Geography

     Geography really does encompass any and all topics you could possibly think of.  I think Reddit user the60thparallel sums it up nicely...when asked the question, "What is geography?" they make the case that it is more appropriate to ask "What isn't geography?" I think this is spot on. In fact, every module we have studied so far in this class could be considered geography. Political science? It is hard to separate geography from that field. History? How can you understand the events and people of the past and present without taking in to consideration space and place? Even psychology can be related back to geography; how we mentally perceive and create places, how our mental maps function, etc. The60thparallel says, "There is a spatial component to every aspect of this world," and I think this is what geography is all about. In geography you learn to think about how every little piece of the world works together as a system. There are no islands. We are constantly looking at both the big picture and the little picture, and everywhere in between. Scale is a word that gets used a lot in introductory courses; we learn about map scales at a relatively early age, and this same principle holds true in geography. There is always another of looking at an issue, and another way we can frame what we are looking at.
    This fall in Kent State's geography department, students can take a variety of classes: Community Landscapes, Memory and Heritage, GIS and Health, Environmental Justice, Conservation of Natural Resources, Marxism and Geography, Spatial Programming, Geography of East and Southeast Asia, and my favorite, Geography of Wine; the list goes on. Many students from other departments enroll in geography courses; and likewise, we as geography students were encouraged to explore courses out of our department. At the reference desk and in the Map Library, I've helped students in anthropology, geology, translation, and public health look for geographic information. And I've helped geography students look for information on public health and musicology research. It's a little ironic how infrequently geography students need maps from the map library.
    Of course geography IS also the study of places. Many geographers devote their research to studying a particular part of the world. Most of our introductions to geography involve a map or photographs of somewhere far away. National Geographic, though it may have forever biased many non-geographers to think that geography is just the study of places is a wonderful example of geography in action. Aside from telling people where they can find the magazine on our shelves, I can see the Education section of the webpage being a valuable tool to provide to education majors looking for resources to include in their lesson plans, where resources are organized by grade level. Is a patron going to be studying abroad next semester? I would direct them to the Travel section of the website to learn a little more about the culture they will be living and learning in.
    Taking things a step further, Atlantic Cities is a really cool website that features articles with a geographic mind. The articles here would be interesting to geographers and non-geographers alike, and one of my favorite things about it is that the news that gets featured here does such a good job of showing how place and space matters, while rarely seeming to get academic. Readers would have to go a step further and research the principles and concepts behind the events and developments, but if you want to show someone why geography matters, Atlantic Cities is the place to send them.
   

Websites that I frequently use or would use are:

http://wikimapia.org/ This one totes itself as a map version of Wikipedia; anyone can edit the map, just like OpenStreetMaps, but Wikimapia lets you take the process a little further by describing the feature in Wikipedia like articles. Its a great tool for simple discovery and exploration of your neighborhood, but I could see this a good resource for documenting and mapping geographic phenomena.

http://walking-papers.org/ Walking Papers is a DIY paper atlas creator. It allows you to print off detailed maps of an area, mark up your paper maps however you like, and then upload the marked-up maps back up to the server. The website introduces itself as a way to improve on OpenStreetMaps data, but I think this would be valuable for researchers who want to map phenomena on the ground without having to use expensive and sometimes un-intuitive GIS interfaces. This could be another form of grassroots mapping. One cool thing about geography is that many researchers are concerned about not only learning more about a phenomena, but spurring social justice through change. Maps allow us to record something that is happening and communicate it geogrtaphically to others.

http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/ OSGeo4W is a package of several high-quality opensource geospatial programs. The industry standard in GIS is ArcGIS, a software package from ESRI. It is high quality but very expensive. Students and faculty at Kent are entitled to a free license, but I think libraries should be investing more in implementing open source software whenever possible. QGIS and GRASS, as well as the other programs included in this package are very capable. If individuals, groups, or whole departments and institutions needed to use GIS and were unable to get access to proprietary software like ArcGIS, I would definitely recommend looking in to OSGeo4W.