Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It is salutary to note that the largest annual meeting in the world
devoted to an aspect of geography is not organized by academic
geographers but by a private GIS company, the Environmental
Systems Research Institute. Ownership of the GIS/EO fi eld
threatens to move outside the discipline of geography to
specialized institutes, possibly to engineering departments of
universities and to government agencies. In many ways, this is a
healthy sign of a success story, and geography has no monopoly
over this increasingly vast enterprise. The important thing is to
retain a strong presence of GIS and EO within the discipline of
geography where it surely belongs. It has to be acknowledged,
however, that GIS and EO sit less comfortably in a discipline that
has experienced such radical changes since the decades of the
quantitative revolution when there were few challenges to the idea
of geography as a science.
Literacy
Perhaps the fi nal skill expected of geographers is 'literacy'.
That assumption has always been there and was present
in the trilogy of 'books, benches, and boots' that used to be
embedded in the minds of all geography undergraduates.
As 'benches' emphasized laboratory work, practical classes,
and cartographic and statistical skills, and 'boots' hammered
home the importance of fi eldwork and the 'fi eld' in general,
so 'books' drew students back to the fundamental need to
master the literature of their subject and be able themselves
to write it. Literacy of course is fundamental to all academic
disciplines and has no claims to be counted as a special
skill of geographers. Similarly, numeracy is widely used in
social sciences such as economics and psychology. What has
changed in recent years, and is clearly linked with the rise of
the new cultural geography, is that geographers, especially
human geographers, have been drawn into and are expected
to be familiar with areas of literature beyond their former
experience.
