The semester is winding down-which means the whirl of finals and holiday plans is upon us.

As my first semester as  SIF comes to a close, I would like to use this last blog post of the semester to as a space to reflect on the experience and make some “resolutions” for the upcoming year .

Reflection: The bulk of my time as a SIF has been spent teaching faculty and students how to create maps for a broad range of topics:

  • location of long stay motels in Atlanta
  • race and mobility in Atlanta’s past transportation planning
  • shoreline accretion and erosion of St. Catherine’s Island
  • relationship between college enrollment and twitter presence
  • relationship between elevation and issues of mold in English Avenue/Vine City
  • examining Atlanta mass transit planning historical planning documents

When looking back at this list, I appreciate the diversity between all the projects. Isn’t diversity, after all, the reason many of us have chosen to study geography/cartography? That was my justification anyways 🙂 As my experience suggests, geography can be explored through an almost endless amount of perspectives and maps are infiltrating other arenas of thought.

Beyond the diversity, I’d also like to point out that I’ve worked with five people this semester that have never once before in their lives used ArcGIS, which is the primary mapping program I tend to use. ArcGIS is an extremely dense program that has a  pretty significant learning curve. And, as Einstein has been quoted as saying, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” So, through the process of teaching these Arc newbies-I have sharpened my own Arc skills. How awesome is that!?!

Resolutions: As noted-a majority of the guidance I offered was within ArcGIS platform. Because ArcGIS is the primary tool taught within the GIS courses in the Department of Geosciences here at GSU, it is the one I am most familiar with.  In the upcoming year, however, I would like to push myself to become more familiar with additional mapping/designing tools. Which tools exactly?

  • Mapbox
  • QGIS
  • InstantAtlas
  • Adobe Illustrator

So thanks for an awesome semester, Student Innovation Fellowship! So far, my role in the program has allowed researchers from all over campus to incorporate maps and spatial thinking into their work, while simultaneously challenging me to be a better cartographer.

Last map of the year: Christmas Lights & Holiday Light Displays in Atlanta

Cheers to the upcoming 2015 Spring Semester!

*Ignite, Inspire, Involve*-Amber