Guessing place

Image above: GeoGuessr website - a look at the characteristics of the environment and quessing location. The marvel of Google Streetview! Not the shadow of the Google camera.

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Email contact:
manning@chariot.net.au


GeoGuessr: an interesting approach to the skill of observation and identifying place.

The excellent GeoGuessr site is a way to engage students with identifying the characteristics of the environment and in many cases logging into the nature of a place.

GeoGuessr is a web-based geographic discovery game which utilizes random Google Street View locations and requires players to guess their location in the world using only the clues visible in Street View. GeoGuessr quickly became popular after it was released on 9 May 2013.

The Street View window of GeoGuessr does not provide any information beyond the street view itself. Things such as road signs, vegetation, businesses, climate, and landmarks have been suggested as some clues which may help the player determine his or her location. The player may also move about along the roads through the normal directional controls provided by Street View. Once the player is ready to guess the location, a location marker is placed on a zoom-able Google Map. After the marker is placed, GeoGuessr reveals the true geographic location and assigns the player between 0 and 6500 points, depending on how far away the player's guess was. A new location is then provided to the player, and this process repeats until the player has guessed five locations

Of particular interest to the geography classroom is the capacity of the site to really develop the geographical observation skills of students. These observation skills are fundamental to the inquisitive nature of geography and require students to identify the visual cues found in the Streetview image - both of the physical and human environment. Students need to look at every aspect of the image and ask a huge number of questions in an attempt to locate the image in space on the World map.
As well as being fun, engaging and challenging, this site can also help students to identify the physical and human characteristics of a place, not to mention the aspects of space seen in the image.

Here is a recent blog on how to use GeoGuessr in the classroom.

More than a blog map!

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project

Spatialworlds website

21st Century Geography Google Group

Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website

Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website

Email contact

manning@chariot.net.au

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Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'

More than a blog map!  Made for spatial analysis.

The programs Revolver Maps and ClustrMaps are some of the fabulous representations of data available free to website and blog site managers.  The Spatialworlds blog has been using these programs as gadgets to log and represent usage of the site for the past 18 months.  The Spatialworlds blog has had over 11488 hits and over 52 000 pageviews from 135 countries in that time.  As I repeatedly look at and review the Revolver Maps and ClustrMaps on the front page of the Spatialworlds site, I have started to think that these maps are a really a great opportunity to undertake some spatial analysis in line with the Space concept from the Australian Curriculum: Geography as previously discussed on this blog.  The curriculum defines the concept of Space as:

“Geographers think spatially: they examine location, and the distribution and pattern of human and natural features, and they engage with the spatial arrangement of those features.”

The Revolver Maps and ClustrMaps offer the opportunity to explore distribution and patterns through the location and quantification of the hits on the site from around the worlds.  The Revolver map of October 2012 displayed above shows;

• high concentration of hits in Europe, US, India, New Zealand Phillipines, Japan 
• greatest concentration of hits in Eastern US 
• moderate hit levels in Eastern Central South America and Eastern South Africa
• linear representation of hits on the eastern side of Australia and Africa
• large vacant spaces in Central, Western and Northern South America, Central and Northern Africa, Central and Western Australia, and Northern North America
• minimal ‘hit activity’ or distribution spread in China and Russia.

Adding the quantifiable representation of dot maps provided by the Revolver Maps data bases and the ClustrMaps dot map (shown above), we observe that the greatest number of hits come from the US, Canada, UK, India, South Africa

Such analysis of the distribution and frequency of hits provided by the maps leads to the next opportunity for meaningful spatial analysis; to use the geographical skill I referred to as the 'whyabouts’ (for the geographer to ask questions related to the Why of the Where?) in a previous Spatialworlds skills posting. This skill involves asking questions such as why:

• the high hit levels in Eastern US, Europe and along the coast of Eastern Australia
• so few hits and lack of distribution in China and Russia
• so few hits in most of Africa and Western South America
• the blog is so popular in the Phillipines, India and only parts of South America.

It is not the purpose of this blog to definitively answer these ‘whyabouts’ questions but it can be said that the answers to these questions are to be found in the exploration of political, physical, social, development and economic geography of these places of the globe. To find possible reasons for the distribution and frequency of such representations would be an interesting and meaningful classroom exercise/assignment for students.

Through the eyes of a geographer, such representation of hits created by the Revolver Maps and ClustrMaps programs show much more than just the spread of technology around the world. Through the patterns, distribution and frequency of the representations, the programs tell us quite a lot about the physical and cultural nature of the places of our earth. These representations many of us use and enjoy looking at are a rich resource to view the concept of not only Space but also Place for students.

Part 4 of Watch this space: Space, more than just spatial science

Left image: Petrel Cave, Victor Harbor.
Right image: Setting sun over Sydney Harbour.

