AP Human Geography: Early Map Makers, Key Concepts, and Map Types

Eratosthenes

The head librarian at Alexandria during the third century BC; one of the first cartographers (Greek). Accurately computed the earth's circumference, coined the phrase 'geography'.

Carl Sauer

From UC-Berkley, defined cultural landscape (results from interaction between humans and environment; no landscape has escaped alteration by humans).

Absolute Distance

The distance that can be measured with a standard unit of length.

Accessibility

The relative ease with which a destination may be reached from some other place.

Cartographic scale

Refers to the way the map communicates the ratio of its size to the size of what it represents.

Census

An official count or survey of a population, typically recording various details of individuals.

Clustered

Clustered together but not coherent.

Complementarity

The actual or potential relationship between two places, usually referring to economic interactions.

Connectivity

The degree of economic, social, cultural or political connection between two places.

Coordinate system

A standard grid, composed of lines of latitude and longitude, used to determine the absolute location of any object, place or feature on the earth's surface.

Dispersed

When a phenomenon is relatively far apart.

Elevation

Height above a given level, especially sea level.

Field Observation

Is used to refer to the act of physically visiting a location, place, or region and recording, firsthand, information there.

Friction of Distance

The measure of how much absolute distance affects the interaction between two places.

Geoid

The actual shape of the earth, which is rough and oblate, or slightly squashed; the earth's circumference is longer around the equator than it is along the meridians.

Global Scale

Set of digital maps that cover the whole globe to express the status of global environment.

Intervening Opportunities

The idea that one place has a demand for some good or service and two places have a supply of equal price and quality, then the closer of the two suppliers to the buyer will represent an intervening opportunity, thereby blocking the third from being able to share its supply of goods or services.

Landscape Analysis

The process of describing and interpreting the landscape ecology of an area.

Large-Scale

Relatively small ratio between map units and ground units. Large-scale maps usually have higher resolution and cover much smaller regions than small-scale maps.

Local Scale

Spatial region equivalent to that of a community.

Media Reports

In general, 'media' refers to various means of communication. For example, television, radio, and the newspaper are different types of media.

National Scale

Spatial region equivalent that that of a country.

Natural Landscape

The Physical landscape or environment that has not been affected by human activities.

Natural Resources

Materials or substances such as minerals, forests, water, and fertile land that occur in nature and can be used for economic gain.

Online Visualization

Use of sophisticated software to create dynamic computer maps, some of which are three-dimensional or interactive.

Photographic Interpretation

Acts of examining photographic images for the purpose of identifying objects and judging for their significance.

Policy Document

Specifies the rules, guidelines and regulations that your organization/country requires employees/citizens to follow.

Qualitative Data

Data associated with a more humanistic approach to geography, often collected through interviews, empirical observations, or the interpretation of texts, artwork, old maps, and other archives.

Quantitative Data

The value of data in the form of counts or numbers where each data-set has a unique numerical value associated with it.

Regional Scale

Interaction occurring within a region in a regional setting.

Relative Distance

A measure of distance that includes the costs of overcoming the friction of absolute distance separating two places, often describing the amount of social, cultural, or economic connectivity between two places.

Sense of place

Feelings evoked by people as a result of certain experiences and memories associated with a particular place.

Small-scale

Map scale ratio in which the ratio of units on the map to units on the earth is quite small, usually depicting large areas.

Spatial Perspective

An intellectual framework that looks at the particular locations of specific phenomena, how and why that phenomena is where it is, and how it is spatially related to phenomena in other places.

Sustainability

The concept of using the earth's resources in such a way that they provide for people's needs in the present without diminishing the earth's ability to provide for future generations.

Transferability

The costs involved in moving goods from one place to another.

Cartograms

Thematic Map that transforms space such that the political unit with the greatest value for some type of data is represented by the largest relative unit.

Choropleth map

Thematic Map that uses tones or colors to represent spatial data as average values per unit area.

Cognitive map

An image of a portion of the earth's surface that an individual creates in his or her mind, including knowledge of actual locations and relationships between locations as well as personal perceptions and preferences of particular places.

Conic projection

Type of map projection where direction is not constant and longitude lines converge at only one pole.

Distortion

The misrepresentation of shape, area, distance, or direction of or between geographic features when compared to their true measurements on the curved surface of the earth.

Dot maps

Thematic Map that shows precise locations of specific observations or occurrences, such as crimes, car accidents or births.

Isoline

Map line that connects points of equal or very similar values.

Preference map

Map that displays individual preferences for certain places.

Proportional / graduated symbol map

Thematic Map where the size of a chosen symbol, such as a circle or triangle, indicates the relative magnitude of some statistical value for a given geographic region.

Reference Map

A map that shows reference information for a particular place, making it useful for finding landmarks and for navigating.

Thematic Map

A type of map that displays one or more variables, such as population or income level, within a particular area.

Thematic Layers

Individual maps of specific features that are overlaid on one another in a GIS to understand and analyze a spatial relationship.

Topographic map

Maps that use Isolines to represent constant elevations, where walking along the path of an isoline keeps you at the same elevation.

Good-Homolosine

A pseudo cylindrical, equal-area, composite map projection used for world maps, presented with multiple interruptions, useful for presenting spatial distribution of phenomena.

Mercator Projection

A true conformal cylindrical map projection particularly useful for navigation because it maintains accurate direction, famous for its distortion of area that makes landmasses at the poles seem oversized.

Peters Projection

A world map projection in which areas are shown in correct proportion at the expense of distorted shape, using a rectangular decimal grid to replace latitude and longitude.

Robinson Projection

Projection that attempts to balance several possible projection errors, minimizing errors in area, shape, distance or direction.