The Revolution Will be Mapped
That’s the title of a Culture & Society article in a publication that “harnesses current academic research with real-time reporting to address pressing social concerns.” The article focusses on a couple that formed a GIS institute to take on social justice issue. The Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities is based in Orange County, N.C., and story highlights how GIS helped rectify injustices in Zanesville, Ohio and Mebane, NC among others.
While the article focuses on how GIS helps in such cases and related policy issues such as health, it suggests GIS in its infancy and still unknown to the public:
Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. “You say ‘GIS’ and people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,’” Elwood says.
