Geodemography is the study of people based on their socioeconomic characteristics and where they live. Geodemography has emerged since the 1980s as a powerful and popular part of geography, enabled by modern Web mapping tools (see Web Mapping), new algorithms that can “cluster” people based on similar characteristics, and a wealth of data at finer and finer resolutions.
While these developments have made geodemography very popular today, its roots go back more than a century. Charles Booth studied deprivation and poverty in London, creating a generalized social index of London’s registration districts from the 1891 Census. Researchers at several universities in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s pioneered the combination of theory and ethnographic fieldwork known as the “Chicago School.” Baker, Bermingham, and McDonald’s 1997 article was one of the first to tie geography to marketing with geodemographics. Geodemographic segmentation systems start with millions of raw statistics, dividing a country’s households into specific groups based on similar characteristics, similar to how a biologist would divide living things into orders, families, genus, and species. Geodemographic systems actually trace their roots to the classification system used in the biological sciences, in addition to the geographic divisions (Zip codes) created by the U.S. Postal Service (or postal codes in other countries). Multivariate regression analysis and principal components analysis are used to create the segments, first done by Jonathan Robbin in 1970. The entitites are classified in such a way as to minimize heterogeneity within groups and maximize heterogeneity between groups.
Systems of geodemographics seek to determine the most probable characteristics of people based on the pooled profile of all living in a small area near a particular address, such as a block group or census tract—in short, a neighborhood. How is the data gathered in the first place? National census agencies gather the demographic data. The consumer preference and lifestyle data are gathered through numerous sources, from databases that house consumer spending data from discount cards consumers use at grocery stores, to credit card information, surveys, and inventory reports from stores, and through other means. From this clustering of like characteristics, numerous geode-mographic systems have been created.
Because the techniques and data are so valued by advertisers, bankers, franchise operators, and other businesses, and by other researchers, the systems themselves have become their own businesses, reflecting the proprietary development of the companies that operate these systems. For example, the Claritas Corporation created the PRIZM and Compass systems in the United States, CACI created the Acorn system in the United Kingdom, and PSYTE HD Canada was created by Pitney Bowes in Canada. PRIZM and Acorn were developed during the 1980s and are still in use today, although Claritas has since been acquired by the Nielsen Company. Clustering has been conducted for about 22 countries; the ability to do so depends on the availability of neighborhood-level census data and the degree to which it is openly available. The popularity and utility of geodemography stems from the basic premise that people with similar cultural backgrounds, income, and points of view tend to gravitate toward one another, the “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon. People then tend to emulate their neighborhood and share certain patterns of consumer behavior.
The original PRIZM model clustered U.S. consumers into 40 “segments”; since then it has expanded to 66 segment types, with 14 demographically and behaviorally distinct groups. The segments have catchy, easy-to-remember names, such as “Movers and Shakers,” the up-and-coming business class: wealthy, dual-income, highly educated couples between 35 and 54 years of age and often with children, ranked first for owning a small business and having a home office. The “New Beginnings” segment is dominated by single young adults. These singles along with some couples are just beginning their careers, or they might be starting new chapters of their lives after divorces or company changes. They are ethnically diverse, and they have modern standards of living that are typical of transient apartment dwellers.
The PRIZM model allows for a smooth shift between a household-level coding and a geographic-level coding by providing the same segment schema at each of these levels. This permits the same analysis to be conducted at the census tract or block group level as on the household level. Nevertheless, caution should be used; neighborhoods can contain more than one cluster type, and sometimes a single cluster type does not predomininate in a neighborhood. The clusters “characterize” the “typical” household in that area, but many exceptions do exist. Just because someone’s Uncle Charlie lives in a neighborhood dominated by the “Winner’s Circle” cluster does not necessarily mean that Uncle Charlie is going to be 25 to 34 years old in a large family in a new-money subdivision, or that he travels, skis and golfs, and often goes out to eat. Clusters are a multivariate creation, and there is no neighborhood in the world where all residents are exactly the same. Homogeneity simply means that groups of nearby neighborhoods will have similar lifestyles and likely similar consumer attitudes (Ramos 2015).
Geodemography is a prime example of the application of geography to meet specific needs and solve problems. Here, the problems are faced by businesses in selecting optimal sites, target marketers seeking to maximize effectiveness within a limited budget, sociologists and geographers seeking to understand how neighborhoods vary across space and time, and others (see Applied Geography). Users of geodemographic analysis ask, “Who are my customers, stakeholders, or clients? Where do they live? How best can I reach them?” As the variety of products and services has rapidly expanded over the past few decades, thanks in large part to supply chain management (see Supply Chain Management), geodemography has become increasingly important. For example, grocery stores may no longer stock just white and wheat bread; rather, they may carry bagels, pita bread, gluten-free options, rice bread, whole and cracked grain, and dozens more varieties of bread products. According to Ramos (2015), over 15,000 companies in the United States and Canada alone used clusters as part of their marketing strategy over the past year. One advantage that clusters provide over straight demographic data is the power of fine-grained analysis. Another advantage is the ability to integrate other data for advertising and target marketing, such as TV programs, postal zones, retail kiosks, AdWords campaigns on the Web, and other means of targeting specific consumers. Another advantage is that the results can be easily measured over space and time and—most pertinent to geography—mapped.
Despite its applied nature, geodemography also has its own theoretical base, one that overlaps with behavioral geography. Behavioral geography focuses on the cognitive processes underlying spatial reasoning, behavior, and decision-making involved in an individual’s perception of and response to his or her environment. Because behavioral geography focuses on the individual, and geodemographic analysis attempts to group people based on common behavior, there is an interesting distinction between the two. However, they share the belief that models of interaction and activity of people can be improved by incorporating more realistic assumptions about the behavior of those people. And grouping people, even into small units such as neighborhoods, in order to understand their behavior helps address the problem of the complexity that would result from mapping individuals in even small metropolitan areas.
While some find the clustering idea interesting and useful, others warn of the dangers if people really do congregate solely in areas where others think and behave as they do. Journalist Bill Bishop, for example, coined the term “the big sort” in his quest to prove that Americans may be sorting themselves into “alarmingly homogeneous communities” down to the neighborhood level (Bishop 2009). Bishop and some others believe that the result is a country polarized, “so ideologically inbred” that people may not know and may not be able to understand those who live just a few miles away, making local communities balkanized and national consensus impossible.
Geographic and environmental research have contributed to the founding and continuing evolution of geodemography. Park and Burgess from the “Chicago School,” for example, defined a theory of “natural areas” stating that competition for land in cities among social groups led to its division into geographic units similar to ecological niches. In the past decade, British geographers Stan Openshaw and Phil Rees collaborated on a free and open classification of the United Kingdom based on U.K. census data. Geography impacts the way in which clusters are defined. Changing settlement patterns are a factor: “Edge cities” and “exurban areas” make the old urban/rural dichotomy obsolete, for example. Changing ethnicities are another factor, as is international migration. Because population characteristics and changes have been a focus for geographers for at least a century, it is natural that the geography research community contributes heavily to the development of geodemographic tools and research foundations (see Defining Geography).
Through the development of spatial analysis tools, researchers use maps to determine how the clusters are distributed across a neighborhood or a region, or even across an entire country (see Spatial Analysis). The clusters often reflect cultural geography forces that have been acting for decades, such as suburbanization, edge cities, the influence of mass transit, frost-belt to sun-belt migration, gentrification of old downtown cores, and international immigration to key major cities but also, increasingly, small towns. Geographers are of great value in interpreting these patterns. Sometimes there is not a clear spatial pattern behind the clusters, which is just as informative to researchers as when a pattern exists. Recently, easy-to-use GIS tools have brought geodemographic analyses to disciplines beyond business marketing and geography: to sociology, criminal justice, and transportation planning, to name a few (see Geographic Information Systems; Web Mapping).
