Intro GIS - 11/18/09

Dr. Hickey will be on the Wet Side learning about the WA Military Division's GIS activities.

Your task is to watch the below videos, spend some time on the last website, and answer a few questions (below).

As always, general information from these videos will be fair game on the final.

Videos:

• A talk discussing Dr John Snowe's mapping of cholera deaths in London. (10 mins)
• A tour of Microsoft Virtual Earth (a bit old, but still cool) (6 mins)
• A tour of Google Ocean (2 mins)
• The touch table (6 mins)
  • in 3D (1 min)
• Hans Rosling, Gapminder, the best statistics ever (20 mins)

Website:

• Gapminder. OK, this site is just plain cool. Head into Gapminder world and explore. You have two options - charts and maps. Play around a bunch. There is mucho data here (click on the axes of the charts to see what you can display). For the maps, you can get to the data to map by clicking under the size (bottom right), then going to indicators - a ton of options pop up. Always note that you can look at only certain geographic regions/countries by selecting them in the country list - and that you can watch things change over time (which is totally cool).

Spend some time playing around with this site. In particular, print out three different charts and three different maps for me (all 6 must show different data). For each, write a paragraph which shows me that you did more than make/print chart (ie, talk about the data, what it shows about xx country/region, etc). Think of it as sort of a reading summary for each - show me you thought about it.

2 points. Due Monday 23 November