Katie Algeo

Teaching Cultural Geography with Bend It Like Beckham

Abstract The British film Bend It Like Beckham (2002) is pedagogically useful in the cultural geography classroom for engaging students with core concepts, such as ethnicity, migration, acculturation, and assimilation, and with more advanced modes of analysis, such as the social construction of identity. Although the film depicts a particular ethnic community, British Sikhs in London, its representation of the betweenness of cultures is typical of the experience of many immigrants. This article provides background on Sikh religious belief, culture, and migration history to help viewers understand the rich cultural milieu depicted in the film. It models and provides suggestions for engaging students in critical analysis of the film in ways that highlight core cultural geography concepts.

Mammoth Cave and the Making of Place

Occupation, use, and symbolic construction of place in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky has resulted in five distinct eras of place-making during the past two hundred years. The connectedness of Mammoth Cave to the larger national stage is revealed through struggles over control and development that wrought successive transformations upon the cultural landscape. The symbolic import of the worlds largest cave altered as, in turn, resource extraction, tourism, and environmentalism became the dominant ideology influencing development in the Mammoth Cave region. This paper positions the process of placemaking at Mammoth Cave within the changing scene of American society and culture.

Underground tourists/tourists underground: African American tourism to Mammoth Cave.

Abstract This paper uses structuration theory and the methods of historical geography to explore the conditions in which a Jim Crow-era hotel run by and for American Americans flourished at the edge of one of the nineteenth centurys most popular tourist destinations, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. It identifies structures, legal and customary, that hindered African American travel, but also, in this particular region, other structures linked to early twentieth-century capitalism that allowed room for agency on the part of the hotels proprietors. It demonstrates the importance of understanding networks of social relations when undertaking micro-scale structuration analysis and contributes to our understanding of a little-studied aspect of Jim Crow-era tourism, the use of temporal and spatial strategies to create separate places within white tourist destinations for African American tourists.

Nationalism in Geography Classrooms: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract This set of essays is based on a panel session convened at the 2009 meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which sought to explore the many challenges and pitfalls involved with teaching nationalism as a topic in geography classrooms. The authors offer different but complementary insights into the practical difficulties and potential strategies for covering an innately difficult topic. The discussion of nationalism in the essays is also an effective venue with which to further engage discussions of critical pedagogy.

Historical GIS as a Platform for Public Memory at Mammoth Cave National Park

The Mammoth Cave Historical GIS (MCHGIS) fosters new understandings of a national park landscape as a historic farming community and offers a web-based platform for public memory of pre-park inhabitants. It maps the 1920 manuscript census at the household level over a streaming topographic map and georeferences Civilian Conservation Corps photographs of dwellings for visualization and analysis of the areas population on the eve of creation of Mammoth Cave National Park. A web interface to the MCHGIS permits broader dissemination of archival holdings. Public participation GIS techniques are adapted to initiate a virtual site of public memory to supplement the history presented by institutionally-held materials with those donated from private holdings.

Handbook of Rural Studies

a glance at the object-oriented data model. Differences between coverage, shapefile, and geodatabase are well covered. The chapter also describes the logical construction of grids and images, and triangulated irregular networks (TIN). The majority of the exercise deals with creating and exploring coverage data structure, which is complemented with a valuable exercise on topological relationships among feature classes in geodatabase. Chapter 5 touches on GIS data sources, such as the Internet or GPS, and describes steps to be considered in developing a GIS database. With regard to spatial data infrastructures, the reader is referred to the Federal Geographic Data Committee Web sites. The comprehensive exercises include exploration of metadata within ArcCatalog, explaining on-screen digitizing including creation of a topology, and demonstrating roles of geographic coordinate transformations and geo-referencing in onscreen digitizing. Chapter 6 reviews some basics of data analysis and data quality, namely continuous versus discrete phenomena, accuracy versus precision, and measurement scales. The exercises apply classification schemes of statistical data, feature selection, joining of census block files with statistical data, and finding proximity between point and line features. Chapter 7 describes geo-processing, such as buffering and overlay functions, for vector data. No distinction is made between overlays (e.g., union or intersect) and what is also referred to as “map manipulation” functions in other GIS books, such as clip or update. Both types of functions are named “spatial joins” in the book. Besides overlays, the exercise section introduces ArcGIS model builder, which is well tied to the previous case studies. Chapter 8 introduces spatial analysis techniques on raster data and refers to the Spatial Analyst extension and the Spatial Analyst Tools in ArcToolbox. The chapter explains raster with integer cell values, introducing zones and regions, and raster with floating-point values. Both the overview and the exercises focus on raster algebra, distance calculations, and basics of hydrologic analysis. No distinction is made between local, neighborhood, zonal, and global raster functions, as found in other GIS books. Chapter 9 briefly touches on leftover topics about the vertical component and the temporal aspect of analysis. It is a collection of seemingly unrelated, but nevertheless, relevant topics, which therefore remind the reader of chapter 1 and close the circle. Each aspect is separately described through a short overview section followed by a hands-on exercise. Topics include three-dimensional viewing with ArcScene, address geo-coding, linear referencing, network analysis, and a good example that analyzes the changes of street networks over time using buffering and topology rules. The overview sections in the book are heavily related to ArcGIS software, which is particularly helpful in understanding the software, and provides a good basis for program customization and programming with ArcObjects. The author’s ambitious goal to provide knowledge that “at least touches on virtually all the ArcGIS capabilities and products” makes the structure of the book somewhat scattered. An instructor might need to reorganize the sequence of the relevant concepts before students start with their hands-on exercises. The discussion of the (obsolete) ArcInfo coverage model could, in my opinion, be shortened in lieu of a more detailed description of geodatabase, particularly the potential uses and advantages of the object-oriented data model. Further, a more in-depth description of coordinate systems, geodetic datums, coordinate transformations (specifically the affine transformation), and projections would be helpful for the reader to better understand and correctly interpret the results of a GIS operation. Despite these few considerations, this book will be a valuable source for a course that focuses on hands-on GIS knowledge at an introductory level using ArcGIS software.

Report of the Honors Committee, 2006

The Honors Committee of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG) each year recognizes outstanding student and faculty achievements. Serving on the ≤≠≠∏ committee were: Katie Algeo, chair (Western Kentucky University); Scott Curtis, chairelect (East Carolina University); Sharon Cobb (University of North Florida); Graham Tobin (University of South Florida); and Qingfang Wang (University of North Carolina-Charlotte). The ≤≠≠∏ Honors Committee congratulates the following individuals who received awards at the recent annual SEDAAG meeting in Morgantown, West Virginia.