For example, the GIS software company Esri uses a “Tapestry Segmentation” algorithm for classifying U.S. neighborhoods into 67 segments, 14 LifeMode groups, and 11 Urbanization groups. The LifeMode groups are based on lifestyle and on life “stage.” The 11 Urbanization groups present an alternative way of combining the 67 segments, based on their geographic and physical features, such as population density, size of city, location relative to a metropolitan area, and whether or not the segment is a part of the economic and social center of a metropolitan area. Esri offers data users a variety of tools, ranging from an easy-to-use but powerful “Zip Code Lookup” that yields maps, charts, and data for any U.S. Zip code, viewable in a Web browser; to tailored packages such as “Community Analyst” and “Business Analyst Online,” which include business locations, demographic data, and lifestyle data that can be mapped at scales from state level to neighborhood block group and Zip code. Each company that creates and uses cluster analysis employs a rigorous test of its methods. Esri, for example, verifies the accuracy of its “Tapestry Segmentation” methods against consumer surveys from the company GfK MRI. These surveys encompass close to 6,000 product brands and service brands in 550 categories, including usage statistics for print media, Internet, TV viewing by channel and program, radio listening, and the Yellow Pages.
Thus, how people behave in terms of their spending, commuting, recreational, and work habits has in recent years shaped the discipline of geography but has also caused those in other disciplines to use the geographic perspective and geographic tools in their work.
See also: Applied Geography; Defining Geography; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Spatial Analysis; Supply Chain Management; Web Mapping
Baker, Ken, John Bermingham and Collin McDonald. 1997. “The Utility to Market Research of the Classification of Residential Neighborhoods.” Journal of the Market Research Society 39 (1).
Bishop, Bill. 2009. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Boston: Mariner Books.
Esri. 2015. “Tapestry Segmentation: Methodology.” White paper. http://downloads.esri.com/esri_content_doc/dbl/us/J9941Tapestry_Segmentation_Methodology.pdf.
Esri. 2015. “Tapestry Segmentation Reference Guide.” http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/community-tapestry.pdf.
Ramos, Andreas. 2015. “Introduction to Geodemographics: PRISM, Claritas, and Clusters.” http://andreas.com/faq-geodemo3.html.
Troy, Austin. 2007. “Geographic Segmentation,” in Encyclopedia of GIS, edited by Shashi Shekhar and Hui Xiong. New York: Springer Science and Business Media.
Weiss, Michael. 1988. The Clustering of America. New York: HarperCollins.
From the time of the first maps inscribed on clay tablets in Babylonia more than 5,000 years ago, maps revolutionized the way people began to understand the world (see High-Resolution Mapping). More than simply providing a means for navigating a city, trade route, military campaign, or hunting ground, maps changed the way that people thought about their own role in the world, and how they could interact with—and even change—the world. Maps provided impetus for sailing across the ocean to lands previously unknown by the explorers venturing to them, to ford rivers with bridges, to drain wetlands, to cross mountains, and to settle and provide ownership to lands new to a nation (see Northwest Ordinance). Yet for nearly all of the 5,000 years of documented mapmaking and map use, maps were always tied to physical objects. At first these objects were ephemeral, drawn in dirt or on cave walls, or etched in trees; and as the centuries passed, maps were made using longer-lasting media: stone, wood, silver (see Al-Idrisi, Muhammad), paper, or linen. But as late as the mid-20th century, maps were still being created on physical objects, which by this time for many national mapping agencies meant copperplates from which maps could be printed on film, paper, or plastic. The advent of computer technology during the 1960s set the stage for a revolutionary moment in cartography and in geography itself—the invention of the geographic information system (GIS).
Dr. Roger Tomlinson, working at the Canadian federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development, pioneered the idea of computerizing the agency’s digital maps into specific themes, such as soils, land use, recreation, wildlife, population, and forestry. Calling it the Canada Geographic Information System, it was the world’s first GIS. Not only did the computerization—through digitizing and scanning—of the nation’s maps allow the mapped data to be much more easily accessed and used, the system also allowed for geographic analysis to take place. For example, the agency could query the system, or ask questions about the data and receive results in tabular and map form, such as “How much agricultural expansion can the soils in this area support?” or “What are the economic trade-offs for these lands to be rotated between pasture and cropland in this region?” This was possible because the mapped data was encoded with topology—the relationships between the points, lines, and polygons, so every mapped feature “knows” the location of every other feature in the data set. Furthermore, the maps and the attribute information about each mapped feature—such as whether rivers were perennial or intermittent, or the types of crops grown in specific areas, or the population density—were stored in separate files, linked through a geodatabase. Coupled with the development of the Canada GIS were advances at the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, where theoretical concepts about the handling of spatial data were developed, as well as early software code and systems, such as SYMAP, GRID, and ODYSSEY. Raster data models that simulated Earth data as a set of regular grid cells instead of as points, lines, and polygons also contributed to the mapping and understanding of satellite imagery and phenomena that changed rapidly over space, such as soil chemistry or elevation.
By the early 1980s, several government agencies and private companies were developing GIS software that began to be adopted by public, private, and nonprofit organizations around the world, from the local level to international organizations. These early developers included Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute), Intergraph, CARIS (Computer Aided Resource Information System), Clark University, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who developed ArcInfo, Intergraph, CARIS GIS, Idrisi, MOSS, and GRASS, respectively. Hastening the development of GIS from the 1980s to the present day included advances in the processing speed of computers and the progression from mainframes to minicomputers to workstations, which opened up an ever-expanding user base within each organization. Additionally, advancement in the amount of data that could be efficiently stored was critical, because mapped data inherently involves large, complex files. The increasing availability of mapped data also hastened the adoption of GIS.
This availability did not happen overnight—the U.S. Census Bureau invested years in developing the first nationwide GIS street file (see Web Mapping); the U.S. Geological Survey began digitizing all of its topographic map features into GIS datasets on land use, rivers, geology, and other themes, creating such products as Digital Elevation Models from contour lines, the National Hydrologic Dataset from its hydrology data, the National Land Cover Dataset from Landsat satellite imagery, and Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles (DOQs) from its aerial photography. Private companies such as SPOT (created by the French space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales) and DigitalGlobe in the United States, and government agencies such as the Indian Space Research Organization and NASA, began providing digital imagery of the Earth. Also hastening the adoption of GIS was a growing realization that the world’s problems were growing in complexity and also beginning to affect individuals’ everyday lives, that these problems were inherently geographic in nature, and that they were complex enough to need an advanced set of tools and the rich data that GIS provided.
It is difficult to overstate the impact that GIS has had on geography. Having a tool that divided up geographic phenomena into map layers fit perfectly into how geographers saw the world—as a series of interconnected themes. And being able to model the world and test those models was the perfect tool for a complex, changing world. By 1992, GIS had its own research base and methodologies, causing some to state that it had become its own science: geographic information science. Today, most university geography departments have significant numbers of GIS courses, and many universities offer GIS programs. GIS, sometimes called geomatics, location analytics, or geotechnologies, is spreading to other disciplines, such as biology, environmental studies, history, and business; it is even forming new disciplines, such as geodesign, which combines landscape architecture, GIS, and planning. GIS deeply impacted the entire discipline of geography, providing new research methodologies, types of data to analyze, and ways of communicating its value to the public. GIS may be the single largest contribution that geography has made to the rest of the world, as millions of people in thousands of organizations use GIS in their daily decision-making, from human health to transportation to development.
Jack Dangermond
Like others described in this book, Jack Dangermond (born 1945) was immersed in the landscape at an early age; for Dangermond, it was helping to run his family’s tree nursery in southern California. He went on to study environmental science, computer graphics, and landscape architecture at Cal Poly, the University of Minnesota, and Harvard University before founding Esri with Laura Dangermond in 1969. Esri grew to become the world’s largest GIS company, creating tools used by millions of people on a daily basis. Jack Dangermond has been a tireless and lifelong promoter and supporter of the value that geographic thinking and geotechnologies bring to everyday decision-making. The attendees of the annual Esri conferences, which number over 16,000 people using ArcGIS technology, exemplify the application of geography to health, public safety, natural resources, the environment, transportation, energy, and hundreds of other fields.
Currently, GIS is undergoing a revolution of its own—a major paradigm shift is occurring as many of its tools and data migrate to a “software as a service” (SaaS) model. The SaaS model of GIS runs in the computing cloud—on a vast array of connected computer servers, rather than on one’s local computer. This allows more complex simulations of climate, ocean, population migration, natural hazards, and other models that take advantage of rapid and vast computing power. It also enables geographic data, methods, and models to be much more easily shared, which is critical because geographic problems do not stop at organizational or political boundaries and they require input from numerous stakeholders. It also enables the use of GIS on a much wider variety of devices than ever before, including tablet and other mobile devices such as smartphones. The geotagging of an increasing number of events, objects, and data as part of the Internet of Things, coupled with GPS technology, is enabling many everyday decisions, from the local to the global scale, to be made with the help of GIS (see Global Positioning Systems; Internet of Things). Maps and the results of analysis of mapped data are a part of everyday news, and maps and imagery are among the most-seen items on the Web.
