GIS Workshop 2011

Erin Moore and Ben Reckelhoff at the Center for Media Design are promoting this year's GIS Workshop with a nice article (below) and short video as part of their February Emerging Media Initiative Update.

Geography students provide GIS services to local non-profits
by Erin Moore, Emerging Media Initiative; video by Ben Reckelhoff, Center for Media Design
In spring 2010, Matt Wilson, Emerging Media New Faculty Fellow in Geography, launched a unique GIS course that partnered geography students with local organizations in need of digital mapping services and analysis. Last year, student teams provided mapping solutions for four community organizations, including Delaware County United Way and Open Door Health Services, a community health center for the uninsured and under-insured.
United Way and Open Door have continued their partnerships with Ball State into 2011, offering opportunities for a new class of geography students to apply their skills to important social issues. For these organizations, student teams have been assembled to map health service provision and analyze links between U.S. Census data and student performance in Muncie and the neighboring community of Gaston.
Wilson has also secured new partnerships for spring 2011, including the City of Muncie Community Development Department, the Delaware County Soil and Water Conservation District, and statewide WorkOne employment offices. Students will complete a comparative analysis of farming practices using historical maps and EPA sediment load calculators, document stream bank conditions using GPS enabled cameras, work with preservation students to catalog conditions of homes in Muncie’s Kimbrough Historic District, and create a central web-based portal of support services for the unemployed, focusing on southeastern Indiana counties.
The students work with their community partners throughout the semester, and each project culminates in a student presentation and delivery of assets to each agency.

Comments

Thinking/Making Geographic Representation

[ Chris Alton, Zulaikha Ayub, Alex Chen, Leif Estrada, Justin Kollar, Patrick Leonard, Martin Pavlinic, Andreas Viglakis, Matthew Wilson ] Following a seminar in critical and social cartography at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, course participants set about writing a manifesto of sorts, a provocation in the thinking and practice of geographic representation. Make art, not maps. Talk is cheap. So are pixels and kilobytes. To build is more labored than to destroy, and maintaining the tenere of an attentional wave is the work of humanist scholars, artists, writers, poets, playwrights, and architects—and not for gaggles of open-source spectators. Masterpieces are immutable. Let's build masterpieces or #dietrying. We would rather enter the ground in pursuit of ineffability than constantly losing face in the mangle in which we are all subsumed. Harness confusion. How maps and mapping need to be rethought starts with a rejection of both the possibility and desirability...

A Critical Spin on GEOG265, 'Introduction to GIS'

I'm gearing up for next semester's Introduction to GIS, a course required of all Geography (and Social Studies Education ) majors at Ball State University . In this course, I attempt to provide learning opportunities such that students can learn the technical skills associated with geographic information technologies, while situating these technical practices, critically . Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and histories that motivate geographic information systems. This course will simultaneously expose students to key moments in the academic literature that gave rise to GIS in the discipline of geography while providing the necessary, introductory skills to operate ArcGIS. GIS brings together traditional cartographic principles, computer-assisted analytical cartography, relational database design, and digital image processing and analysis to enable people to develop geospatial databases, analyze those databa...

Atlas for a Community Mapshop

Community Mapshop 2015 has culminated in a series of outputs and engagements, but most recent among these, is our Atlas for a Community Mapshop . This is a compilation designed by a student in the course, Renae Mantooth , containing a number of the graphics and maps produced at the mid and final reviews for the studio. Using Denis Wood's Everything Sings as our inspiration, the class was asked to prepare graphics in grayscale, allowing for their easy reproduction and circulation. You can read the digital text, here (or below, or download ). We explored the following themes: Food Network Education Opportunities Modes of Travel Bus Shelter Inequity Uneven Housing Landscape Wifi Inequity Blue Grass Trust Plaque Program Facade Dichotomy From the text: Drawing on the last twenty-five years of scholarship in critical cartography and critical GIS, this workshop begins from the premise that maps are more than windows on the world. Maps do not only provide a re...

Critical GIS .com

Search This Blog