The purpose of this textbook is to provide an accessible introduction to geotechnology for a wide range of students. The techniques and approaches to problem solving, project organization and management, and data visualization are used with the intension of introducing students to the possibility of using GIS as a platform for making contributions to a wide range of programs that are concerned with social, economic, political, and environmental change. Includes activities that lead students through hands-on workflows to create flexible and functional "solutions" to specific tasks that are typical for geospatial analysts.
Coming to GIS: Making sense of geotech; Ground rules: Georeferencing, smart data practices, and making smart maps; Creating (spatial) knowledge: Getting the world into your GIS; Maps with legs: Think globally, map locally; Application I: Toxics in our town; Application II: Environmental justice[ Application III: Food deserts; Application IV: Climate change; Executing GIS: A suggested template for organizing a GIS project; Mapping futures: communities, crowds, and clouds.
Cassie Follett is the GIS Coordinator for the Department of Geography at DePaul University, helping to plan and expand GIS capabilities on campus and managing the new GIS Lab on campus. Before coming to DePaul she worked for NASA and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and received her MA from West Virginia University while researching big data and open source web GIS. She holds a bachelors with double major in Geography and History from Carthage College. She is a volunteer with several open source GIS projects such as Cesium and QGIS, and is currently a "Hacker in Residence" with local Chicago startup Hologram, and a "Cyberacademy Fellow" with SANS. She is currently pursuing a second MS at DePaul in Computer Science. Her research interests are participatory GIS, GIS programming, critical GIS, environmental justice, and virtual reality.
Sungsoon Hwang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at DePaul University. She received her B.A. in Geography Education from Seoul National University. She received her M.S. in Geographic Information Systems from University of Nottingham. She received her Ph.D. in Geography with a concentration on Urban and Regional Analysis from State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. She has created and taught 20 courses related to GIS. She has published on fuzzy geodemographics, GIS for sustainability education, and uncertain GPS trajectory computing in the disciplines of geography, urban planning, and computer science.
Professor McHaffie joined the faculty at DePaul University in 1996 after academic appointments at West Virginia University, Dartmouth College, and West Georgia College. During the 1980's he served with the Kentucky Geological Survey where he conducted environmental research related to coal mining, directed the National Cartographic Information Center affiliate office, and coordinated the State Topographic Mapping Program. His research interests and publication history include the social history of cartography and GIS, the cartographic labor process, cartographic ethics, the geography of education spending, Appalachian social geography, and the social construction of the global. He currently is completing a study of highway planning in Chicago during the cold war. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, History of Cartography Project (University of Wisconsin), and the University Research and Quality of Instruction Councils (DePaul University), and he holds a GISP certification.
Professor Yang is a broadly trained GIS scientist with an interdisciplinary perspective and particularly specializing in GIS modeling, Web GIS, GIS Spatial Statistics, Geovisualization, GIS-based 3D City model. His recent research interests involve developing dynamic Web GIS applications (VGI or PPGIS), visualizing 3D Landscape, 3D building models, and GIS based immersive technologies in urban areas. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in a field of Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing, and a certified Mapping Scientist, certified by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).