This map of the central United States, created by geographers with a Geographic Information System (GIS), shows earthquake epicenters over the past 200 years. The spatial pattern of earthquakes is of great use to a wide range of professionals, including architects, highway engineers, and emergency responders. (Esri)
The invention and adoption of GIS technology was revolutionary to geography—but also to society—for a number of reasons. One problem with stone, wood, or paper maps is that they are always “snapshots in time”—current as of when they were created, and indeed, most likely current as of several years before, given the amount of time needed to produce them. Even during the 1980s, a typical USGS topographic map took several years to produce, from the initial aerial photography and fieldwork to its final cartographic rendering. The Earth is a dynamic planet, and geography is a subject that describes that dynamic planet, and so having GIS tools, data sets, and models that are increasingly real-time fosters an unheralded understanding about the Earth. The data in a GIS can be funneled through animations and visualized in 2D and 3D. GIS data are referenced to real-world coordinates and are thus much more accurate than any maps produced by hand. The data can be combined with other data from different regions for comparison, or different themes, or at different scales, all displayed in the same GIS. The data can be analyzed quantitatively using established techniques (see Quantitative Revolution) and communicated to an increasingly diverse audience.
Real-time data can be input into the system, such as wildfire perimeters, or current events through social media; “citizen science” data can be incorporated (see Citizen Science), and results can be communicated through story maps and other digital multimedia. With a GIS, everything from global climate change to the impact of rezoning on a community can be forecast and better understood, leading to sound planning, resilience, and a healthier and more sustainable planet. The ubiquitous nature of Web maps is influencing geographic literacy and the way in which people interact with the planet and understand it. And the impacts of this revolutionary technology are only just beginning to be felt.
See also: Al-Idrisi, Muhammad; Citizen Science; Global Positioning Systems (GPS); High-Resolution Mapping; Remote Sensing; Web Mapping
Chrisman, Nick. 2006. Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS. Redlands, California: Esri Press.
Data for Decision. 1967. Set of three videos from Roger Tomlinson describing the world’s first GIS, the Canada GIS. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAFG6aQTwPk.
Kwan Mei-Po, Doug Richardson, Wang Donggen, and Zhou Chenghu, eds. 2014. Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience: Research Frontiers in the US and China. New York: Springer.
On a night in December 1821, a group of 217 scientists gather in a large room in Paris to plan how geographical knowledge can be encouraged in the present and for future generations. They seek an organization that will not only endure but also thrive—no matter what state of war or peace exists, and no matter how science is supported or disdained by the government or by the people. Some of the scientists who gather have accompanied Napoleon on his expeditions to Egypt. Collectively, they represent some of the most accomplished scientists of the world at the time. In each of their minds is the nearly 40-year-old vision of Jean-Nicolas Bauche, who was first geographer and cartographer of King Louis XVI of France. As a result of their efforts on this December night, the Société de Géographie (French, “Geographical Society”), is formed—the first geographical association.
The assemblage of scientists into an association, or society, was not new; the French Academy of Sciences, for example, dates back to 1666, founded by Louis XIV, and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom is even older, founded in 1660. However, the Société de Géographie represented a revolution in geographic thought—that an association could encourage research, exploration, and publication specific to geography. For such an organization to be founded and to sustain itself was also a revolution—and not only did the organization sustain itself, but it also thrived. True to its purpose, the entrance to the Société de Géographie’s headquarters in Paris is marked by two gigantic caryatids—sculpted female columns—representing land and sea. In 1879, at the society’s headquarters, the construction of the Panama Canal was decided upon. In 1913, the first Arab Congress met to discuss granting Arabs living under the Ottoman Empire more autonomy at a pivotal time in world history. The society’s Great Gold Medal of Exploration and Journeys of Discovery has been awarded since 1829 to those who greatly enhanced geographic knowledge, including Antarctic explorers Ross, Shackleton, and Amundsen. Indeed, the focus of much of the early work of these societies was to sponsor, fund, send out, receive, and assemble data from explorers who climbed mountains, crossed deserts, picked their way across glaciers, or descended into the depths of the ocean. They thus did much through these efforts to promote geographic research, but their relevance remains today despite some change in their mission, as we shall see.
The founding of the Société meant that the discipline of geography had the necessary core tenets and core scientific approaches and, by this time, a body of literature and research behind it. Moreover, while it shared linkages with geology, biology, astronomy, and history, it was not any of those disciplines; it was unique and could stand on its own. Geographers shared a worldview that was spatial in nature—that place, space, and proximity mattered, and that the geographic perspective allowed specific patterns, relationships, and trends to be understood in a way that no other method could quite match. The revolution was that the discipline of geography had at last arrived on the world stage. True, the Société sponsored physical expeditions on land and sea—such as to the North and South poles, to ocean trenches, and to the tops of mountain peaks—but equally far-reaching was the encouragement that the Société gave to all who called themselves geographers. This included the confidence that geographers gained in becoming a part of the established academy. It was manifest in the founding of geography departments at major universities, such as the first one at the University of Berlin just four years after the founding of the Société (see Ritter, Carl).
The second oldest geographical society is the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Berlin Geographical Society), founded in 1828 in part by geographers who were revolutionary in their own right and are included in this book: Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. Its journal, Die Erde (The Earth), has been published since 1853. In the United Kingdom, the Geographical Association, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society have each served for over 100 years. The RGS is the third oldest such association in the world, founded in 1830 after those in France and Germany. Today, the RGS has over 16,500 members, having merged in 1994 with the Institute of British Geographers. Five geographers formed the Geographical Association, including Halford John Mackinder (see Mackinder, Halford), and it is the largest association in the world focused on geography education. Canada has long been represented by two prominent geographical associations—the Canadian Association of Geographers and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, with the former focusing on geographic research in higher education and the latter focusing on increasing geographic knowledge throughout education and among the general public.
In the United States, four geographical associations have been revolutionary to the discipline—the American Association of Geographers (founded in 1904), the National Council for Geographic Education (founded in 1910), the American Geographical Society (founded in 1851), and the National Geographic Society (founded in 1888). Each serves a particular area of geography. The American Association of Geographers has focused on encouraging high-quality geographic research in higher education. The National Council for Geographic Education has emphasized geography education at all levels—primary, secondary, university, lifelong learning, and informal education. The oldest, the American Geographical Society, has focused on exploration and connections with the business community. The National Geographic Society has focused on exploration and media, beginning with its iconic magazine and maps and branching into travel and television, film, and other media by the late 20th century. It also funded and supported the geography alliances, a network of state-based partnerships to provide professional development for geography instructors. However, despite their unique areas of emphasis that endured into the 21st century, the associations can and do collaborate on projects to advance geographic scholarship and literacy, including the 18 geography standards for education (see Defining Geography) in 1994.
Gilbert Melville Grosvenor
Through his role as editor of National Geographic Magazine and president and chairman of the National Geographic Society, Gilbert Melville Grosvenor (born 1931) has had great influence on geographic research, teaching, and learning. During the 1980s, Grosvenor established a network of 55 state-based geographic alliances to address the growing lack of geographic literacy among primary and secondary school students in the United States. Through a large financial grant from National Geographic, a group of coordinators, composed of geography professors and geography teachers, conducted thousands of workshops and created curricula for geography educators in their own states. Grosvenor oversaw the transformation of National Geographic to fit the modern era, including its digital atlases and media such as the National Geographic Channel, all of which helped bring geographic awareness and knowledge to a global audience.
Other scholars felt that national-based geographical societies were too small in scope and that continental and international organizations were needed. The European Association of Geographers (EUROGEO), founded in 1979, is an example of a continent-wide geography association. It received funding from the European Commission in 2008 to improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education, including the training of educators, in a project known as the HERODOT Network for Geography in Higher Education. An example of an international geographic society is the International Geographical Union (IGU; French, Union Géographique Internationale, or UGI), which traces its beginnings to the very first International Geographical Congress, held in Antwerp in 1871. Meetings in the years that followed led to the establishment of the current IGU organization in Brussels, Belgium, in 1922. The IGU includes 34 commissions and four task forces. The commissions cover Gender Geography, Applied Geography, Marine Geography, and Landscape Analysis and Water Sustainability. Another international organization with strong ties to geography is the International Cartographic Association. It is much newer, dating from 1959, and it has since become an authoritative body not only for cartography but also for the geographic information sciences (see Geographic Information Systems).
