Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Constructing A Home On The Range: Homemaking In Early Twentieth Century Plains Photograph Albums, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.¹

These lyrics capture a yearning for a place to call home. But what landscape is associated with this longing? For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"-but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would …

Playing With Landscape: Social Process And Spatial Form In Video Games, Michael Longan

Michael W Longan

Video games not only incorporate representations of landscapes, they are themselves a form of landscape representation that communicates ideas about how the world is and how it should be. Like traditional forms of landscape representation, video games use tricks of perspective and realistic graphics to represent real world places or to create worlds that appear to be real. Through their interactivity, video games also give their players a sense of power and control over the spatial form of the landscape. However, unlike traditional forms of landscape representation, video games offer opportunities to subjectively enter the space of the game and …