Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
criminal justice system that labels an act as deviant in the fi rst
place; crime is a social defi nition. Geography also has practical
value in coping with crime. Most police forces are using GIS and
create maps of offences and crime scenes. Forensic psychologists
have used basic techniques such as centrographic analysis,
which generalizes upon sites at which offences occur, to profi le
the locations where serial offenders may be found. This is one
modern face of geography where both old and new methods and
intellectual traditions have been applied to a fresh and different
subject area.
Geographical meanings in literature and fi lm
A second vignette can be used to demonstrate the changing
meanings that underpin the subject matter of human geography.
There are well-known attempts to employ fi ctional literature
as a means of gaining insight into the places where their novels
were set. Charles Dickens, for example, throws parts of London
into sharp perspective and has a great deal to say about the
social condition of the people; Jane Austen sketches the lifestyles
of genteel, upper-class rural families at the end of the 18th
century; and Upton Sinclair portrayed the appalling conditions
under which the poorer people of Chicago lived in the early 19th
century. Similarly, works of art can be used to interpret a view
of landscapes. Constable's paintings of rural England represent
tranquillity and continuity; the Impressionists, such as Monet,
depicted the leisured classes of French society in the settings,
rural and coastal, where they resided or played. Sources of this
kind have always been used with caution. Novels, for example, are
works of fi ction and authors are not necessarily constrained by
adherence to real facts. Postmodernism opens up a more critical
view that applies not just to literature but also to narrative history.
The essential argument is that all 'facts' are not real but must be
seen relative to the writer and the values that he or she holds. Jane
Austen, for example, belongs to the stratum of society about which
she writes; her knowledge of other parts of the world and of its
societies is closely circumscribed.