Other prominent geographical associations exist around the world, including many that have long been established. These include the Russian Geographical Society (dating from 1845), the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (dating from 1873), and the Société Royale Belge de Géographie (Belgium, founded in 1876), along with newer ones, such as the Hong Kong Geographical Association.
While each of the geographical associations and societies has its own area of focus, and while these focus areas have evolved over time with the evolution of the discipline of geography itself, they share some common activities, missions, and goals. Activities include organizing events (including national conferences and symposia), producing publications (including multimedia, teaching materials, journals, books, and all forms of electronic Web-based media), supporting existing and new geographers in their jobs and careers, and supporting best practices in the teaching of geography at all levels. Geographical associations also partner with nonprofit organizations, private industry, academia, and government on projects that support geography, lobby in government affairs to promote geography when appropriate (including the making of recommendations to policymakers who serve in local to national and international government organizations), and provide a common forum for the discussion of matters of common interest to geographers. Electronic social media has allowed geographical associations to make an even bigger impact in the 21st century.
That these associations are also called societies harkens back to their original intent—to provide a league or a union, a “home” from which geographers’ voices could be heard. These organizations are an important part of the discipline of geography, fostering new research, teaching, and development, and helping to communicate the value of geography to the general public.
See also: Defining Geography; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Mackinder, Halford; Ritter, Carl
About.com. 2016. “Listing of Geographic Organizations.” http://geography.about.com/od/geographicorganizations.
Johnston, R. 2009. “On Geography, Geography and Geographical Magazines.” Geography 94 (3): 207–214.
Murphy, Alexander B., H. J. de Blij, B. L. Turner II, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Derek Gregory. 2005. “The Role of Geography in Public Debate.” Progress in Human Geography 29 (2): 165–193.
National Academy of Sciences. 1997. Rediscovering Geography: New Relevance for Science and Society. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
As this book’s description of notable developments and people that have contributed to the discipline has shown, geography has had a long history. However, the teaching of geography concepts, theory, skills, and methods in colleges and universities is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first geography department was not established until 1874 when the Prussian government established a Chair of Geography in every university in the region (what is now Germany). The first geography department in the United States was not established until 1903 at the University of Chicago.
The development of what is known as the “classic” higher-education geography in the 1800s was closely linked to the University of Berlin. Although geography was lectured about at almost all German universities during the early 1800s, it fell under theology, philosophy, mathematics, and statistics. In 1810, when lectures began at the newly founded University of Berlin, geography was represented as an associate professorship by Johann August Zeune (1778–1853), who was the inventor of a globe for the blind. With the advent of Carl Ritter (1779–1859), Zeune withdrew from geography teaching (see Ritter, Carl). The University of Berlin later became the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (1828) and later the Humboldt University of Berlin (1949). Ritter was called to the Allgemeine Kriegsschule in Berlin as associate professor of Erd-, Länder-, Völker- und Staatenkunde (geography, regional geography, ethnology, and statistics) in 1820. In 1825, his position was upgraded to a full professorship of geography, ethnology, and history, which he held until his death in 1859. At first, Ritter encountered a lack of interest from students, who were under the impression that to learn geography meant nothing more than memorizing facts. Interestingly, the same impression exists today in the minds of many university students, non-geography faculty, and the general public. Nevertheless, Ritter’s expertise as an instructor gave geography a new image, legitimizing it as an independent discipline, and its status was heightened further by Alexander von Humboldt. Geography was also legitimized as a discipline through the establishment of professional societies in several countries, whose members kept it before the general public through sponsoring lectures and journals (see Geographical Societies).
During the late 1800s, geography was dominated as a scholarly discipline by a few individuals, including Ratzel and Hettner in Germany, de la Blache in France, Herbertson and Mackinder in the United Kingdom, and Davis and Semple in the United States. Thanks in large part to Mackinder’s advocacy, the influence of the environment on society became a focus. This focus continues today, but in the early 1900s, a few geographers believed that the environment set the scene for and conditioned the evolution of human progress. Known as “environmental determinism,” it had its proponents and detractors, and many of its tenets were subsequently discredited; however, studying the influence on the environment is a strong 21st-century geography theme. Between 1902 and 1914, geography was established in only 15 universities worldwide. But during the period between the world wars, the number of geography departments expanded markedly.
The focus of geography departments also diversified from the late 1800s to today. Departments often took on the focus of their most prominent researchers, who sometimes attracted faculty with similar interests if their positions were funded and supported. More commonly they attracted students with similar interests, who went on to influence their own organizations. Again, the University of Berlin provides a good example of what transpired in many departments: After Ritter’s death, the professorship at the University of Berlin remained unoccupied until 1874, when Heinrich Kiepert was installed as a full professor focusing on historical cartography. Von Richthofen founded the Institute of Geography in 1887, and a highly visible event was the international Day of Geography held in Berlin in 1899. Penck followed him at the university, focusing on alpine ice-age research and geomorphology. Rühl followed Penck, blazing new respect for economic geography. In 1949, the university was renamed Humboldt University of Berlin. After 1989, restructuring resulted in today’s Institute of Geography as a teaching and research institution within the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science.
Perhaps because of its interdisciplinary contributions, geography remains misunderstood by some in academia. However, geographers have long been concerned about how their discipline is viewed and its future role: Halford Mackinder, at the founding of the first university undergraduate course at Oxford in the United Kingdom, asked the Royal Geographical Society, “What is geography?” (see Mackinder, Halford). He gave two reasons why the question was important: the first was the struggle for the existence of geography as a recognizable body of knowledge; the second was that because of the ending of the great period of exploration, geography faced a crisis and an opportunity to shape its future role. With increasing breadth and specialization of education, he advocated that geography’s main function should be to trace the intersection of humans in society and describe local variations in the human and physical environment.
During much of the history of geography in higher education, geography has sometimes been combined with other departments on a campus. Most of the early geography departments were associated with geology, reflecting the prominence of physical geography in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As noted in this book, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter were both geologists and geographers (see Ritter, Carl; Von Humboldt, Alexander). Immanuel Kant taught a course in what people would now call geography during his years serving as a university professor in Germany. He, like Lewis and Clark, and John C. Fremont, conducted research that was geographic in nature, even though he had not studied geography per se.
Today, geography departments sometimes combine with or split from other departments as part of the continuing change that is the culture of higher education. When it is combined with another department, geography is usually combined with international relations, disciplines related to the atmosphere (atmospheric sciences, meteorology, and climatology), political science, or economics. At times, geography has changed its departmental name entirely, to Global Studies, Geographic Information Science and Technology, Geomatics, or Spatial Studies. Geography at the University of Berlin represents the restructuring of university geography quite well: After a split in the 1950s in geography of the human-economic and physical components, it merged in the 1960s under “Institute of Geography” within the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, reflecting the quantitative revolution (See Quantitative Revolution). In 1968, the Geography Department of Humboldt University emerged, integrating the teaching methodology of geography.
In the second decade of the 21st century, geography departments exist in most major universities around the world. By 2015, according to the American Association of Geographers, 192 geography programs existed in the United States, 25 in Canada, and 69 in Mexico, Central America, and South America. The expansion of geography in the United States and in many other countries was driven in part by the advent of geographic information systems, remote sensing, and other geotechnology programs, most of which were founded by departments of geography (see Geographic Information Systems). But it should be remembered that the establishment of any academic department or program by no means should be considered permanent. If national and international societal and educational forces acting at any particular time result in low enrollments, departments are subject to closure. Even if they do have sufficient enrollment, departments and programs are entities subject to current university politics, personalities, and funding. In fact, one by one, Ivy League universities dropped their geography departments during the two decades following World War II, a trend that geography professors (Dobson 2007) noted with concern. Today, among the Ivy League universities, only Dartmouth retains its geography department.
Despite these concerns, most academic geography departments have thrived and grown over the past 25 years. This is due to the environmental movement, the expansion of geography in secondary schools (in the United States, particularly Advanced Placement human geography), and increasing demand for spatial thinking and geotechnology skills in the workforce (see Environmental Movement; Internet of Things). In addition, geographic thinking through the teaching of GIS technology and methods rapidly expanded into technical and trade colleges beginning in the late 1990s, such as in the American community college system. More recently, online instruction through massive open online courses (MOOCs) has also exposed many to geographic thought and skills: The first three offerings of Penn State’s Maps and the Geospatial Revolution course, for example, attracted nearly 100,000 students. Evidence exists that the expertise of geographers is increasingly sought by other departments and programs on campus, such as business and health.
