My involvement with GIS began more than 20 years ago with SYMAP (a line-printer mapping utility) and continued in the microcomputer environment with AutoCAD. In 1998 I received an ACS grant to purchase a library license for ArcView, and subsequently Washington & Lee got a site license for ArcView. I attended the GIS Boot Camp (funded by the Environmental Studies Program of ACS) at Trinity in August 1999, following which many institutions acquired ESRI's ArcView GIS software, either in site license or lab pack form. John Blackburn and I developed a part of the ACS-funded Miley graphics server as a central location for campus support for GIS data and online tutorials, and we also worked on a proposal for an ACS-wide GIS server (The Digital South) in the fall of 1999. In an effort to develop a collaborative basis for infrastructural support within ACS, in Winter 2000 I wrote (in consultation with Bob Whyte) an unsuccessful application for FIPSE funding. Some of the ideas in that proposal led to experiments with GIS support at Washington & Lee, and I have continued to explore GIS possibilities in a variety of locations and disciplinary settings, including my own courses in Anthropology of East Asia and Human Geography. In the last two years I have had opportunities to attend several GIS conferences (San Bernardino 2000, ESRI's annual user conference in 2001, and several local meetings in Virginia), and I have visited ESRI and a number of institutions in California with active spatial information programs (February 2000 and February 2001). I have also served as a GIS development consultant to University of Richmond. ESRI's gift to Washington & Lee of ArcIMS software led to a project with Washington & Lee colleagues to distribute spatial information via the Web, the current state of which we introduced at the recent meeting in Richmond.
Some documents that summarize my thinking and activities at specific
times:
GIS in midsummer 2001 (a general summary, including a report of my attendance at ESRI's User Conference)What we need to do in planning and carrying out the next phase of GIS development (end of June 2001)
Some resources for University of Richmond visit, 25 May 2001
Building a Digital Library of Spatial Data and Images for Rockbridge County (April 2001)GIS in Undergraduate Teaching (Dec 2000 summary)
GIS Across the Curriculum (LAAP PreProposal, March 2000)
GIS: an insurmountable opportunity? (November 1999)
Information Fluency writings, 1999-2001