic landscape, the love of nature and the moral nature of the Chinese as distinct from other groups. Based on membership in the Association of American Geographers, it's estimated there are more than 8,000 humanist geographers in the U.S.

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

Interesting Blog/Journal Culture and Space....

2006-11-30T20:27:40Z

http://www.spaceandculture.org/index.php

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

Jane Jacobs

2006-04-30T15:21:09Z

Jane Jacobs, author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) passed. There is a good article here:

http://www.pps.org/info/bulletin/jane_jacobs

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Sense of Place

2006-04-30T15:15:00Z

I have been working on research projects that involves the concept of sense of place for several years now. Of particular interest to me is future cites or probably more familiar what has become to be known as "edge cites". Therefore, I am curious if ther are other geographers or cross-disciplinarians that are intrested in such. Here is a primer:

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/placesense.htm

posted in Geographie - 2 replies

ipod transit maps

2005-09-26T13:22:13Z

Transit maps on your ipod photo! William Bright thought it would be handy to create a website where you could download maps and of course to openly share his idea to the world so people could find their way. Now he is getting cease and desist letters from the NY and San Francisco transit systems. Keep in mind, although he accepts donations on his page he does not charge for the maps. Find out more at:

http://www.ipodsubwaymaps.com/

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

geography & career

2005-07-12T16:30:36Z

its definately true that one can get a good job from geography background & having further skills in gis - planning. there are some more areas to get work easily as a geographer like natural resource management etc.
but one thing that i would like to mention that geography is not a professional training like hotel management or software development ...its a way to analyse things spacially but in various era the people who gave thier life to study geography focus on that aspect of study that can earn livelihood to them too. thats y we can see the approach and focus of study geography remain changing time to time .
so if we study geography in today's globalised world ..having focus on urban & regional issues , accuire desired technology like ..GIS ...train ourseves for working in professional settings ...project management & report writing ..... then we can may be useful for so many NGO'S, DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH ORGANISATIONS , GOVERNMENTS .
FUTURE OF GEOGRAPHERS IS VERY BRIGHT ......THIS SUBJECT REALLY ALLOW TO LEARN ...THAT CAN HELP US TO GROW ....HELP US TO MAKE EARTH A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE.

CHEERS

AJEET SINGH
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE -URBAN MANAGEMENT & PLANNING
ALL INDIA INSTITUTE FOR LOCAL SELF GOVERNMENT ,AHMEDABAD INDIA
ajeet_geo@yahoo.com

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

jobs and careers?

2005-07-11T18:25:52Z

hi i have a pretty broad question to ask, it would be cool if you can answer the best you can. what kind of jobs/careers can you get with a geography degree with bs or masters. what is the salary of that job? im really interested in geography, especially physical geography, but i just dunno if its worth spending money and getting into..

posted in Geographie - 11 replies

geographer and media

2005-05-16T04:19:46Z

hi all.

i m a geography graduate from india .i wana know about contribution of geographers in mass media in recent years . who r the geographers doing significant work in the field of documentry making or reporting either print or electronic media.

infact the routes of subject geography ,are in describing the understanding n knowledge about people n places of any place or regions .people use this knowledge or understand ,about spalital organisation ,thats is very vibrant when human n its activities / culture is included , for various purpose from planning to entertainment or defence to marketing.

but as i feel there is a degradation in the tredition to describe about the physical n cultural framework in which we live specailly in mass media.although after emerging environment concerns globally some environment journalist forcing people to be down to earth but where are the geographers????????

i would like to know some geograpers who r working for mass media n exploring earth n forwarding the old tredition to share geographical knowledge .

i would will encourage if someone who tell me why there are progarms of forensis science on national geographic channel?????

ajeet singh

ww.ajeetavshesh@yahoo.com

posted in Geographie - 1 reply

psychogeography specific discussion tribe

2005-05-16T04:14:03Z

http://psygeo.tribe.net/

For discussing the development and frontiers of psychogeography.

posted in Geographie - 3 replies

templet wanted

2005-03-16T23:17:59Z

Sometimes I am asked to draw direction maps us MS paint. Does any one have any templet I can use to cut and paste onto the maps I am working on. Please contact me directly.

posted in Geographie - 1 reply

sexual geographies/geographers (beyond USA and Europe)

2004-08-02T12:11:30Z

Hi folks,

This is a long shot, but does anyone who of any geographers who are writing sexual geographies outside of a North American/Western European context? Preferably, geographers from the developing world rather than US/European scholars studying sexual cultures in the South...