Investigating a few departments of geography may aid in understanding the importance of the anchoring of a discipline in higher education. Penn State University, for example, offers a BA, a BS, an MS, and a PhD in geography. Research strands include geographic information sciences, human geography, environment and society, and physical geography. Forty-three faculty and staff currently serve in the department, and 106 undergraduate and 58 graduate students are enrolled. In the online geospatial education program, 35 faculty members are teaching and 1,075 students are enrolled. Texas State University’s geography department may be the largest in the United States in terms of the number of students, with 656 undergraduates and 104 graduate students.
The establishment of geography as a department in the academy was a revolution in the discipline. More than just a plaque on the new department’s door, geography now was a recognized discipline throughout academia. As a part of the academic establishment, geography is able to achieve much in research, development, and influence. Geography was recognized as having a research base and a way of looking at the world, and as offering value to academia and society.
See also: Environmental Movement; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Geographical Societies; Internet of Things; Mackinder, Halford; Quantitative Revolution; Ritter, Carl; Von Humboldt, Alexander
American Association of Geographers. 2015. The AAG Guide to Geography Programs in the Americas. http://www.aag.org/galleries/publications-files/20142015_Guide_to_Geography_Programs_in_the_Americas.pdf.
Dobson, Jerome E. 2007. “Bring Back Geography!” ArcNews. Spring. http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/spring07articles/bring-back-geography-1of2.html.
Throughout history, people have struggled with determining accurate locations for places on the planet. Of particular difficulty is the challenge of determining their own location. Geographers have grappled with this challenge and have played an important role in the evolution of devices and methods to determine location. This evolution took the tools from cross-staffs to navigational clocks and from surveying to radar (see Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices). The technology that represents the latest revolution in determining accurate positions on the Earth’s surface is the global positioning system, or GPS.
One could make a strong case that because the positions measured with GPS are far more accurate than any method that came before it, the development of GPS far eclipsed previous revolutionary moments in determining location. But each of the tools was equally groundbreaking for its time. Even the measurement and addressing system for the planet, latitude and longitude, had to first be determined, as did the shape and size of the Earth through the science of geodesy (see Latitude and Longitude; Surveying). But unlike with past tools such as the cross-staff and the sextant, GPS positions can be determined anywhere—in a canyon, in the middle of a city, on a mountaintop, on the ocean, or even in a moving vehicle or airplane. Furthermore, unlike the eccentricities of past devices that needed equipment that was individually produced, that required a great deal of expertise to set up and use, and that required a certain set of conditions to be met, such as a clear view of the stars at night, GPS requires nothing more than accessing the system. In addition, GPS can be accessed using a multitude of devices. These include low-end GPS receivers, a simple device on the dashboard of a car, and even an ordinary smartphone.
What’s more, the positions of other objects and phenomena—not just one’s current location—can be determined. This includes objects near to and far from the observer, as well as objects past and present. These objects (such as webcams, seismic and weather stations, and even vacant parking spots) are increasingly providing real-time signals indicating their positions, collectively making up a network where millions of things on the planet can be mapped and analyzed spatially (see Internet of Things).
GPS technology is built on earlier satellite navigation systems, including TRANSIT, which was used by the U.S. Navy, and the OMEGA worldwide radio navigation system. The first GPS satellite was launched in 1989, and the system was complete with the 24th satellite’s launch in 1994. GPS is a space-based navigation system constellation that as of late 2012 included 32 Earth-orbiting satellites, each housing stable and highly accurate atomic clocks. The orbits are arranged such that four are visible at all times to the operators of the ground receivers. GPS satellites emit high-frequency, low-powered radio signals. GPS is part of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), which also includes the Russian GLONASS system and, under development, China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, the Galileo system from the European Union, and India’s Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS). GNSS is sometimes also referred to as a satellite navigation system, or “satnav.”
The GPS system also includes a ground control system consisting of two master control stations, four ground antennae, and six ground monitor stations that keep the system in place. The ground receivers operated by scientists and citizens alike make up the third “user” segment of the system. GPS receivers contain an antenna tuned to the GPS satellite frequencies, processors, and a highly stable and accurate clock. GPS works through trilateration from the “spheres” that represent the distance between a receiver and each satellite that it can detect, through the familiar distance = rate × time formula. Through comparing the time that the signal arrived at the receiver with the time it was transmitted by each of the satellites visibile at any particular time, the receiver can calculate its three-dimensional position—latitude, longitude, and elevation. The system uses a fundamental concept in geography—distance, or more specifically, trilateration. From those distances, the angles to each satellite are computed, and once this is done, the angles and distances are used to obtain the position.
The United States’s GPS system’s official name is Navstar—Navigation System using Timing And Ranging. It was comceived in the 1970s, operational by the military in the 1980s, and had spread to scientific use by the 1990s. On May 1, 2000, U.S. president Clinton signed an executive order authorizing the removal of a random error code called “Selective Availability.” Suddenly, the spatial accuracy of even low-end GPS receivers improved from 100 meters to 3 or 4 meters. Within two days after Selective Availability was turned off, a five-gallon bucket was placed near 45° North latitude and 122° West longitude in Oregon, USA, by Dave Ulmer. The bucket contained a Delorme Topo USA 2 CD-ROM set, a cassette tape player, a George of the Jungle VHS tape, a Ross Perot book, four $1 bills, a slingshot handle, and a can of beans. When the coordinates were listed on the Internet and someone searched the Internet, wrote down the coordinates, and found Dave’s bucket, modern-day geocaching was born. Over the subsequent months and years, geocaching spawned a host of other location-based recreational activiites.
From 2000 to today, the spatial accuracy and availability of GPS continued to improve: The accuracy improved through the incorporation of triangulation between Wi-Fi hotspots and cell phone towers, differential GPS, and the Wide Area Augmentation System, among other techniques. The availability of GPS improved as receivers became smaller and smaller and embedded in thousands of objects. GPS technology enabled an enormous number of civilian uses in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, private industry, and research. This took several important forms.
First, GPS receivers, or chips, were embedded in an increasing number of everyday objects, so that the objects and the networks they were parts of could be tracked and the networks optimized for efficiency. This included light-rail and bus transit systems in urban areas; the location of ships and airplanes; stations that monitored current weather, streamflow, and earthquake and volcanic activity; precision agriculture; emergency services; banking; and the operation of power grids. By the second decade of the 21st century, an increasing amount of data—such as photographs, videos, social media posts, and data logs—became geotagged, meaning that it contained location information. This has led to the geo-enablement of information, rapidly fueling the “big data” era—the era of truly massive amounts of data. A gigabyte (one billion bytes) and a terabyte (one trillion bytes) of data were considered large not long ago, but today, petabytes (one quadrillion bytes), exabytes (one quintillion bytes), and zettabytes (one sextillion bytes) of data are increasingly manipulated and visualized.
Second, Earth observations that used locations gathered with GPS technology were increasingly used, particularly by geographers, but also by other scientists in biology, oceanography, and other fields. These include observations on the ground but also those collected by airplane and satellite through remote sensing (see Remote Sensing). All of these can be mapped in a geographic information system (GIS), which is already firmly anchored in and dependent upon real-world coordinates and thus easily able to ingest these locations (see Geographic Information Systems).
Third, with the advent of cloud-based GIS, GPS-gathered location data can now be used in conjunction with social media, so that often the first news about a world event comes from ordinary people located where that event is occurring, rather than an established news agency, through geo-enabled tweets, YouTube videos, or Instagram posts that ordinary citizens are posting (see Citizen Science; Social Media).
The transformation of daily life through GPS is nothing short of revolutionary. First, GPS has made maps and locations available to millions—even billions—on a daily basis. People now regularly depend on GPS to navigate in their own cities but also through unfamiliar ones in which they travel. Second, GPS has become a fundamental technology that enables modern society to function—from electrical energy to mass transportation and beyond. Third, GPS has altered the way in which people think about and interact with maps and location. While stories of people blindly following the directions given by their GPS into a swamp or off a cliff regularly appear in the news media, the advent of these geotechnologies has transformed the way people and whole societies interact and work. GPS has also fostered concerns about location privacy—the potential adverse consequences of making one’s own location and movements known.
