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Read first! Instructions on how to do a term project.

On this blog I present student projects from past years for GEOG 2010 (Introduction to Human Geography) and GEOG 4031 (Latin America and the Caribbean) to illustrate some of the range of topics and approaches possible.

The examples are presented anonymously, and their inclusion has nothing to do with their quality or the grade they received. Seniors in GEOG 4031 typically, but not always, produce more advanced types of projects than Sophomores in GEOG 2010. 

When perusing these example, please think through the issues involved in doing such projects.

  • Similar to a term paper based on library research, you must choose a project based on what you have learned through the readings, lectures, and response paragraphs so far in the course but one that allows you to develop a deeper understanding of a topic that is personally interesting and exciting to you and use it to demonstrate your deepening understanding of some aspects of the course material.
  • Also similar to such a term paper, you must situate your project in the academic literature you have learned about from the textbook readings and can further research in the library so that you relate the research question you chose to what is already known and not known. This is one of the aspects of the term project (and term papers in general) that students really struggle to accomplish, so allow me to spell it out in detail. You must start the written part of your term project with 1-3 paragraphs that review the literature and end in a thesis statement by following these steps:
    1. Decide on your general topic (religious syncretism, deforestation, etc.) and narrow it to one -- and only one -- specific research question or problem that you can accomplish as a term project;
    2. Search peer-reviewed literature in geography and closely allied disciplines such as anthropology by using the list of references at the end of relevant textbook chapters and other readings, Google Scholar, Project MUSE, and other scholarly search engines, staying away from encyclopedias, textbooks, pop culture websites, and other none-scholarly sources;
    3. Select some of the sources on the basis of their abstracts and read thoroughly;
    4. Write a paragraph or two to act as the introduction to your project that summarizes the patterns you find in the development of existing knowledge on your topic, such as increasing knowledge over time, remaining gaps in our understanding, and controversies about methods, underlying assumptions, biases, or philosophical approaches;
    5. Be sure to cite the literature you review in step 4, using parenthetical citations such as this one (Marquez and Smith 1998; Borges, et al. 2000: 156-58; Potter 2018: 21-26; King, Wong, and Philo 2020);
    6. On the basis of your literature review, end the introductory paragraph(s) with a thesis statement that sets out for your readers what your project will address and how.
  • Once you have reviewed the literature and drafted your introductory paragraph(s), but before starting the research for the project and creating your webmap(s), you must develop and turn in a project plan to help you think through, based on the skills you have developed with the exercises, the steps involved in accomplishing your project:
    • How you will acquire the necessary data, giving citations to print and online sources;
    • How you will analyze those data in terms of spatial and temporal scale as well as qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods;
    • And how you will report results on your blog in terms of a well structured narrative, tables, dynamic webmaps, static images, and/or graphs.
  • Finally, remember that you must constrain the scope of your project so that you can complete it in the remaining weeks of the semester because, as spoofed below, everything will involve unforeseen challenges that take time to solve.


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