Acknowledgements

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David DiBiase with contributions by James L. Sloan, Ryan Baxter, Wesley Stroh, Beth Fletcher King, and many students

The Pennsylvania State University

The purpose of this text is to promote understanding of the Geographic Information Science and Technology enterprise (GIS&T, also known as “geospatial”). Since I began writing in 1997 it has been a vehicle for me to understand the field better, and to help my students do the same. Originally my students were undergraduates enrolled in the Penn State course GEOG 121 (now 160): Mapping Our Changing World. Later, I developed an online text for students in our Postbaccalaureate Certificate Program in GIS and Master of GIS (MGIS) degree program, both offered to adult professionals across the country and around the world through the University’s “World Campus.” A short version that includes ArcGIS exercises appears in Esri’s Virtual Campus as “Understanding Geographic Data.” Now, with the blessings of both Penn State and Esri, I am pleased to share the text with students and teachers everywhere as part of an Open Educational Resources initiative of Penn State’s John A. Dutton e-Education Institute. You are welcome to use and re-use materials that appear in this text (other than those copyrighted by others) subject to the licensing agreement linked to the bottom of this and every page.

GIS&T is the intersection of professions, institutions, and technologies that produce geographic data and render information from it. It is a rapidly growing and evolving field. Learning is a way of life for all GIS&T professionals. With this in mind, I hope that this text may contribute to your lifelong exploration of how geospatial technologies can be used to improve the quality of life–yours and your neighbors’, locally and globally, now and in the future.

The title of the text is a tribute to the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where my exploration of GIS&T began in 1983. There, and through projects that kept us in touch after we had gone our separate ways, I was privileged to work with Barbara Bartz Petchenik and Arthur Robinson. In 1976 Barbara and Robbie co-authored The Nature of Maps. Long before that, Richard Hartshorne published the influential (and controversial) The Nature of Geography in 1939, a year before moving to Madison. It may be that neither of these works was altogether successful in revealing the nature of their subjects. Neither, perhaps, is this poorer attempt likely to succeed entirely. Still, I hope that its availability in this open format will be useful to those who can’t afford expensive (though sometimes very good) printed texts, and I imagine that Barbara and Robbie would have approved.

I wish to thank colleagues in the Dutton e-Education Institute who help me make this text, and all our online curricula, available. In collaboration with our friends at the e-Learning Institute of Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture, Elizabeth Bailey and Martin Gutowski have been particularly instrumental in catapulting our professional practice into the present. I am grateful for the thousands of students who have traversed this text over the past fifteen years, and who continue to challenge me and my team to improve it.

This text serves as an assigned reading for registered students in formal Penn State courses. The Orientation section (under Start Here on the left) familiarizes registered students with the text and with the associated course management system (ANGEL). Links to Chapters 1-9 appear in the Contents menu. Only registered students are entitled to feedback from instructors and to earn academic credit for their participation in the course. For information about how to apply for admission to Penn State’s Postbaccalaureate Certificate and MGIS degree programs see the Geospatial Education Program Office. Information about Penn State’s Department of Geography appears here.

The National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries in the Classroom program supported portions of this work.