The impact of GPS technology on geography has also been transformational. Geographers have always been concerned about location, so if there was ever a technology that was perfectly suited to geographers, GPS is that technology. The observations about people and the environment that geographers have long collected became much more easily mapped and analyzed geographically. This includes the analyis of oil spills (through GPS-enabled ocean buoys), the impacts of logging, animal migration, water quality, urban neighborhood change, and virtually every other geographic research topic.
GPS, GIS, and remote sensing have rapidly become a “nervous system” for the planet—very soon there will be very few places on the planet that cannot be monitored and mapped. It is hoped that these technologies will bring about increased geographic literacy and smarter, more efficient, and more sustainable decision-making from the local to the global scale. In geography education, studies include how GPS has influenced how people interact with maps, space, and place, and how it alters people’s perception of and connection to community and global issues.
See also: Citizen Science; Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Internet of Things; Latitude and Longitude; Remote Sensing; Social Media; Surveying
Bednarz, Sarah. 2004. “Geographic Information Systems: A Tool to Support Geography and Environmental Education?” GeoJournal 60: 191–199.
Grubbs, Bruce. 2014. Exploring with GPS: A Practical Field Guide for Satellite Navigation. Flagstaff, AZ: Bright Angel Press.
Pain, Rachel. 2004. “Social Geography: Participatory Research.” Progress in Human Geography 28 (5): 652–663.
The mounted globe . . . is the only one of all instruments whose frequent usage delights astronomers, leads geographers, confirms historians, enriches and improves legists [les legists], is admired by grammarians, guides pilots, in short, aside from its beauty, its form is indescribably useful and necessary for everyone.
—Gemma Frisius, Netherlands cartographer, mathematician, and instrument maker, in Principiis de astronomiae et cosmographiae, 1530
Frisius’s praise of globes serves as a reminder that globes have long been regarded both as useful and beautiful. In terms of their utility, from ancient times, globes have been used to model the world. The depiction of the Earth as a physical spherical shape was a revolutionary idea in geography. Not only could the world be depicted as it really is—or as it was thought to be at the time of the globe’s creation—but it also could be used for research, instruction, and navigation. It could be used to depict new discoveries by those traveling over land and sea, and indeed, globes changed a great deal from Frisius’s time to today. It also subtly changed geographic thinking. First, as globes became more common, they banished most lingering thoughts that the Earth was anything but a sphere (or close to a sphere; see Surveying). More importantly, to all who gazed upon them and ran their fingers over them, they gave some sense of awe and wonder at the size and the diversity of the Earth, and that awe and wonder encouraged some to study it and others to explore it. Globes gave some sense that the world could be understood through exploration, gathering data, and mapping that data through geography, geology, biology, oceanography, and other disciplines. In addition, they also gave people the idea that humans could have domination over the globe—through the building of dams, the construction of cities, the conversion of land for agriculture and grazing, and much more.
Two thousand years ago, Strabo reported that Crates of Mallos possessed a globe that was over three meters in diameter (see Strabo). The oldest surviving globe was made by Martin Behaim, a German navigator and geographer employed by King João of Portugal in 1492. This globe not only includes known lands, but also lands newly explored by contemporary navigators, along with information on commodities, marketplaces, and trading protocols; thus, like many globes, it includes thematic content and not simply political and physical features. Globes also increasingly reflected their utility for navigational purposes. Flemish cartographer Mercator, for example, included rhumb lines on his globe of 1541 (see Mercator, Gerardus). Rhumb lines are imaginary lines on the surface of the Earth that cut across all meridians at the same angle, and they are used as the standard method for plotting a ship’s course on a map, chart, or globe. By the 18th century, some people believed that globes were useful only as explanatory devices and not scientific ones; according to Joseph Priestley of the Royal Society, globes, “like books, have no uses more extensive than the view of human ingenuity” (Priestley 1761). However, globes continued to be used to record discoveries and were used in training navigators and astronomers.
From the 15th century onward, the art and the beauty of globes were highly admired, and globes began to be exchanged as gifts among important rulers and the wealthy throughout Europe. Indeed, the increased demand for globes began because of their art more than their science, and globemakers began making very handsome globes indeed. Both terrestrial and celestial globes were made, showing the Earth and the stars, respectively. In England, Joseph Moxon first produced pocket globes in 1673. In 1693, a terrestrial globe made by Moden, Berry, and Lea reflected the dilemma that globemakers were experiencing: New data arriving from global explorers was often contradictory, and often it went against previous globes or traditional Greek or medieval writings. How could globemakers determine which sources to trust? This question sounds strikingly modern in the 21st-century world of thousands of mapped data sources appearing daily from established mapping organizations and citizen scientists. The depiction of California as an island on world maps from the early 1500s to the early 1700s attests to the difficulty that cartographers often had in sorting out fact from fiction. Over time, experience and observation were valued over ancient sources, and thus globemaking and mapmaking reflected and also hastened the Renaissance. The lines on the globes had to wait, in part, for latitude and longitude to be standardized for the planet (see Latitude and Longitude).
Globes have also been used to create maps. Franciscan monk Vincenzo Coronelli is considered one of the greatest globemakers of all time. Coronelli received training in xylography, a relief printing technique using wood and ink. After constructing a pair of enormous globes measuring over 3.6 meters in diameter for Louis XIV during the 1680s, he set up a factory for globemaking at his monastery in Venice. These were made of spindles of bent timber, plaster, fabric, and ink. While there, he even founded the oldest surviving geographical society, the Accademia Cosmografica delgi Argonauti. From a series of his extensive globes, and the gores—the triangular pieces used to create globes—he produced a world map in 1701 in his book Libro dei Globi. This map gave prospective purchasers an easier—and flat—way of viewing his globes before buying one. The map is highly detailed and focuses on recent French exploration—not surprisingly, given that his audience was often French—including La Salle’s journey from Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi River in 1691–1692. By the time he died in 1718, Coronelli had created dozens of globes, hundreds of maps, and a six-volume encyclopedia, Biblioteca Universale Sacro-Profana.
A chief advantage that globes have always had is that they could depict and model the planet in a way that no flat map on paper, wood, or other material could do: as a three-dimensional sphere. One could argue for that reason that they also are more realistic than a modern 2D digital map from a GIS. However, their chief disadvantages are closely related—because they are 3D objects, they are difficult to transport, reproduce, and store. Globes were, however, still occasionally used in the field, even in modern times, such as the Starfinder globe made by Cary & Company around 1925. This was a small globe and a celestial one, meaning that it was used to help identify stars to aid seafaring navigation. By the end of the 19th century, globes were made portable in umbrella shapes and in puzzle formats so that they could be easily transported and used in schoolrooms. They were also mass-produced, so that even the ones that could not be taken apart found their way into at least one classroom in nearly every school in the developed world by 1900. Images from the first space flights during the 1960s brought renewed interest in globes as, for the first time, visual confirmation was received of the shapes that had been drawn on globes for centuries.
In the early 21st century, globes remain as ubiquitous in schools and in many universities today as ubiquitous as the blackboard or whiteboard. Replogle, 1-World, DuraGlobes, Rand McNally, and other companies still make globes to meet global demand. Many of these globes show the world’s political boundaries, but others show the topographic relief of landmasses and the ocean floor, or plate boundaries, earthquakes, and volcanoes, or historical routes of the explorers, major battles, or other themes. A few companies, including Bellerby & Co., and Greaves & Thomas in the UK, still make globes by hand using plaster spheres, papering them and painting them in the time-honored tradition. But with the advent of the digital age, companies such as Pufferfish are combining spatial data, visualization, remote sensing, and GIS to create digital globes that can display the Earth in hundreds of different themes, as well as other planets and moons. Globes also found a home in Web mapping tools—3D globes such as ArcGIS Earth, Google Earth, and NASA WorldWind provide tools and data that allow geographers and other scientists, as well as the general public, to browse the planet effortlessly through clicks on a computer mouse (see Web Mapping).
See also: Latitude and Longitude; Mercator, Gerardus; Strabo; Surveying, Web Mapping
Perkins, Emma. 2009. “A Celebration of Navigation: Famous Voyages Depicted on a Globe,” in Explore Whipple Collections. Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge.
Priestley, Joseph. 1761. Rudiments of English Grammar, Adapted to the Use of Schools, with Observations on Style. London: R. Griffiths.
