Skip to main content

GIS Workshop makes front page news at The Star Press

At the conclusion of GIS Workshop (GEOG448/548), each student team presented their findings to community partners.  While all the student teams created products that will greatly assist their community partners, the animal shelter project, in particular, captured the attention of the community partners.  The Star Press, drawing on recent concerns about the operation of the animal shelter, ran a story about the mapping project.

An excerpt:

It's raining stray cats and dogs in Muncie, and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it.

That's what mapping by Ball State University shows. It also shows the problem is worse in south Muncie, including the Industry Neighborhood.

"There's certainly a south-of-the river phenomenon," said Matt Wilson, an assistant professor of geography and emerging media expert.

But he advises against finger-pointing.

"This is a social justice issue," said Wilson, who predicts the spread of stray animals will only become magnified unless the city tackles issues like unemployment and poverty. [Click for more.]

In my interview at TSP, I discussed the importance of these kinds of collaborations, particularly in the context of the geographical imaginations of Muncie's 'south side' on the part of BSU students and faculty.

Great work, students and community partners!  I'm certainly looking forward to future collaborations in GEOG448/548.

Comments

  1. I find this offensive. It is Central and west Muncie with most of the issue for as far as I can see.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 record

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

Critical GIS in the classroom

For one academic year, I've attempted a different type of approach to an introductory course in GIS, drawing on various curricular strategies of Nadine Schuurman , Sarah Elwood , Francis Harvey , and Meghan Cope .  In this course, students work through introductory technical skills, while simultaneously reading/writing about and discussing the GIS & Society tradition.  In this brief post, I'm asking students who participated in this introductory GIS course to reflect on what it means to practice 'critical GIS'.