In the News
GIS reveals undeserved areas for college-bound support
Virginia is dotted with resources that Nathan Alleman and his colleagues call "college access providers," entities that are as challenging to define as they are to identify.
Broadly defined, "college access providers" are people or groups that help young Virginians to navigate the college selection and admission processes. Such resources tend to be richer in areas that have a generally higher college attendance rate.
"They're pieces of the sort of cultural-social capital that a lot of people just don't grow up with if they are not around people who go to college," he said.
Alleman, a visiting assistant professor at William & Mary's School of Education, leads a group charged with assembling a report showing where the scores of college access providers are across the state. More importantly, the study also was to identify the Commonwealth's undeserved areas
$1.1 million in funding
The study, commissioned by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), was funded through a $1.1 million federal College Access Challenge Grant.
Purgatory...with a capital 'P'
Prehistoric megalithic dolmens and menhirs dot the landscape of Dénezé-sous-Doué. At certain times of the year, the fields reveal lines that are congruent with boundaries of the narrow farm plots shown on 200-year-old maps.
It's a place that has been continuously populated for millennia. Barbara Watkinson says that even the place names in this part of France have changed very little from medieval times to the present. Watkinson brings together a collection of documents including 11th-Century monastic land records, Napoleon Bonaparte's tax maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery and modern maps to chart and explain the transformation of the landscape in this particular area of western France.
Watkinson, an associate professor in William & Mary's art and art history department, enlisted the Center for Geospatial Analysis for help in "stitching together" the various media using various GIS techniques to reveal historic patterns of land ownership in the melded data.
Off the map
GIS is making new types of research possible at William & Mary.
It's also allowing researchers to look at work in progress in new, compelling ways. GIS uses computers to connect
the dots among the often-neglected spatial components of data. The term itself is an acronym for "geographic information system." Rather than a single system, GIS refers to a variety of techniques and tools. Stuart Hamilton, director of the College's Center for Geospatial Analysis (CGA), says Google Earth and other data-rich, interactive features on the internet have made people familiar with the products of GIS, even if they're unfamiliar with the technology itself. In the past few years, researchers and scholars have discovered the world of GIS—and the world through GIS.
Have you Mapped Your Data?
Read the full article at Computer World