Sumira, Sylvia. 2014. The Art and History of Globes. London: The British Library Publishing Division.
Many of the revolutionary moments in this book have to do with mapping. Indeed, making and reading maps has always been one of the primary activities of geographers throughout the ages. But creating the map is not typically the end goal; the end goal, rather, is to understand what is being mapped. This was the goal in one of the most ambitious mapping projects ever envisioned and undertaken: the Great Trigonometric Survey of India.
An 1870 map showing the triangles and transects used in the Great Trigonometric Survey. This painstaking and accurate survey made possible the modernization of India, though not without controversy, and advanced cartography, geodesy, and geography throughout the world. (SSPL/Getty Images)
It was “the longest measurement of the Earth’s surface ever to have been attempted. Its [2,575 kilometers] of inch-perfect survey took nearly 50 years, cost more lives than most contemporary wars, and involved equations more complex than any in the pre-computer age” (Keay 2001).
Why did the Great Trigonometric Survey (GTS) consume so much time and so many resources? Physical geography played a huge role. India is one of the most physically diverse places on Earth, and its canyons, forests, marshes, plains, and mountains would have been enough of a landscape challenge, but there was a climatic challenge as well: winds, heat, cold, and its famous torrential monsoon rains. Furthermore, the animal life of the region, ranging from boa constrictors to Bengal tigers to scorpions, literally stopped many surveyors in their tracks. Malaria also took its toll. The cultural geography was also challenging—hundreds of languages were spoken in the area mapped, and much of the land was already densely populated. The scientific challenges were also great: Some instruments weighed a half-ton. They all had to be kept dry, even in monsoons. Pre-GPS-era surveying depended on line-of-sight observations. In India, to clear the heavy vegetation and canyon walls, surveyors had to stand on flimsy platforms that were 90 feet above the ground, or on hillsides or mountain peaks that might be facing blizzard conditions or whiteouts. Masonry benchmarks had to be established along the surveyed lines, some over 15 meters high.
Political geography was another challenge: The survey was initiated by India’s occupying country, Great Britain. Many local people knew that to survey the land meant understanding the land, mapping the land, and controlling the land—their land. Naturally they were not friendly to these occupying surveyors and the army and country that they represented. The mysterious character of the instruments and operations, as well as the planting of flags and signals, naturally awakened the apprehensions or excited the jealousy of the local and regional rulers and princes. The surveyors required, therefore, extraordinary tact, firmness, and patience in order to negotiate their goodwill and safe passage through the areas they controlled. Transportation included foot, canoe, horse, elephant, and camel. Control of the project was eventually transferred to the government of India in 1818. The fact that many surveyors acquired land and became rich also did not sit well with the Indian people.
The survey was piloted and initially run by William Lambton, later by George Everest (yes, the same one for whom the mountain is named), and later supervised by others. The survey was revolutionary for the challenges it faced and overcame, and for its accomplishments, which included the demarcation of the British territories in India, obtaining the measurement of the height of the Himalayas (including Mount Everest, K2, and Kanchenjunga), and taking one of the first accurate measurements of a section of an arc of longitude and a major portion of the Earth’s surface. From an initial survey at Cape Comorin in the south, it ran nearly 2,400 kilometers north to the Himalayas. This created a backbone of accurately mapped points in chains across the length and breadth of the country, the basis for an accurate map.
From the backbone, surveyors created and measured triangles, using trigonometry. To create each surveyed point, they needed locations that could be seen from at least two previously visited places, but in reality, they needed more than that, to act as checks on the core measurements. From these triangles, more detailed land parcels were mapped. The field mapping was often done on a detailed scale of 4 inches (10 cm) to the mile (1.6 km).
The GTS, a project of the larger Survey of India, began on April 10, 1802, with the measurement of a baseline near Madras. Major Lambton’s selection of a plain seemed like an easy place to start, but measuring that first baseline of just 7.5 miles (12.1 kilometers) required 57 days! From Britain, surveyors hauled a 36-inch theodolite, which was a surveying instrument with a rotating telescope for measuring horizontal and vertical angles, weighing half a ton (see Field Collection Devices). A 100-foot steel chain had to be laid out, rolled up, and moved to each point. No ordinary chain, it consisted of 40 links that had to be kept out of the sun and under constant tension. The distance measured from coast to coast (360 miles, or 580 km) took four years to complete. This initial baseline had to be measured with meticulous accuracy, since it would be the basis for all of the subsequent surveying work. Corrections were applied for things such as the curvature of the Earth, the fact that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, temperature, refraction, gravitational influence of mountains on pendulums, and elevation. From this initial survey, over 3,700 square miles (9,583 square kilometers) were surveyed. At times, the cartographic survey party numbered over 700 people.
Cartography in India in the 19th century was the most advanced cartography in the world. No other countries, including Great Britain, were mapped as detailed and accurately as India was being mapped at the time. There was a strong element of control in the effort to map South Asia. As Ian Barrow states, “The Survey not only helped the state gather information and knowledge, it also . . . added legitimacy to colonial rule by making it seem that this form of science in India would not only result in India’s progress but would also improve geodesy” (Barrow 2003). In 1804, a test of a line of nearly 159 miles (257 km) showed that the computed and measured lengths of this line differed by only 3.7 inches (9.4 centimeters)!
The survey was also revolutionary because from it, the first accurate maps of portions of the Himalayas were made (see Surveying). This not only included the mountains, lakes, ice fields, and valleys but also the latitude and longitude of each peak and, even more impressively, its elevation. None of the peaks had been climbed yet, and due to the political situation at the time, surveyors could get no nearer than 108 miles (174 km) away. The surveyors viewed peaks from many different locations and calculated horizontal and vertical angles to obtain the height from those locations. Their averages resulted in a height of 29,000 feet for Mt. Everest. Thinking the number implausibly perfect, they added two feet and reported it as 29,002 feet high. Their map credits the Bengali mathematician Radhadanth Sikdar for the arithmetic. With today’s technology, the figure has been adjusted to 29,029; this is equivalent to an error of five feet in one mile—a remarkable feat. The results were published in 1856, though at the time, none of the surveying crew knew that Everest was the highest mountain.
It is not known whether George Everest actually saw with his own eyes the mountain that now bears his name. However, Andrew Waugh, his successor as Surveyor General, extended Everest’s triangulation network to locate the mountain’s summit. Waugh’s admiration of Everest’s achievements led to the naming of Peak XV in the Himalayas: “Here is a mountain most probably the highest in the world without any local name that I can discover,” he wrote, proposing to “perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of geographical research . . . Everest” (Waugh 1857).
Through the Great Trigonometric Survey, surveyors were able to map the entire Indian subcontinent and were also able to contribute to the development of roads, railways, telegraphs, and, later, telecommunications. Modern India was thus shaped in part from this mapping effort. India as a country would never be the same. The survey’s painstaking accuracy set the tone and the standard for all surveys to follow, and indeed for the entire profession of surveying and mapping. The survey of India was controversial—many of the region’s people knew that mapping the country was a precursor to dominating it, and they were right: It would be almost another century before India would achieve independence from Great Britain. The survey resulted in the first accurate measurements of the Himalayas, advanced cartography and geodesy, advanced the knowledge of India, and even advanced knowledge of the exact shape of Planet Earth.
See also: Field Collection Devices; Surveying
Barrow, Ian J. 2003. Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Danvers, F. C. 2010. “The Trigonometrical Survey.” http://wgbis.ces.iisc.ernet.in/biodiversity/sahyadri/wgbis_info/trigonometrical_survey.htm.
Edney, Matthew. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Keay, John. 2001. The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named. New York: Harper Collins.
Markham, Clements R. 1878. A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 2nd ed. London: W. H. Allen and Co. http://archive.org/details/memoirontheindia025502mbp.
Root, Mary M. 2004. “Sir George Everest and the Survey of India.” http://www.surveyhistory.org/sir_george_everest1.htm.
Roy, Rama Deb. 1986, January. “The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in a Historical Perspective.” Indian Journal of History of Science 21 (1): 22–32.
Waugh, Andrew Scott. 1857. “Papers Relating to the Himalaya and Mount Everest.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London IX (April–May): 345–351.
Imagine having a landform named after you. That’s exactly what happened to Arnold Henry Guyot (1807–1884), a Swiss American geologist and geographer. “His” landform was named due to Guyot’s lifelong work in physical geography.
