HERODOT Network: Activities

HERODOT — the Higher Education Network for Research and Education in Geography — has, since its founding in the mid-2000s, functioned as one of the principal vehicles for cooperation among European geography departments. Where national subject associations tend to focus inward on their own school systems, HERODOT’s remit is explicitly transnational and higher-education-facing: it connects lecturers, department heads, and curriculum developers across borders, and it does so through a deliberately mixed portfolio of meetings, publications, projects, and competitions. This article sets out what the network actually does, how its activities fit together, and how an academic or department can get the most out of participating.

Key Takeaways

• HERODOT’s activity portfolio spans four broad strands: events (conferences, workshops, seminars), publications (edited books, proceedings, reports, CD-ROMs), projects and networking (TUNING, benchmarking, EU-funded cooperation), and student-facing competitions and dissemination.
• Its most durable intellectual contributions are the State of Geography in Europe report and the TUNING Geography work, which gave departments a shared vocabulary for describing geography degree programmes and their competences.
• HERODOT works through partnership rather than solo effort — joint sessions with EUGEO, IGU, EGEA, ESRI, and the Geographical Association are characteristic of how it operates.
• For a department, the practical value lies less in any single event and more in the cumulative benchmarking effect: seeing how peers elsewhere structure fieldwork, GIS teaching, and citizenship education.
• Membership and participation are open to institutions and individuals; the network’s documentation (partner expense forms, time sheets, partner lists) reflects its origins in EU-funded project administration.

What HERODOT Is and Why It Exists

HERODOT is best understood as a network rather than a society in the traditional sense. It has no large permanent secretariat of the kind that, say, the International Geographical Union (IGU) or the Association of American Geographers maintains; instead it operates as a consortium of interested departments and individuals, coordinated by a small project team and steered by the priorities of its members and its funders.

That structure shapes everything it does. Activities tend to be project-driven, time-limited, and collaborative, with outputs — a proceedings volume, a report, a workshop — that can be shown to funders and reused by members.

The network emerged at a moment when European higher education was being reshaped by the Bologna Process, the intergovernmental reform that introduced bachelor/master structures, learning outcomes, and credit accumulation across the continent. Geography departments suddenly needed to explain what a geography degree was in comparable terms, and to justify their place in restructured curricula.

HERODOT’s early agenda — benchmarking, competence description, the State of Geography in Europe report — was a direct response to that need. Understanding this origin explains why so much of the network’s output is about describing and comparing programmes rather than about, say, advancing a particular research frontier.

The Four Activity Strands

HERODOT’s own summary of its work is deceptively short: it organises meetings, workshops, seminars and conferences; it produces academic publications; it participates in major networking activities in Europe and beyond; and it connects to other major geography networks worldwide. Unpacked, these become four practical strands.

1. Events. The network has convened or co-convened conferences and workshops across Europe — among them the Ayvalik conference in Turkey (2009), a Liverpool conference (2008), a Stockholm conference held partly in conjunction with ESRI’s S-GROUP, and four sessions at the EUGEO conference in Amsterdam (2007). It has also run targeted workshops, such as Teaching Geography using GIS, and a TP4 workshop on interdisciplinarity in Sibiu, Romania.

2. Publications. HERODOT has produced edited books, conference proceedings, reports, and CD-ROMs. Titles include Geographical Diversity (conference proceedings), Teaching in and for Europe, Bilingual Geography, Promoting and Celebrating Geography, and the Learning with GeoInformation series (volumes III and IV). The State of Geography in Europe report and the TUNING Geography report sit alongside these as reference documents.

3. Projects and networking. The TUNING survey of geography is the clearest example: a discipline-level application of the TUNING methodology for describing degree programmes in terms of competences and learning outcomes. Benchmarking exercises — including work on citizenship and fieldwork — extend the same logic to specific curriculum components.

4. Competitions and dissemination. HERODOT has run a Geography student film competition jointly with EGEA (the European Geography Association for students and young geographers) and a student poster competition jointly with ESRI. It has also used online questionnaires and country-report forms to gather member views under the Promoting Geography banner.

How the Activities Fit Together

The strands are not independent. A typical HERODOT cycle looks like this:

• A workshop or conference session identifies a shared problem — for example, how fieldwork should be assessed, or how GIS should be embedded in a degree.
• A project or survey gathers comparable data across countries (the TUNING survey, the State of Geography report).
• A publication codifies the findings so they outlive the event.
• A competition or dissemination activity raises the profile of the theme among students and the wider geographical community.

This is why the network’s output list reads as a sequence of themes rather than a random collection: bilingual geography, geoinformation, fieldwork, citizenship, interdisciplinarity. Each theme has usually passed through all four stages.

Deciding Whether and How to Engage

Not every department benefits equally, and it is worth being candid about the trade-offs. HERODOT participation costs time, and for a small department the administrative overhead of EU-style project documentation — partner expense forms, time sheets, partner lists — can be disproportionate to the intellectual return. The following criteria help a department decide.

Consideration	Engage strongly if…	Engage lightly if…
Curriculum reform	You are redesigning a programme or writing learning outcomes	Your programme is stable and accredited
Internationalisation strategy	You need European partners for mobility or joint degrees	Your international links are already well developed
GIS / geoinformation teaching	You are building or modernising GIS provision	GIS is already mature and well resourced
Fieldwork and citizenship	These are live curriculum debates for you	They are settled in your context
Administrative capacity	You have staff who can absorb project reporting	Your administrative team is stretched

A pragmatic middle path is common: send one or two delegates to a relevant HERODOT session, contribute a chapter to a proceedings volume, and use the State of Geography in Europe and TUNING reports as free benchmarking references without committing to a full project. The reports are useful precisely because they let you compare your programme against European norms without leaving your desk.

