GIS Tutorial (Kind of)

Luckily, I survived any grievous bodily harm I caused to myself during this lab. On several occasions, I punched myself in the face, cursed God, and contemplated dropping the class. I generally consider myself fairly sharp and somewhat tech savvy, so after drooling on myself in wonder, my word view was changed a bit.  I encountered two main problems during this lab. Occasionally, I would make an accidental change, and then be at a total loss on how to undo the change. I exacerbated this problem by continually clicking the undo button, only to fuck things up even worse. Secondly, the versions in the tutorial and the school computers were different. These inconsistencies lead me to aimless search through menus looking for the proper button (that may or may not look like the tutorial).

The potentials for GIS are virtually unlimited. It is a tool that is so valuable to understand, I am taking this class for no good reason other than I want to learn how to become proficient. While doing the lab, my mind was continually wandering to potential uses of GIS, and I had multiple ideas of maps I’d love to create. The implications to hard sciences are virtually limitless, for example, I have spent years searching for populations of a particular species of flower. With GIS, I could add multiple layers with preferred growth conditions and environments, and narrow my search areas substantially (I really don’t even know if this is true, but I hope so!). I could think of hundreds of other examples of how GIS could be useful in the sciences.

The pitfalls for the GIS are the learning curve. I made change my opinion of this as we progress, but after this exercise I am feeling somewhat disheartened. I can only hope it gets easier with use. In addition, people without the proper knowledge base could make inaccurate maps that others believe to be accurate. In my flower example, if someone walked up to me and handed me a map of potential sites, I would be inclined to believe them, even without investigation. They know more GIS than me, so they must be right, right? Furthermore inconsistencies in data can be propagated through GIS, adding another layer to unravel if a true hypothesis is found to be incorrect.

In conclusion, GIS is such a useful tool, users are willing overcome obstacles and potential problems to become proficient in its use. I imagine GIS will become increasingly more useful and user friendly as technology evolves. As the amount of users increase, the ability to distinguish poor procedures will increase within the community, reducing incongruencies.  If nothing else, learning GIS may make you contemplate your place in the universe