The Observer, October 21, 2005
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 8
Case hosts national conference at KSL
Last Thursday and Friday, Case hosted a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) conference, highlighting Kelvin Smith Library's Center for Statistics and Geospatial Data (CSGD). The Center, located on the second floor of KSL, provides basic GIS software training and research tools for the Case community.
Today, GIS technology is being used to study geospatial trends of cities, people, and physical landscape, which are useful for understanding many current environmental and social issues. Almost a hundred people drawn from government agencies and universities across the country attended the conference.
Kicking off the two-day event was a keynote speech by Gregory Crane, a classics professor at Tufts University. Crane spoke on "The World as a Library: Making Space Readable," and addressed both technical and moral issues that have arisen from the collection of massive amounts of information in the past few years.
He spoke about community-driven resources, like blogs and "wikis," which are online collections that can be accessed and altered by any user. He referred to these as bottom-up, democratic movements. "Wikipedia is the most astonishing development of the last five years," Crane said.
Recognizing the online encyclopedia's more than 750,000 articles, Crane believes that the Wikipedia is the most comp-rehensive reference work on Earth. He said these articles – generally not produced by academics or professionals – are usually up-to-date and very accurate.
"[The articles are a] decentralization of power and authority," Crane said.
Following the keynote were eight Project Seminars, presented by GIS researchers and librarians. Subjects included "The Role of Non-school Factors in the Failure of Public Schools: Using GIS to Explore the Life Conditions of City Kids," "Dynamic Maps and Cultural Atlases – From the Silk Road to North American Missions," and "Immigration and the Neighborhood," among others.
One of the presenters was Dorothy Merritts, Professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, who used Case's CSGD during the '04-'05 school year. She has been investigating sources of sediment and nutrient pollution to the Chesapeake Bay, and used GIS technology to combine information from several sources.
By plotting data from historical documents (maps, U.S. census data) with data collected through remote sensing techniques and field observations, Merritts and her colleagues at Franklin and Marshall have discovered that the high levels of sediments and nutrients currently being dumped into the Chesapeake may actually be the result of the un-damming of old 18th and 19th century mill-ponds, rather than the runoff from the many Amish farms in the area. "We used GIS to create an immense database of information on thousands of dams … which enabled us to plot their impact," Merritts said.
Her research is just one example of the many ways GIS is being used in geographical research today, as demonstrated by the topics presented in project seminars and poster sessions during the two-day symposium. The diverse subject list included the role of GIS in conservation planning, community development, transportation, fine-scale digital mapping, and the Antarctic search for meteorites.
This wide array of applications for GIS technology speaks to its versatility and potential for future research.
For more information, go to http://library.case.edu/ksl/csgd/.