Publications as a Practical Resource

For teaching-focused academics, HERODOT’s publications are arguably its most underrated output. The Learning with GeoInformation series addresses the perennial problem of teaching GIS to students who are geographers rather than computer scientists — a distinction that matters enormously in practice, because the pedagogical challenge is conceptual (coordinate systems, scale, uncertainty) rather than technical. Bilingual Geography speaks to the growing reality of English-medium instruction in European departments, where students may study geography in a second language. Teaching in and for Europe and Promoting and Celebrating Geography address the identity and advocacy dimensions of the discipline.

The State of Geography in Europe report and the TUNING Geography report are reference works rather than reading material: they are the documents to cite when you need to justify a curriculum decision to a committee, or when you want to know how peers elsewhere handle a structural question. The TUNING methodology itself is widely used across disciplines and is documented by the TUNING Educational Structures in Europe project; geography’s application of it through HERODOT is one of the clearer examples of a discipline taking ownership of the approach.

Working With Partner Networks

HERODOT’s habit of co-organising is not incidental — it is a deliberate strategy to avoid duplicating what other bodies already do well. The pattern is worth understanding because it tells you where to look for different kinds of value:

• EUGEO (the European Association for Geographical Societies and Associations) provides the broad European conference platform; HERODOT contributes higher-education sessions within it.
• The IGU brings global reach and its Commission structure; joint HERODOT–IGU sessions on Teaching in and about Europe connect the European agenda to worldwide debates.
• EGEA reaches students directly, which is why the film competition was run jointly with it.
• ESRI and the AGIT / GI Forum conferences connect the network to the geoinformation industry and to applied GI research.
• The Geographical Association (UK) links HERODOT to the school sector and teacher training, which matters for anyone thinking about the school-to-university pipeline.

For a department head, this map is useful: it shows that HERODOT is a node in a wider system, and that engaging with it can be a route into several other networks at once. The same logic applies to the Eurogeo initiative, the European Association for Geographers, which HERODOT helped to promote as a more permanent representative body for the discipline.

Getting Involved: A Practical Sequence

If you are considering participation, a sensible order of operations is:

1. Read the reference documents first. The State of Geography in Europe and TUNING Geography reports tell you whether the network’s concerns match yours.
2. Attend one event before committing. A single conference session is a low-cost way to assess whether the network’s style suits you.
3. Contribute to a publication. A chapter in a proceedings volume is a manageable first contribution and a visible one.
4. Consider a project role only when you have administrative support. Project participation brings reporting obligations; go in with eyes open.
5. Use the student competitions. They are a low-effort, high-visibility way to engage students with the network’s themes.

Membership enquiries, publication purchases, and project queries have historically been routed through the network’s Project Manager, and the membership documentation — partner expense forms, completed example forms, time sheets, and partner lists — is available to members. Anyone joining should expect the administrative conventions of an EU-funded network rather than those of a learned society.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the HERODOT Network?

HERODOT is the Higher Education Network for Research and Education in Geography, a European network that connects geography lecturers, departments, and curriculum developers. It organises conferences, workshops, and seminars, produces academic publications, and participates in European and international networking projects. Its work is particularly associated with benchmarking geography programmes and with the TUNING Geography survey.

What is TUNING Geography?

TUNING Geography is HERODOT’s discipline-level application of the TUNING methodology, which describes degree programmes in terms of competences and learning outcomes. It grew out of the wider TUNING Educational Structures in Europe project and gave geography departments a shared vocabulary for comparing programmes across countries. A TUNING Geography report was published as an output of the work.

Which organisations does HERODOT work with?

HERODOT co-operates with a range of bodies, including EUGEO, the International Geographical Union (IGU), EGEA (the European student geography association), ESRI, the AGIT/GI Forum conferences, and the UK’s Geographical Association. It has also promoted Eurogeo, the European Association for Geographers. This partnership model lets it reach audiences — students, school teachers, GI professionals — that a higher-education network alone would not.

What publications has HERODOT produced?

Its output includes edited books and proceedings such as Geographical Diversity, Teaching in and for Europe, Bilingual Geography, Promoting and Celebrating Geography, and the Learning with GeoInformation series, alongside the State of Geography in Europe report and the TUNING Geography report. It has also produced CD-ROMs. Publications can be obtained by contacting the network’s Project Manager.

How does a department join HERODOT?

Membership is open to institutions and individuals, and enquiries are directed to the network’s Project Manager. Prospective members should review the membership documentation — partner expense forms, example completed forms, time sheets, and partner lists — before committing, since these reflect the administrative expectations of a project-based network. Attending a single event first is a reasonable way to assess the fit.

Why does HERODOT focus so much on benchmarking and competences?

Because the network grew up alongside the Bologna Process, when European departments needed to make their degrees comparable and to articulate learning outcomes. Benchmarking exercises — on citizenship, fieldwork, and the discipline as a whole — were the practical answer. The resulting reports remain useful to any department that needs to justify or redesign its curriculum in comparable European terms.