Geographers ask where things are and why there. This unit is the toolkit for the rest of the course: the kinds of maps and what they distort, where geographic data comes from and how it's used, spatial concepts like distance decay, how people and environments shape each other, and how scale and regions change what you see.
Reference maps show where things are; thematic maps show patterns in data. Maps show absolute and relative distance and direction, clustering, dispersal and elevation. Every map is selective, and every projection distorts shape, area, distance or direction.
Geographic data is collected in the field by organizations and individuals, by geospatial technologies (GIS, satellite navigation, remote sensing, online mapping), and from written and visual sources like field observations, media reports, travel narratives, policy documents, interviews, landscapes and photos.
Census data, satellite imagery and other geospatial data guide decisions at every scale: personal, business, organizational and governmental. Those decisions have geographic effects.
Key spatial concepts are absolute and relative location, space, place, flows, distance decay, time-space compression and pattern.
Nature and society meet through sustainability, natural resources and land use. Thinking about that relationship moved from environmental determinism (environment controls culture) to possibilism (environment limits, people choose).
Geographers analyze at global, regional, national and local scales, and the same data can show different patterns, and support different interpretations, at different scales.
Regions are areas unified by one or more characteristics or by a pattern of activity. They are formal, functional or perceptual/vernacular, with boundaries that are transitional, often contested and overlapping, at local, national and global scales.