By MIKE DUNHAM

An item from the Associated Press in the Daily News on July 20 quoted former Gov. Sarah Palin identifying Kodiak as “America’s largest island.” The article gave the area of Kodiak as 3,588 square miles and 4,028 square miles for the island of Hawaii.

Call me a geo-nerd. It may stem from growing up in a place where, not having any Nobel laureates or famous inventors to our credit, big rivers and mountains are what everyone brags about. Besides, Alaska geography is really cool and cartography may be the art form that most closely reveals the real world. Take a look at the maps of Mt. McKinley created by Bradford Washburn, whose photographs currently are the subject of an exhibit at the Anchorage Museum.

When I lived on Kodiak, folks there acknowledged it to be the second biggest U.S. island in terms of area, but number one in coastline. I tried to get confirmation of those claims on the internet, but it was a fool’s errand. The sizes given for both islands were all over the map, so to speak.

I contacted the U.S. Geographic Survey, who you’d think would be the ultimate arbiter. “I was unable to find answers,” said the information officer who responded. But he did tell me that the largest freshwater island in America is Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron.

The USGS’s source for this big island data? Wikipedia.

I thought Daily News readers deserved something a little more authoritative. So I went to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Edition, “The Official Dictionary of the Associated Press.” There on page 794, it gave the area of Kodiak Island — not the archipelago or islands, plural — as 5,363 square miles.

The 5,363 figure has been used by Webster’s for at least 30 years, including in their geographical dictionaries. I sent an e-mail asking for clarification and sources to the book’s publisher, Macmillan, but have yet to hear back.

I did hear back from Holly Ramer, the AP reporter who wrote the above story and who, in that story, identified her source for the Kodiak number as the Alaska Office of Economic Development. She sent me to the website where she found the information, http://www.commerce.state.ak.us/oed/student_info/learn/aboutgeography.htm.

The site gave as its source as The Alaska Almanac, a compendium of tourist information published by now-defunct Alaska Northwest Books of Portland, Ore. Contributors included local satirist Mr. Whitekeys.

David Szumigala of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys was also listed as a contributor. I called him and he contacted state cartographer Alfred G. Sturmann who gave the area of Kodiak as 4,908.90 square miles — more than 800 square miles bigger than the biggest estimate for Hawaii.

Before we start celebrating, note that Sturmann included both Kodiak “and surrounding small islets,” of which Kodiak has many. “This number can vary depending on the accuracy of the data used. I wouldn’t take it court,” he said and referred me to DNR’s Division of Mining, Lands and Waters.

It was a good referral. Within a day they’d taken a fresh look at the numbers and recalculated the area of just Kodiak Island as 3,595.09 square miles, slightly bigger than the most common number found on the internet. But no Hawaii.

However, for that other measurement, coastline, DNR gave me a ballpark figure of 1,343 miles for Kodiak. Hawaii’s Big Island Visitors Bureau said the shoreline of their delightful island is 266 miles — or was. Hawaii’s size fluctuates, sometimes daily, as a result of lava flows and erosion. Anyway, Kodiak clearly wins the shoreline competition.

(“Shoreline” and “coastline” are not always the same thing, but I’m using them interchangeably here.)

There’s also the matter of what one assumes “largest” to mean. The official AP dictionary defines “large” as “of great extent or amount” (among other things). In the absence of further specifiers, it can just as easily mean shoreline as land mass or any other measurable feature — like population. One can correctly say New York City is larger than the City and Borough of Yakutat, even though Yakutat’s 9,459 square miles far exceed New York’s puny 321 square miles. The largest island in America in terms of people is probably Manhattan.

For a discipline involving numbers, geography is not an exact science; perhaps no science is. As the Alaska Almanac says in its listing on geography, “it depends on how you look at it.”

So, in the limited arena of words, one can legitimately call Kodiak the largest island in America without any refutiation from me.

Brag on.