GIS Education at UC Berkeley

GISC Short Courses provide a quick and in depth overview of Geographic Information Science.

Past Courses

“A Survey of GIS Applications for the Social Sciences and Humanities”

February 17, 2006,  9 am to 4 pm

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an increasingly ubiquitous technology in research, education, and our daily lives.  Scholars are discovering the usefulness of GIS data in non-traditional fields such as the humanities and social sciences.  This course serves as both an introduction to GIS and to its application within an academic environment. 

Course Description:

The Geographic Information Science Center at the University of California Berkeley is offering a one-day workshop: A Survey of GIS Applications for the Social Sciences and Humanities. The instructor, Kevin Mickey, is Director of Professional Education and Outreach at the Polis Center, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis.

The workshop will begin with an overview of the types of spatial issues that confront researchers and scholars in the social sciences and humanities and the role that spatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) can play in addressing those issues.  It will then proceed to a review of the types of software tools that can be used to collect, display, and analyze spatial information.  The workshop will also provide information about where free and fee-based spatial data or data that can be spatially enabled - can be found as well as how new data can be created that allow users to address specific research or teaching goals. 

During the course, participants will complete hands-on exercises that provide an opportunity for them to explore a number of GIS applications that range from free to fee-based and from simple to challenging in terms of their complexity and capabilities.  The exercises will include a review of some of the powerful tools that are available for manipulating the display of map and tabular information, tools that are available for spatially orienting scanned imagery such as historic maps with other sources of information so as to allow for a comparison of past and present landscapes, tools for integrating information such as the locations of archaeological artifacts collected from GPS instruments with other data, and tools for performing analysis of spatial phenomena such as population dispersion patterns. 
 
Course participants will each receive a copy of a free GIS data viewer as well as an evaluation copy of the powerful desktop GIS software that is explored in the class.  They will also receive a copy of the course data and a sample collection of spatial data resources so that they can explore the many tools that are discussed in the course at their leisure following course completion.