- Good evening, my name is Nicole Cherry, I’m from Columbus, Ohio, and I am a first-year student studying Environmental Science. Possibly a double major including Geography and a minor in Women and gender studies, but I haven’t fully made any decisions past ENVS as my major. I’mexcited to take GIS since I know it will contribute to my major, but further than that, I don’t know much about it.
- Something I found really interesting and helpful to get a better understanding of what GIS is was the comparison between the relationship of GIS and the quantitative revolution, and the relationship between mathematics and calculators. This comparison helped me to understand how GIS is essentially a tool used for spatial analysis to make the process much easier and make advances within the field easier to understand and obtain. GIS takes graphing and geographic information from a solely analytical approach to add a visual approach, which causes people to process said information differently. The legitimacy of GIS decisions and results is frequently not disputed, which was really interesting to me because it also mentions how this can essentially frame someone’s perception of different income communities. With this information, Goodchild argued that in GIScience, it is imperative to still dissect the inherent bias that comes with human production in science. This to me really analyzes how even though Fields of science still contain human biases and need to be evaluated and questioned. I also thought it was interesting that it was noted repeatedly that GIS is incredibly important in many spaces in our lives, and having never heard of GIS before coming to OWU, the knowledge of this program seems so necessary to everyone, yet not as widespread as I would anticipate. Even things that seem basic to me on a surface level, such as farming, are incredibly reliant on GIS. Finally, a part that I thought was really interesting throughout the entire reading is that the relationships between groups, even human geographers and GIS scholars, are explored so intently. I guess finishing the reading this does make a lot of sense since, from what I understand, it is the main basis of GIS in exploring relationships between groups of any kind, from humans to relationships and boundaries between plants. GIS seems to be heavily focused on deciding what those boundaries are and where to put them.
- (A) Political issues are just an interest of mine, so I thought looking up prominent hate groups would be interesting. This source states how the media has brought attention to hate groups, and GIS is used in areas with high rates of hate crimes of different groups, to have a better understanding of where these hate groups are predominantly located.
Mapping crime – Hate crimes and hate groups in the USA: A spatial analysis with gridded data – ScienceDirect
- (B) As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community Political issues surrounding this are very important and impact me, so I just thought it would be interesting to see how GIS is involved in research surrounding these issues. This source used GIS to map LGBTQIA+ uncertainty within this political climate.
Coloring Outside of the Lines: Sketch Mapping Fear, Safety, and Community for LGBTQ+ Students Amidst Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation