geoLibro.org

EDUCAUSE has posted a Learning Initiative paper on Data Visualization, “7 Things You Should Know About Data Visualization. But they might as well have just called it “why geoinformatics is fucking awesome,” since at least three of the examples they cite are exactly within the realm of geospatial data visualization and analysis made available by these kick-ass new computing contexts about which everybody is so excited.

One of their examples, in fact, (the groundwater model) is remarkably similar to the exercise we’re using in our Geoinformatics course this Spring. Oh, right: part of the reason the geoMp3s have been so slow to return is that I’m co-teaching an inaugural “EAS 591g: Geoinformatics” course. There will be more to say about this as the experiment rolls on (maybe something about teaching Geoinformatics almost entirely at the local, desktop computing level instead of wading out onto the gridded, supercomputer world one usually associates with this topic? Maybe something about the unbelievable audacity of the makers of the Blackboard classroom content system to ignore RSS?), but…what was I talking about? Oh: thanks, EDUCAUSE.

Edit: I’m disabling comments on this one, as apparently “EDUCAUSE” gets hit hard by spammers.

Guess what: Library Trends v.55 no.2 is devoted to Geographic Information Systems and Libraries. Yep, the entire issue. Articles I am most eager to read:

Turns out that’s just about all of them, but it’s not often entire editions of a journal — a library journal, no less — is devoted to my specific job. The toc and article URLs can be found here.

Eeeegh [pulls on collar]. It got pretty bad again…

Anyway, 9.2 arrives and my IT guys suddenly can’t find server space for us to mount .iso images of the discs I want to put up for authenticated download. I think they’re all busy with a little thing called MetaLib that they’re trying to get up before mid-December or something wild like that. So I’ve been duplicating discs and making my own .iso files and none of it is fun or efficient or novel like it was supposed to be.

I’m otherwise knee-deep in data preparation and grant preparation and a number of other project-planning activities and this blog gets bumped every time. But there is news to report:

ArcGIS Explorer is out. Download link is here.

I got a MacBook Pro from the North Michigan Av. Apple Store and it kicks. Very fast, remarkably smooth display. I’ll be attempting the Parallells/ArcGIS combination sometime this week if I can crawl out from the hole I’m in.

And finally: 9.2′s Batch… does work, but it takes about a day to run a very simple process on ~250 files. Not. Cool. I have a ticket in for ESRI about it, but I think the problem is that when you give the input table your list of files to be processed and corresponding list of output paths, it runs a very, very, very, very long check on whether those inputs are valid. I’d rather they be invalid and the process to choke than sit around waiting for this verification. It’s grueling. If anybody knows more about this, I would love to know.

The good folks at Indiana University’s Geology Library have posted a series of maps that depict a number of Thanksgiving-related ag production variables, including cranberry, onion, pumpkin, and turkey production. Bring them to Thanksgiving dinner with you and it can go something like this:

Relative: So are you still doing GPS?

You: GIS

Relative: Oh that’s not the satellite…thing?

You: No, that’s Global Positioning. G.P. I do GIS, Geographic Information Systems.

Relative: [head tilts slightly to the side, eyes go glossy]

You: [unfurling IU's Thanksgiving poster with stony, blank face] Uh, I make maps.

Roughly two weeks ago, I mentioned a workshop on GIS for librarians. Well, I went after all, with the slightly hidden agenda of seeing who in the state was interested in GIS for a library, why they were interested, and possibly hearing about ongoing or planned projects. First of all, it wasn’t taught by an architect after all. The instructor had almost 30 years of GIS under his belt and who happened to work for a firm whose several services include architecture.

Anyway, what was most useful was hearing the questions existing librarians had about why GIS should even be in a library, what would it cost, etc. Also interesting was witnessing confusion about that murky place between these datasets everybody talks about and the map products themselves. In other words, for most attendees it was easy to see conceptually how geographic information can be useful and how it might even belong in a library, but very difficult for them to imagine how that information gets put onto a computer screen in any useful, intuitive format.

Our instructor didn’t help out much in that respect, as his was pretty clearly a general “What-is-GIS?” presentation he just happened to be showing to a roomful of librarians. In other words, very little was said about how librarians might play a part in metadata creation, storage, or development and very little was said about how a library might go about employing and applying GIS for themselves or for patrons. And almost nothing was done to illustrate the real, physical connection between something called “data” and that rich, graphical, colorful visualized version thereof.

And one more thing. If you were talking up GIS to a bunch of nonprofit types and they almost literally gasped at the price of the ESRI products, wouldn’t you also mention that there are several easy to use, free (open source, most likely) software titles that might do what they  need? Not everybody would.

We first saw MetaCarta’s Geographic Text Search back in 2005. There must be some new functionality or something (document density map, maybe?), because the All Points Blog and others are covering it again. I’m jealous of MetaCarta’s effort more than its existence. It’s the sort of business that a library-based GIS might attend to (especially as more and more library faculty are ushered toward doing interdisciplinary research [with, say, computer scientists]). MetaCarta is using a map interface for non-map, non-GIS document clusters and we should all be interested (but librarians especially) in how these documents are ingested and indexed. If they can do automated geographic indexing of 10,000 documents per day, why don’t more libraries have map interfaces or at least some other geographic utility for locating materials?

Cartographica.com alerts us to a May 24, 2006 Christian Science Monitor article that reviews a pair of geo-savvy museum publications. The second of these, Folk Songs from the Five Points, is exactly the kind of thing libraries might do with their placeable collections. Perhaps more than anything I’m interested in atypical applications of GIS and mapping, and geographic access to library collections may or may not be considered an example thereof. Either way, Folk Songs… (as well as Curating The City, for that matter) is a great example of how content tied to place can be placed. Make sense? Good, because libraries are full, full of placeable material.

These are the kinds of projects for which a library-centric GIS might be especially-suited. A publication like Folk Songs… isn’t exactly hard science, and some might argue that it’s not GIS at all. My point is that while this kind of geospatial application becomes more and more commonplace and more and more desirable, students and faculty are going to be more and more curious about it for their own work and are going to need some place to which they can turn and get support for it. Hard science or even just department-specific labs are typically not interested in providing this kind of support, especially for extra-disciplinary folk. That’s all I’m saying.