Introduction to the Workbook

L. Meisterlin (2022)

Overview

Learning Critical GIS is a practical primer on techniques and concepts central for conducting GIS-based work in urban environments. It is a workbook of exercises and software tutorials developed for and through my courses and serves as one component of the Geographic Information Systems course at Columbia GSAPP. Within that introductory graduate course, the exercises here comprise many of the lab assignments, and the tutorials supplement in-class software demonstration. Beyond that course, these materials are provided online with the hope they are useful.

I describe it as a "workbook" rather than a "textbook" because (to date) the contents here do not include much of what we would expect of such a textbook. For example, the specific technological, cultural, and political histories imbricated in geographic information systems are not discussed in these exercises or tutorials. While those histories are more explicitly covered in other course materials—in readings, lectures, and discussion—their implications on the technical act of doing GIS and the questions they raise while we interact with GIS software or manipulate geospatial datasets are threaded throughout the workbook.

Still, translating the issues, problematics, and tradeoffs characteristic of talking about GIS in socially contextualized and careful ways into doing so is never clear nor easy. The question has remained: how do we teach and learn to design, build, enact, and deploy GISystems in ways that are technically rigorous, ambitious, and elegant, without teaching and learning technocracy?

About the Learning Critical GIS pedagogical project

Most of the workbook's exercises have been created (and iterated) since 2016 by me (Leah Meisterlin), building on course materials I had developed in the prior five or so years. In addition, several recent exercises are the result of collaboration with and iteration between lab instructors over years.

Early versions of these exercises focused on Esri's ArcMap software as the primary environment in which the technical "hard skills" were demonstrated and performed. Beginning (slowly at first) in 2018, additional tutorials were developed to supplement the ArcMap-based exercises, demonstrating these "hard skills" with other, including open-source, GIS tools.

The primary goal was, and remains, two-fold:

• Maintaining a software-agnostic workbook of exercises that is relevant and meaningful for learning (critical) GIS, independent of changes in the products and apps available and regardless of which tools students have at their disposal.

• Conceptually separating learning applied GIS from learning GIS software, recognizing that their conflation often functions as the first (and fundamental) pedagogical barrier for both teaching and learning critical, applied GIS.

The project is ongoing by necessity. Keeping the material fresh and keeping the tutorials up-to-date are both labors of love and obligation.

Use and Contact

The structure of Learning Critical GIS follows the structure of my course and pedagogy (more on that below). The workbook is presented online and free-to-use with attribution, for supporters of this site.

If you teach GIS and find these materials useful, I would love to know about it. If you would like access to supplemental materials—including PDFs of older tutorials, data packages, example deliverables, and answer keys!—or just want to chat about how the workbook fits into the syllabus, please reach out. Talking about GIS education is one of my very favorite things to do.

Lastly, this workbook developed because of a dearth of specifically applied, high-quality, critical, practical, and challenging instructional materials available. GIS educators have two options: use what’s available or write your own. After years of writing my own, I am adding it to what’s available with the hope that it eases the labor of teaching as well.

Structure of the Workbook

A little background information is in order because there are myriad ways to structure and order a geospatial data analysis workbook, as well as the skills and exercises contained therein. The most obvious (and probably most common) being to start with the technically simplest of tasks and build up from there. But I eventually learned that foregrounding technical-skills scaffolding over conceptual and critical skills development only produces that pedagogical barrier mentioned above.

Mapping-Analyzing—Making Data

In 2013, I reformulated my then-undergraduate GIS class into a tripartite structure organized around different social, cultural, economic, and political activities for which a GIS can be built, maintained, and used. Those activities were summarized under the headings Mapping Data, Analyzing Data, and Making Data—in that order, which I understand is sometimes viewed as unusual. I gutted my syllabus and started from scratch, writing new lectures and assignments, drastically reorganizing when (and how) topics were covered and which (and how) skills would be cumulatively acquired through the semester’s exercises and other assignments. The motivation for this change was conceptual and pedagogical in that it allowed for a detailed, developing discussion of how geographic information systems are designed and deployed for different purposes; by different actors and agents; and by, with, or upon different communities. The new structure emphasized why and how a GIS is used rather than how to use a GIS.

The results were astounding. And, unsurprisingly, the conceptual shift in the course also supported and accelerated students’ technical skills acquisition. Not only were students more critically engaged, questioning, and thoughtful in the class, but they were eager to leverage that thinking in their work (read: effect of finding intellectual agency in a “hard-skills” class), with noticeably more ambitious expectations of their own technical proficiency, graphic communication, and analytical scope.

By 2016 when many of the exercises in this workbook were first drafted and outlined, I was committed to this Mapping—Analyzing—Making structure and the overall arc of the semester. (It has undergone iterations and tweaks, as expected: a little flexibility is always good in a course that must be updated almost every year.) To date (2022), I have tested the framework in undergraduate and graduate classes, as well as in workshops and bootcamps for professionals as well as non-GIS-y faculty colleagues, and thus far it continues to yield joyous leaps and breathtaking “aha! moments” in student development.

Exercises, Skills Tutorials, and Resources

Following the logic described above, the workbook’s materials are organized into three broad categories: Exercises, Skills Tutorials, and Additional Resources.

The exercises are structured lab assignments, each designed with a hypothetical but grounded scenario that includes specific questions we might use a GIS to consider and an audience, reader, or community with or for which we might develop our response. Most of these exercises include a brief that describes deliverable requirements, with formatting parameters that keeping the audience in mind.

The skills tutorials comprise a short demonstrations of "hard skills" in different softwares, platforms, or programming languages/environments. They are the how to. The first round of skills tutorials focus on Esri’s ArcGIS Pro, and will be replicated in QGIS (and maybe even Esri’s ArcMap) as appropriate. Others will include non-GIS-specific platforms including R, Excel, and Python as well as web-based platforms. These are a constant work-in-progress as new software versions are released and old ones are deprecated.

Relevant skills tutorials are collected within each exercise, with links, allowing students to access the “how-to” in the context of where those skills are deployed. All skills tutorials are accessible at GIS Software Skills Tutorials, which includes galleries by topic and some “beginner” resources in sequence.

Finally, additional resources are the helpers, references, and other materials that, over time, I and my students have found useful to compile in one place. These include references on citing data sources, among others.

Credits

As mentioned above, the individual credits listed in each skills tutorial can only scratch the surface in describing the contributions from various GIS users and learners in developing and compiling the materials collected here. I can’t thank them enough.