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Mar
8
Workshop 2: GIS Introduction Workshop
March 8, 2012 | Leave a Comment
GIS, or geographical information system, is something that I remember as a frustrating, tedious tool that my best friend and I always struggled within our high school oceanography class. Usually, we resorted to copying data and operations from the smart girl who sat next to us, leaving us time to watch Youtube videos instead. At the introductory workshop I took yesterday, I learned that not much has changed since then.
The program we used, ArcGIS, is supposed to be a more basic GIS program, but it is still a highly complex, confusing, non-intuitive program for those who have never used it before. True mastery of it requires what I’m certain is weeks or months of intensive training followed by years of practice and experience with it. It’s not something where clicking random buttons may eventually yield the desired result; you must know exactly what you want to do with it.
That being said, I managed to get through the beginning exercise packet without putting my fist through the monitor. It was a fairly simple, step-by-step process where all of the data was already loaded on the computer for you, and all you had to do was basically push the buttons it told you to.
But it was that simplicity that was most deceiving. After I left the workshop feeling like a GIS wizard, I realized that somebody may as well have been holding my hands and making them press the right keys. I had done nothing truly on my own, and I still had no idea how a GIS works. If somebody gave me some data now and told me to plot it somehow in a GIS program, I would be utterly lost.
The purpose of the introductory workshop could not have been to teach a person to use the software, but simply to introduce them to it. In this sense, it was successful. I had seen and used GIS tools before, but this refresher course made it seem slightly less imposing than I remember it being. Still, I feel very fortunate to have sat by the smart girls in my high school oceanography class, or senior year might have been more of a drag.
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