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GEOG 55 - Critical Analysis in GIS

This is the course guide for GEOG 55.

Course description

This course develops the elements of critical analysis using geographic information science (GIS). While using GIS as a method to ask questions and analyze geospatial data, students will also explore the ways that GIS is shaped by its underlying assumptions, embedded politics, societal impacts, knowledge-generation capabilities, and other limitations. Lab sessions will incorporate learning GIS analysis in the open source statistical package “R”, in tandem with readings and discussions about the theoretical and social dimensions of GIS.

[Source: ORC/Catalog, 04/04/2022] Dist: TAS

Defining analysis

The process of making sense of an issue, place, situation, or other phenomena by identifying its key components. All people are routinely analytical but researchers and teachers try to take especial care in justifying their analytical decisions. When confronted with something concrete that needs to be understood—such as a global commodity chain—geographers seek to achieve synthesis by first analysing what may be a multifaceted phenomenon. Analysis is the search for what some call ‘rational abstractions’: these aim to ‘cut reality at the joints’ rather than impose categories that make distinctions between what are, in fact, indissociable or functionally coherent phenomena. See also abstraction.

Rogers, A., Castree, N., & Kitchin, R. (2013). Analysis. In A Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2 Jun. 2023

In the Library's collections

You can use one of these subject headings to start your research in the library's online catalog:

Introductory reading(s)

Selected book title(s)

Other library resource(s)

Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)

With our discovery system, you can easily search across multiple formats to find resources for your search. The link below focuses on scholarly journal articles.

Internet resource(s)

Citing and Tracking Your Bibliographic References

Use this guide to help you learn how to correctly cite and keep track of the references you find for your research.

Keeping up with Cartography/GIS journal literature

Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for Cartography or GIS? And do you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.