Course Description | What is GIS?
Maps are rhetorical tools. Designers craft compelling arguments with maps, mapping, and spatial data visualization. Maps represent vast, complex data; they can be seductive and powerfully dense. Designers use maps — not just of geography, but of social, domestic, and political context — to analyze and understand spatial problems, and argue for data-defensible solutions.
In this course, we’ll cover the basics of finding and evaluating data, representing data sets in GIS, using GIS tools to dig into the meaning of data, and crafting visual arguments in the form of data maps. We’ll then translate this into online, interactive maps using Mapbox and Leaflet.
Course Structure | Assignments
You will each choose a city in Appalachia to focus on for the Tutorials and final research project. You’ll use publicly available GIS data, building department records, and census data to represent spatial power dynamics: the relationships between topography, density, access, income, age, health, and other variables that serve as proxies for your chosen socio-political topic. The final project will be a scrollymap: an interactive essay with maps and images that presents your spatial research and conclusions. This format will address the two major goals of this class: it will display the technical skills you’ve learned, and it will demonstrate your thought process as you construct a visual argument through maps.