As detailed elsewhere in this book, revolutionary moments sometimes are the result of a lifelong partnership between two collaborators. In the case of Guyot, his lifelong friendship with glaciologist and geologist Louis Agassiz proved beneficial to the development of the theories of both of these scientists, as well as to the disciplines of geology and geography.
Guyot, originally from Switzerland, moved to Berlin, where he received his PhD from the Berlin Botanical Garden. His dissertation was a foreshadowing of his life’s work, as it focused on the natural classification of lakes. A third revolutionary scientist was key here—Guyot’s invitation to the Garden was from none other than Alexander von Humboldt, whose work led to the foundations of modern biogeography, physical geography, and meteorology. And like other revolutionary thinkers in geography, spending time in the field was an important part of the development of Guyot’s theories. His first fieldwork was a six-week investigation of glaciers in Switzerland. From that experience, along with four years of travel throughout Europe, came revolutionary observations about glacial motion and structure. Guyot claimed that rather than moving uniformly, glaciers moved more rapidly at their tops and at their centers than at their bottoms and sides. Guyot’s studies were critical to the development of physical geography as a discipline.
Oblique aerial photograph of the terminus of Bear Glacier, Kenai Mountains, Alaska, August 2007. Guyot and Agassiz advanced the research and instruction of physical geography, as well as geology, paleontology, and meteorology, through their meticulous attention to fieldwork, and their promotion of the theory that the Earth had been subjected to ice ages in the not-too-distant past. (U.S. Geological Survey Department of the Interior/USGS)
Guyot had a keen interest in all levels of education. At the Massachusetts Board of Education, he instructed those training to be geography teachers; he also served as professor of physical geography and geology at Princeton University. He also founded the museum at the university, contributing many of the specimens from his own collections.
He overcame the challenge of the closing of his department at Neuchâtel Academy in Switzerland by moving to Cambridge in the United States. He also overcame disappointment as a result of his failure to publish much of his work, when others—even his contemporary Agassiz—received all the credit. But shortly before his death, a short summary of Guyot’s contribution to Agassiz’s Système Glaciaire was published.
Why was Guyot so revolutionary, besides his work on glaciers? First, he perfected a plan of a national system of meteorological standards. Standards in measurement of phenomena in physical and cultural geography are so taken for granted nowadays, but they are the foundation, the “language” that enables comparative research to be conducted. Guyot’s work in this area was so important that it became adopted by the Smithsonian Institution, and it also led to the establishment of the United States Weather Bureau, known today as the National Weather Service. Furthermore, to determine the best locations for the country’s weather stations, he undertook a systematic topographical survey of the entire Appalachian region, from Vermont to North Carolina. This occurred before the advent of advanced means of transportation, or even suitable clothing for hiking, for that matter, and decades before advanced surveying equipment. Indeed, the U.S. Geological Survey was just forming as Guyot was completing his work. The completion of the survey took place in 1881 in New York’s Catskill Mountains, and when Guyot was over 74 years old.
Second, Guyot spread a new concept of fostering geographic education by means of field studies. To support this concept, he prepared, over 14 years, a series of textbooks and wall maps. These wall maps became very popular, and fieldwork became accepted as fundamental to the teaching and learning of geography.
And what of the landform named after Guyot? He did not live to see it happen, but nearly 80 years after he died, around 1960, Harry Hammond Hess named an underwater seamount with a flat top in his honor, and the name stuck. Interestingly, the study of these seamounts was instrumental in convincing the scientific community that the theory of plate tectonics was indeed what was actually occurring and was manifested in part by seafloor spreading.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, commonly known as Louis Agassiz, like Guyot, was born in Switzerland and during the same year (1807). Though Guyot outlived Agassiz by 11 years, Agassiz’s impact on geology and geography was arguably even greater. Like Guyot, Agassiz studied in Germany and later migrated to the United States, landing a post at Harvard in zoology and geology and making revolutionary contributions to both fields. Like Guyot, he began a museum at his university. Agassiz is considered the founder of glaciology. He was known for his meticulous classifications and observations, including those of fossils of extinct species, particularly fish (ichthyology). Later in life, he journeyed to Brazil and collected more than 80,000 fish specimens from the Amazon. He was the only person who named two fossil species after Mary Anning, who had found an ichthyosaur at age 12 and went on to become an important thinker about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth, and she became a paleontologist during a time when women generally were not acknowledged for their scientific work.
Agassiz began a revolution in geography by being the first to propose that the Earth had gone through an ice age in its past. Going further than contemporaries who described the movement of glaciers in Switzerland, Agassiz added to the theories concluding that in the recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland, largely buried under one vast sheet of ice. During the same year (1840), he and William Buckland found clear evidence that Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland had also been under great sheets of ice. These conclusions and his publications inspired others to study glaciers and glacial landscapes all over the world. During his time, the prevailing opinion in geologic studies was that higher temperatures in the past hindered glaciation. Agassiz, by contrast, viewed glaciation as part of a long cooling trend of Planet Earth, and he maintained that between periods of uniform temperature were shorter periods of mass extinctions. Therefore, he combined uniformity with a certain catastrophism that explained the extinction of specific types of fauna, such as dinosaurs.
During his extensive university career, he had a profound effect on geography, geology, paleontology, glaciology, and anatomy, through his writings but also by teaching scores of students who would go on to become influential scientists. Long before Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson, Agassiz was one of the first scientists to become popular with the general public. He resisted Darwin’s theories on evolution, even though Darwin claimed that much of his own research was confirmed and encouraged by the writings of Agassiz. And even Agassiz’s attacks on evolution provided evolutionary biologists with insights. Some of his claims had little evidence, and others actually have been shown to be wrong. He also often failed to recognize others who had contributed to his own research. Despite his flaws, Agassiz’s influence was enormous.
During Agassiz’s life, he developed a reputation for his highly demanding teaching style. It is alleged that he would “lock a student up in a room full of turtle-shells, or lobster-shells, or oyster-shells, without a book or a word to help him, and not let him out till he had discovered all the truths which the objects contained” (James 1896). In 1855, Agassiz launched his greatest project to that point: He began a 10-volume set called Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. He planned to do in the United States what von Humboldt had done in Europe—write a comprehensive natural history. The first two volumes appeared in 1857 to tremendous anticipation. However, reviews were mixed, and while he did write four volumes in all, the entire set was never completed.
Agassiz also had several landforms named after him, on Earth, on the moon, on Mars, and in the asteroid belt, and various species of beetles and tortoises. But one cannot visit the largest landform named after Agassiz, because Lake Agassiz no longer exists: It was an ancient glacial lake that was the precursor to the modern Great Lakes of North America. It was Agassiz’s concrete statue at Stanford University that notoriously plummeted head first into the ground during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, prompting the university’s president, David Starr Jordan, to write, “Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that ‘Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete’” (Jordan 1906).
See also: Von Humboldt, Alexander; Wegener, Alfred
Agassiz, Louis. 1837. “Upon Glaciers, Moraines, and Erratic Blocks; Being the Address Delivered at the Opening of the Helvetic Natural History Society, at Neuchatel, on the 24th of July 1837, by Its President, M. L. Agassiz.” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 24 (Oct. 1837–April 1838): 364–383. http://books.google.com/books?id=2yEAAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA364#v. (Accessed April 21, 2016.)
Bennett, Matthew M., and Neil F. Glasser, eds. 2009. Glacial Geology: Ice Sheets and Landforms. New York: Wiley.
Cooper, Lane. 1917. Louis Agassiz As a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His Methods of Instruction. Ithaca, NY: The Comstock Publishing Company.
Guyot, Arnold H. 1849. Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in Its Relation to the History of Mankind, translated from the French by Cornelius Conway Felton. Boston: Ayer.
Irmscher, Christoph. 2013. Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
James, William. 1896. Louis Agassiz, Words Spoken at the Reception of the American Body of Naturalists, 30 December 1896. Quoted in Cooper, Lane. 1917. Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His Method of Instruction. Ithaca, NY: The Comstock Publishing Company.
Jordan, David Starr. 1906. “Stanford University and the Earthquake of April 18, 1906.” Pacific Monthly 15 (6): 635–646.
Montgomery, Keith. 2015. “Episode: Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1837–1838,” in “The Development of the Glacial Theory, 1800–1870.” University of Wisconsin–Marathon County. https://www1.umn.edu/ships/glaciers/Agassiz.htm.