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American Empire

2004-04-21T02:41:57Z

Has anyone here read Neil Smith's book about Isaiah Bowman. If so, what did you think about it?

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

AAG

2004-03-25T03:17:22Z

Anyone here going to the conference?

posted in Geographie - 22 replies

post-AAG

2004-03-20T14:14:03Z

Hey Waypoints,

Sorry to hear you were ill. Hope you're feeling better now.

So, did everyone who went have a good conference? What were the highlights for y'all?

I've just arrived back in the UK after a sleepless night flight. So, mnore reflections from me once I've caught up on some sleep and am feeling a bit more human....

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

www.bioindicators.com

2004-03-13T16:26:02Z

New website. It is under construction and I have little time to commit as I prepare to graduate.

Please let me know your thoughts. Any corrections or suggestions are welcome....

www.bioindicators.com

posted in Geographie - 0 replies

The Discipline of Geography

2004-03-06T02:53:28Z

What does the quantitative revolution and Geography have in common or not have in common? Why where Geography departments in schools removed in history? and what has changed since then?

posted in Geographie - 22 replies

GIScience 2004 Submission Deadlines

2004-03-04T14:57:44Z

GIScience 2004 Submission Deadlines
Full papers are due by April 12th, notification by May 31st. Abstracts are due by June 28th, notification by July 31st. Camera-ready versions of accepted full papers due by July 5th
GIScience 2004 is the follow-up meeting to the highly successful GIScience 2000 and 2002 conferences with over 300 researchers attending each time. GIScience 2004 will again bring together scientists from academia, industry, and government to analyze progress and to explore new research directions. It will focus on emerging topics and basic research findings across all sectors of geographic information science. The conference program aims to attract leading GIScience researchers from all fields to reflect the interdisciplinary breadth of GIScience, including cognitive science, computer science, engineering, geography, information science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, social science, and statistics.
The conference will be held October 20-23 2004 at the Inn and Conference Center, University of Maryland, close to Washington, DC. Full details of the conference are at <http://www.giscience.org>
To accommodate the variety of papers and presentations that result from an interdisciplinary melting pot, GIScience 2004 will give authors choices about the type of submission they want to make. Full papers, consisting of 5,000-word manuscripts, will be thoroughly reviewed. Manuscripts must describe original work that has not been published before nor is currently under review elsewhere. Papers must be written in English, in 12-point type, and double-spaced. All submissions will be reviewed by three members of the international program committee, and high-quality submissions will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Accepted papers will be published as a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Extended abstracts of 500-1000 words, describing work in progress, will be screened by program committee members, and those selected will be presented at the conference, with extended abstracts published as a volume prior to the conference. Extended abstracts must be written in English, in 12-point type, and
double-spaced.
All submissions (full papers and extended abstracts) must be sent electronically to papers@giscience.org. Material can be submitted as PDF files or Microsoft Word files.

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theban mapping project

2004-02-21T16:12:11Z

http://www.thebanmappingproject.com

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projects?

2004-02-19T02:04:01Z

So, what projects are people working on?

posted in Geographie - 4 replies

Time line of monsters

2004-02-13T13:12:01Z

Time line of monsters

I was rather disappointed to see the thread on timeline of explorers deleted following my query with regard to the inclusion of certain dubious historical figures. It made me think though why not have a timeline of monsters?

I'm not a historian and so would require help on this but for starters here are a few

Henry VIII
Joseph Stalin
Adolph Hitler
Pol Pot
Idi Amin
Augusto Pinochet
Sadam Hussain

The kind of candidates suitable for this timeline are individuals responsible for reigns of terror or mass murder whilst in some senior political and/or military position. This effectively rules out terrorists who thankfully do not hold such office, but does, most definitely, includes individuals who have sponsored terrorists whilst in such office.

