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| Every day of your life you make several decisions that are based on geography. Using your smart phone you inquire where is the best place to have lunch with friends and how is the best way to get to the restaurant. On your laptop you roam the earth to see where your relatives live and observe photos of those locations that others have taken. You receive texts from people you don’t know who are explaining where a social event is happening tonight. Every day of your life you are interacting with geospatial data. This course introduces you to the role that geography plays in your life. From Google Earth to Facebook to Twitter to Apps, we will examine how geospatial data are collected and used, how geospatial technologies have transformed the way we think and make decisions, and the important societal issues that result. We will discuss the use of online mapping, satellite images, crowd sourcing and mobile technologies for responding to natural disasters, galvanizing underrepresented communities, devising combat plans, enhancing security, and embedding spatial information into our daily activities. This course is a prerequisite for upper level courses in geographical information science in the Department of Geography, and is the first step in providing you with a greater appreciation for Our Digital Earth. This course is designed to satisfy Social Science group status. Our Digital Earth will provide a critical perspective on the collection, use and dissemination of geospatial data and technologies. We will examine a cross-section of issues relating to how geospatial data and technologies have enhanced our lives by enriching the amount of information made available to us, and how these advances have led to serious concerns regarding privacy and safety. The course will cover several issues relating to the use of mobile technologies, crowd sourcing, online mapping and satellite images for providing emergency response, galvanizing underrepresented communities, devising combat plans, enhancing security, and embedding spatial information into our daily activities. Furthermore, the subject matter for this course will be relatively broad as we look at the evolving role that geospatial data and technologies play in shaping societies around the world. Examples include comparing the use of community mapping in underrepresented neighborhoods in Africa and the United States, examining how crowd sourcing and online mapping provided essential emergency response during the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Haiti and Japan, how satellite images are being used to direct decisions regarding deforestation in the context of climate, and how open source mapping applications are continually being used to tag information into the fabric of objects that surround us. |
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Course Fees: