My name is Claire Evans, and I am a second year Environmental Science and Art History student.
Something within the chapter that caught my eye is the idea of data within GIS being biased due to human biases and choices that must be made to convert data into something usable within GIS. Uncertain data being difficult to represent and share is true regardless of what a person is using, visual or verbal, GIS or physical papers. The chapter mentioning that GIS can’t work well with uncertain data is then interesting in that it is not a fault only of GISystems. Because it doesn’t have a large impact on how the systems are used, the inclusion of the arguments pertaining to the origins of GIS in an introduction chapter to the systems surprised me. I’m currently taking Urban Geography, and the point made about how a neighborhood looks on a map and how a route may not actually be the most effective based on the data given being incomplete or in favor of a certain area reminded me of the idea that a city looks very different from a map view to a street level view. Dr. John Snow having both mapped out the cases of cholera, but also having to get extra information via speaking to people who lived in the area in order to figure out what wells were causing the cholera outbreaks reminds me of this as well. It’s also similar to looking at a piece of art in a setting other than where it was intended to be; you lose context and surrounding features, such as lighting and sound, when looking at a piece in a museum rather than where it is from, just as you lose some information when looking at a map of data rather than being in the area and community that you are examining.
MSF (Doctors Without Borders) uses MSF to create maps of common needs in communities they are stationed in, and they use a simple form of GIS through MissingMaps to make maps of constantly changing refugee camps that volunteers can help create.
This study used GIS to examine the number, size, and make-up of Buddhist organizations in the 4 corner states. They examined factors such as race, age, and political leaning to see if there was a potential correlation between these things and the practice of Buddhism in the 4 corner states.