READING, WRITING, ARITHMETIC: AND READING MAPS
Liberal arts students at Albion College in Michigan can add a new "liberal art" to the traditional reading, writing and arithmetic this fall: geographic information systems, or GIS.
Geographic information systems are computer systems that facilitate the display and analysis of spatial dataóany kind of dataóbe they geological (e.g., the distribution of rocks, natural resources, or earthquakes) or non-geological (e.g., the distribution of hospitals, transportation routes, or voting patterns). In the past the academic use and development of these high-tech mapping techniques has been largely restricted to geography departments, but like many other small schools, Albion College does not have a geography department.
Yet the use of GIS has crossed disciplinary boundaries: to the extent that almost every student should be aware that GIS exists, and be able to explore its use. The value of GIS for a geographer may be obvious, but in the near future economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and teachers could find themselves looking for answers on a digitized map.
Political scientists can use GIS to identify voting trends, sociologists to gauge the effectiveness of social programs, economists to plot the relationships between income and education, to name only a few examples. Business people in the twenty-first century will be called upon to read maps constantly.
"Reading maps is an essential skill for liberal arts graduates," according to Russell Clark, the geology professor who will be teaching Geology 111, "Modern Maps and GIS"at Albion College this fall. "Non-scientists in particular need to learn the difference between a correlation and a cause: with GIS it's a simple matter to plot population density against crime rates and reach a glib conclusion. But the economist, politician or businessperson doing the plotting also really needs to consider the sources of the data. That's why understanding geographic information systems is really a basic skill, like being able to read, or to interpret numbers."
"Maps can and do play a much larger role in their lives than most people realize," Clark says. "Students will learn that, in this age of electronic maps and digital mapping, it can be very easy to create a map and use it for displaying and analyzing data, or modeling processes, or making decisions."
Contact Russell Clark in the Albion College geology department at 517-629-0312, or Jim Klapthor in the college news office at 517-629-0543. Clark's e-mail address is [email protected], and the Albion College GIS web site is at www.albion.edu/fac/geol/Gis_Lab.htm.
###
RSS