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'


Space, more than just spatial science

Nick Hutchinson, AGTA's “thinker in residence”, contends in his excellent paper, Space: moving beyond spatial science to engage Australian students with Asian geography that “geography is much, much more than the branch of science concerned with identifying and describing the Earth, utilising spatial awareness to try and understand why things exist in specific locations.”

In the paper Nick highlights the current debates about space in contemporary human geography and suggests that such a perspective/s should have significant implication for geography teachers and the Australian Curriculum, Geography.

Nick has for some time been discussing the nature and complexity of space beyond the mechanistic view. In his paper Nick describes and analyses the myriad of perspectives which have been developed by academic geographers to discuss the nature of space in geography. At the beginning of his paper Nick provides a view of the space concepts as many of us see it.

“Space is one of the more important geographical ideas. It is a highly complex term
that is used and understood in a variety of ways (Crang & Thrift, 2000, 1). It is most commonly thought of as a great expanse extending in all directions, a vast canvas on which geographers work to describe the earth, and an expanse that extends from personal space to the global. Within this vast space, or over portions of it, all material objects are located. This is the space of explorers, map makers, field study, and of Geographical Information System analysis. This is the geographer’s palette where they work on the assumption that where things are located in space has some significance.”

Nick highlights the criticism of spatial science which focusses on our desire to construct human geography as an autonomous science of the spatial. There is a growing need for geographers to emphasise the importance of incorporating social relations and processes into spatial analysis. Indeed, space has began to be thought of as something that is produced by human activity. By the 1980s space was ‘seen not merely as an arena in which social life unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social relationships are produced and reproduced'. (Gregory & Urry, 1985, 3).

It is the human perspective of space that Nick considers needs to have greater credence in our thinking about space. Nick actually quotes the definition of space I developed in trepidation in a previous Spatialworlds posting. I agree my definition is very mechanistic in nature and after reading Nick’s article I feel that there is room to move the definition out of the science approach to a more humanistic perspective.

As Nick says:
“geography is much, much more than the branch of science concerned with identifying and describing the Earth, utilising spatial awareness to try and understand why things exist in specific locations.”

In no way could I do justice to Nick’s well researched and analytical article (will try to give a reference to it when Nick puts it on-line) but I think it is useful to highlight and provide links to some of the key space concepts and subordinate concepts Nick highlights in his discussion and articulation of space.

Absolute space (subordinate concepts: spatial patterns, location, spatial association, spatial interaction, movement, network, nodes, hierarchies, spatial distributions, spatial structure and organisation, spatial, relationships, directional orientation, distance, relative position)

Social space (subordinate concepts: socially-produced space, conceived space, spaces of representation, perceived space, spatial practice, lived space, representational space)

Thirdspace (subordinate concepts: spatiality, Firstspace, Secondspace, Thirdspace, ‘making of geographies’, ‘out of place’ people) Thirdspace is to be explored spatially, ‘to improve the world in some significant way’. The concept of thirdspace can be broadly used to highlight the ‘othering’ of geographical space and social spatiality.
Read more on thirdspace

Space given meaning by human endeavour (subordinate concepts: ‘time–space compression’, space of flows, Dreaming spaces and learning tracks, personal space, virtual space, real space.)

Relative space (subordinate concepts: relative space, topological space, relative space, ‘time–space compression)

Relational space (subordinate concepts: fluid space, social space, Cartesian and
Euclidian space, the nature of space, conceptualisations of space, space as a Conjuncture

Nick's article focusses on a new way of looking at space, with the subordinate concepts: spaces shaped by social relations, social relations shaped by space–‘geography matters’, power geometries, ready-made space, space in the making, hierarchies of power in space, scaled space, heterogeneous space, space under construction, bodily space and performative space being fascinating areas to investigate for teh geographer. For example, the authors of Living Geography look at futures, in terms of sustainable development, global dimensions: living in the wider world, applying geographical thinking to life, death and disease, as well as advocating the use of digital and spatial technologies to explore space.

So in summary, traditionally contemporary school geographies have dealt 'primarily with ‘absolute space’, the space that is broadly taken for granted in western societies and naively assumes sense of space as emptiness – but it is only one way in which space can be conceptualised.’ Nick contends that this more complex, humanistic and open-ended view of space would provide a wonderful opportunity for school geography to develop a more sophisticated treatment of all that we study.

My question, as I struggled to understand some of the intellectualising on space; is how do we translate to the teachers and in turn students the complexity of this work on space without creating great confusion and irrelevance?

I agree with Nick when he says:

“Let us continue to scratch our heads, theorise and change our minds about the concept of space and the spatial…”
The fact that we have trouble creating a definitive definition for space is strength and adds to the richness of the discipline, a discipline always evolving and being re-interpreted. Such debate and discussion on a key concept can only add to the quality of geography in schools but we must keep touch with the realities of everyday teaching and learning in school geography.