Renaming and Rebranding within U.S. and Canadian Geography Departments, 1990–2014

Between 2000 and 2014, more than thirty geography departments adopted revised or new names, with some entirely dropping geography. Although renaming and rebranding efforts are not new to higher education, the rapid pace at which geography department names have changed raises questions about the discipline's identity and health. We examine the renaming trend within geography programs together with intended and unexpected factors as perceived by faculty. Specifically, we look at the renaming and rebranding trend within the context of four pillars offered by Pattison (1964 Pattison, W. D. 1964. The four traditions of geography. Journal of Geography 63 (5): 211–16.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to define geography's principal academic domains—earth-science, man–land, area/regional studies, and spatial traditions.     

Black–White and Hispanic–White Segregation in U.S. Counties

Residential segregation in metropolitan areas has been the subject of much research, but this article analyzes patterns of white–black and white–Hispanic segregation in counties across the United States. Our purpose was to understand county variations in this one dimension of inequality. Conceiving of segregation as relative inequality of access to neighborhood resources, we measured segregation in 2000 by the index of dissimilarity (D) calculated by blocks, mapped the index values, and correlated them with census variables. Three filters enabled us to eliminate counties with characteristics that could have corrupted the analyses, leaving us with more than 1,000 counties in each analysis. Both minority groups were less segregated from whites in the West and South and in metropolitan counties. Lower segregation was strongly associated with higher minority socioeconomic status and higher percentages of minorities living in housing built in the 1990s, and Hispanic–white segregation was lower where more Hispanics were U.S.-born or English proficient. The racial threat hypothesis was supported only weakly and inconsistently. Mapping made it possible to identify regional and local patterns of high and low segregation as well as the lower segregation of suburban counties in some large metropolitan areas.     

A Review of: “Remote Sensing of Soils and Vegetation in the USSR”. By P. J. CURRAN,G. M. FOODY,K. YA. KONDRATYEV,V. V. KOZODEROV and P. P. FEDCHENKO. (London: Taylor & Francis, 1990.) [Pp. 200.] Price £30·00. ISBN 085066 4020.

As they increase in popularity, social media are regarded as important sources of information on geographical phenomena. Studies have also shown that people rely on social media to communicate during disasters and emergency situation, and that the exchanged messages can be used to get an insight into the situation. Spatial data mining techniques are one way to extract relevant information from social media. In this article, our aim is to contribute to this field by investigating how graph clustering can be applied to support the detection of geo-located communities in Twitter in disaster situations. For this purpose, we have enhanced the fast-greedy optimization of modularity (FGM) clustering algorithm with semantic similarity so that it can deal with the complex social graphs extracted from Twitter. Then, we have coupled the enhanced FGM with the varied density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise spatial clustering algorithm to obtain spatial clusters at different temporal snapshots. The method was experimented with a case study on typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and Twitter’s different interaction modes were compared to create the graph of users and to detect communities. The experiments show that communities that are relevant to identify areas where disaster-related incidents were reported can be extracted, and that the enhanced algorithm outperforms the generic one in this task.