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Editor's note: To present informative maps and graphics using Census 2000 data, the Santa Barbara News-Press has formed a partnership with the UCSB Geography Department, in particular assistant professors Sara Fabrikant and Stuart Sweeney and UCSB senior Steven Hochart.
By NORA WALLACE
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
nwallace@newspress.com
UCSB's Geography Department is world renowned. Its professors study complex topics such as the impact of clouds on global climates, rates of snowmelt and surface water production and migration patterns of low-income populations.
Its graduates become military scientists, urban planners, map curators, tourism developers and hydrologists. The department is the lead institution in the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at UCSB.
But despite this, for most people, geography comes down to the questions asked on the game show "Jeopardy."
What's the longest river in Africa? What's the capital of Minnesota? What's the highest mountain peak in Canada?
Those are the questions sometimes posed to UCSB assistant professors Sara Fabrikant and Stuart Sweeney when people learn they're geographers.
Although any geographer can rattle off those answers, Fabrikant, who earned her doctorate in geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her master's degree in geography from the University of Zurich, would rather discuss the changing nature of cartography, the science of making maps. Or perhaps explain geographic information science - the ability to collect and manage banks of data and represent them in a digital framework.
Sweeney, who earned his bachelor's degree in urban studies and planning from UC San Diego and his doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, favors discussions on urban and regional modeling, such as tracking economic activity and human migration or mapping outbreaks of disease. |
It's not the concept of geography that most people understand, but it's the one that's shaping how people view the world in which they live. In fact, UCSB's Geography Department has just rewritten its "vision statement" to reflect its goal to become the "intellectual home of choice for studies of Earth as the home of humanity."
For the two assistant professors, UCSB is not just coordinates on a map, but a place to teach a discipline that has long captivated each of them.
Since her childhood in Switzerland, Fabrikant has been fascinated by geography and history. She had planned to major in history in college, but became interested in cartography and geographic information science.
"These two fields ideally combine the pragmatic and artistic sides in me, doing research to solve real-world problems and having fun designing the tools to do it," Fabrikant explained.
After living in Los Angeles and San Diego, Sweeney said he sensed such metropolitan areas "were strange and problematic arrangements for human settlement." And after traveling in Mexico, he reasoned that the border region was an "unnatural physical and economic rift in space."
Those thoughts left him wanting to understand more about regional economic and demographic forces and the formation of "odd" places. He also wanted to use scientific knowledge to help formulate public policies for "informed" development.
"As a graduate student, I realized I was more interested in spatial economic theory and statistics than in policy and planning," Sweeney admitted. "Geography is an open discipline that permits one to pursue pure theory without regard to policy conclusions."
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