An interesting inclusion would be individuals from American history. Who was principally responsible for the extermination policies against the Native Americans? Equally whose idea was it to starve the Indians by exterminating the bison? Would these acts not qualify for reigns of terror or acts of mass murder?

Perhaps someone is familiar with British exploits and can recommend someone from our colonial exploits in Asia and the Pacific?

And what about Spain?s triumphs in Latin America or Australian programmes against the Aborigines?

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Regards.

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First Nation?

2004-02-04T11:23:12Z

I am trying to figure out what was the first true modern nation. Does anyone know?

posted in Geographie - 7 replies

Interests?

2004-01-27T11:00:12Z

So, what aspects of geography are people interested in or working on?

I'm a (part-time) PhD student in the Geography Dept. at King's College London carrying out an ethnographic study examining the social and cultural geographies of queer space in East London.

More broadly, I think of myself as an urban cultural geographer and I have an interest in geographies of political activism and new social movements.

posted in Geographie - 6 replies

Ecology vs Geography

2004-01-26T03:13:30Z

A recent news report in India described how the government has decided to replace geography with environmental studies as a required subject for secondary schools and colleges. Perhaps geography is to further face more challenges in self-validation. In the middle of the last century the discipline of Geography faced criticism both internally and externally that it was not being scientific enough (hence the quatitative revolution). This lead to many universities (including Harvard) to close their deparments or merge them with other disciplines. Today GIS may be pumping new life into some departments. A key impact is the channeling funds into these departments. However, even with GIS other disciplines are incorporating training in the such geospatial technologies into their programs. Geography may be a broad discipline with both human and physical aspects but what may be the future of the discipline? Are we becoming so specialized that the discipline may just erode away into other disciplines?

posted in Geographie - 5 replies

Looking for Remote Sensing Professionals

2004-01-22T02:56:34Z

I am interested in pursuing a career as a hyperspectral imaging analyst If anyone knows of the steps to take to realize this I would greatly appreciate it I currently have basic knowledge of the ENVI/Flaash software suite. Thank you in adance for any assistance.

posted in Geographie - 2 replies

The bone yard

2004-01-22T00:01:18Z

Basically my only experience with cartography has been working on a project in Columbus, Georgia mapping out an old African American cemetary (dates began mid-1800's). The project involved the actual mapping of the cemetary and indicating where the various burial plots were (they were not always in neat rows) and then creating a database to indicate who was where. Fortunately, they had record book of who was buried and some statistics. I left the project about half-way through because my internship period was over. It was really interesting and I wish that I had been able to see the whole thing through.

posted in Geographie - 8 replies

3D Digital Panorama of Spirit's Landing

2004-01-20T01:06:44Z

Check out the cool 3D image of Spirit's Mars landing zone. It is available at:

http://www.3dworld.com/images/mars_spirit.jpg

* note you will have to dig out a pair of 3d glasses from your bottom drawer

posted in Geographie - 1 reply

interest

2004-01-16T21:55:44Z

Is anyone here into medical geography?

posted in Geographie - 1 reply

The new USGS online catalog is a major improvement

2004-01-16T14:59:12Z

The USGS opened its new online store this month. This is great news because ordering products from the USGS usually involved a phone call or to visit a store. Now you can browse their product line to find exactly what you are looking for. Also, many recreational outfitters and other commercial retailers that offer USGS topographic maps have quit offering printed maps and have installed print-on-demand mapping kiosks. In my opinion, the maps are not nearly as readable as the traditional paper versions. Anyhow, the new online store seems to have a very broad inventory of maps, books and digital products too. There is also a section of specialty maps that include themes from natural disasters to other planets. Maps from other government agencies are offered as well. You can access the online catalog via: http://store.usgs.gov

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Welcome to the new tribe "geographie"

2003-12-24T19:06:04Z

The purpose of this tribe is to offer networking, news, and discussion related to the field of geography in an open forum format. Participants are encouraged to post discussion threads, post listings, inform other members about geography or tribe related events, or just share news. Enjoy!

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