A basic requirement for effective Stewardship is control of information about what one proposes to care about and care for. A Steward needs to be able to find relevant research that has been done, needs to understand the findings and the progress made by researchers, and needs to be able to ask questions of relevant data. These needs imply an array of skills, general and specific, and a support infrastructure that facilitates access to literatures and data.
We propose to train students to comprehend problems at large scale --to develop data-based sophistication about issues like health, poverty, demography, environmental conditions, urbanization, unemployment, etc.-- and to produce graduates who know how to investigate and analyze and synthesize and communicate findings. To accomplish these goals, we must offer courses which develop awareness of the intellectual background to such issues, teach practical and appropriate analytical skills, and broaden students' geographical knowledge and cultural sensitivity.
Many of the concrete problems of Stewardship have spatio-temporal components, and our graduates should know how to set about answering questions such as these:
What is the local, regional, national and global distribution of infant mortality (or illiteracy or soil erosion or peonage), and what is its temporal trajectory? What are the related environmental and social variables? What do you need to know to answer the underlying questions? Where will you find relevant data? How will you evaluate the quality of available data? What are the appropriate analytical tools? Who has done analyses of related problems?
Such questions are often interdisciplinary in scope, and answers require access to information and analytical tools that are outside the experience of Washington & Lee departments and libraries. Adequate institutional support for this program must include an expansion of library holdings (including digital data and other electronic resources) and analytical capabilities (including support for GIS). Library resources are increasingly electronic, and their efficient use requires the services of librarians as curators, consultants, and trainers. Similarly, as GIS gains acceptance as a professional tool and availability of spatial data continues to expand, the expertise of a GIS specialist (who combines knowledge of specific software, local and remote computing environments, and the acquisition, storage and manipulation of data) will be necessary.
Much of the intellectual background to GIS has developed within the academic discipline of Geography, which (largely because of its rarity in the American university context) is not well connected to cognate science and social science disciplines. Consequently, researchers with spatial data in fields such as Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Politics, Marketing, Economics, History, Journalism, and Biology have rarely had professional support in efforts to use GIS unless their campuses had friendly and generous Geography (or sometimes Geology) departments.
Most Geography departments teach GIS: they offer training in the technical specialty and operate certificate programs that train their graduates for employment in companies and governmental agencies. Students from other departments may be able to take GIS courses, and GIS may be used in other Geography courses, but the influence on faculty in other departments is minimal.
The use of GIS as a classroom and research tool outside of Geography departments is rare but growing, and requires institutional support to encourage professors to explore teaching with GIS. Such support for faculty and student use of GIS is provided on some campuses by an interdisciplinary GIS lab, often housed in the library and/or included in an Instructional Technology center. On a few campuses digital data are considered to be just another form of information, part of the emerging mission of the digital library, but most libraries have not reached this point.
15 Jan
The questions I'll be asking on the February trip come from the intersection of work I've been doing with
In the last decade electronic tools and resources have accelerated processes and spawned new complexities in every aspect of American life, and in the lives of many people in other parts of the world. Thanks largely to the ubiquity of computers we can know more about the world, and mastery of information techologies promises better management of human and natural systems. Liberal arts institutions must develop productive ways to employ new technological possibilities for teaching and learning, without compromising the goal of producing broadly educated graduates who will continue to learn throughout their lives. Our students need both the traditional skills of written and spoken communication and a firm grounding in emergent technologies, and they need to study and understand both Euro-American traditions and other ways of comprehending the world. Global Stewardship joins Environmental Studies and the Shepherd Poverty Program as W&L's answers to the need for relevant, practical and issue-focused interdisciplinary courses. These programs will thrive as they meet the needs and interests of the students who take their courses, and as faculty contribute time and energy to developing new ways to collaborate with colleagues here and elsewhere.
We have a great wealth of information resources, more and more of which are (a) available in electronic form and (b) interconnected. Nobody is truly expert in this realm, though W&L's reference librarians have a good collective understanding of what we can access, what to do with it, and how to help people learn to use the resources.
16 Jan
In my day-to-day work I wrestle with information sources and data constantly; I know a lot about how to find stuff that's hidden,