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GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE: Getting Started

What's in this guide?

This guide will help you begin the research process in geographic information systems by providing guidance in finding, evaluating, and using a variety of information sources available through Armacost Library collections and beyond.

 

Verónica Vélez. Racial Justice and GIS

In this webinar, scholar Verónica Vélez asks, "How are social forces like racism mapped onto landscapes, and in what ways can GIS help to make evident those forces as they become mechanisms of our everyday?" Her research investigates "how space is not just a container that defines where people live and where things happen, but is an important unit of analysis that fundamentally shapes our social, political, and historical realities."

"It was the mothers' intimate knowledge of their community and collaborative analysis in the process of map making that was key. By rooting the analytical capabilities of GIS in their own lived experience, the mothers' drove an iterative inquiry that led to the building of a counter-cartographic narrative that spoke back to the post-racial narrative taking hold of educational reform in their local context. Appropriating GIS mapping as a community-based practice, the mothers ground-truthed the maps, making visible spaces and spatial relationships that otherwise would go unnoticed... Their efforts revealed the potential of GIS to build spatial models of the world from the lived experiences of people of color." -- Verónica Vélez

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