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This book is about the variable and changing ways that geographers
have answered the question "what is geography?," and the contextual
factors that help explain those answers. It is about the
back-and-forth between world, and a changing discipline. Perhaps most
importantly, it is about *you*: learning how to place yourself in
this evolving world of ideas.

# Disciplines and the Modern Academy

# Geography of Empire

# A Modern Discipline

# Heterodox Geography

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% Tools for Academic Literature Review and Analysis

# Tools

Keeping track, and making sense of, one or more academic literatures
is a difficult task greatly helped up electronic tools: most notably
research databases and bibliographic managers. I present here how to use
both of them here, with a particular focus on my tool of choice:
Zotero. Feel free to use any tool you like, but I choose to
demonstrate Zotero because it:

1. has all the features we need
2. allows your data to be synced to the cloud, and so available on
different computers
3. is completely free; no cost and open source
4. is cross-platform and application, and so works equally well
whether you use Windows, Mac OS, or Linux for an operating system, or
OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Word for your word-processing.

We have already reviewed that the task of analyzing a little consists
of the following steps:

1. identifying relevant keywords
2. gathering references
3. reading sources and categorizing them
4. describing the connections among the different groupings

We will thus operationalize these steps using Zotero.

# Identifying Keywords

Here we first have to figure out what it is we are trying to describe.

# Gathering References

Here we will use two journal databases, and Google Scholar, to find as
many relevant references as we can.

Once we find these references, we want to quickly suck the relevant
metadata into Zotero for later reuse. we thus simply click the button
in the toolbar, and Zotero will save the information.

Once we are done collecting the references we can make a quick first
pass by tagging each item consistently based on what we can tell from
the abstract and a quick glance at the article.

Now that we have everything properly tagged, we want to identify key
readings for further analysis. We might want to prioritize those
readings that have two characteristics:

1. roughly 3-7 years old
2. relatively high citation counts (greater
than 20 or so in Google Scholar is good; more than 50 is ideal)

More recent articles (or books) have often not been out long enough to become
established in the literature, but older articles by definition
exclude more recent work. So this is a good sweet spot.

You can then work backward from there, observing how each article
builds on previous work. As you read more, you will start to recognize
pattens of citation: this article gets cited when an author wants to
make X point, and another article when they want to make Y
point. Recognizing these patterns is essential to understanding a
literature.

In the end, we want a handful of collections that describe different
areas of our literature. We want each collection to have roughly ten
examples, and for each of them to have a clear statement about why
they are there, and what their significance is. At this point, we can
ask Zotero to generate a report for us.

Once we have this, we can start work on our papers. Each collection
should ideally map onto a section heading, and each article should get
cited in that section.

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