Learning Critical GIS is a practical primer on techniques and concepts central for conducting GIS-based work in urban environments. It is a workbook of exercises and software tutorials developed for and through my courses and serves as one component of the Geographic Information Systems course at Columbia GSAPP. Within that introductory graduate course, the exercises here comprise many of the lab assignments, and the tutorials supplement in-class software demonstration. Beyond that course, these materials are provided online with the hope they are useful.
I describe it as a "workbook" rather than a "textbook" because (to date) the contents here do not include much of what we would expect of such a textbook. For example, the specific technological, cultural, and political histories imbricated in geographic information systems are not discussed in these exercises or tutorials. While those histories are more explicitly covered in other course materials—in readings, lectures, and discussion—their implications on the technical act of doing GIS and the questions they raise while we interact with GIS software or manipulate geospatial datasets are threaded throughout the workbook.
Still, translating the issues, problematics, and tradeoffs characteristic of talking about GIS in socially contextualized and careful ways into doing so is never clear nor easy. The question has remained: how do we teach and learn to design, build, enact, and deploy GISystems in ways that are technically rigorous, ambitious, and elegant, without teaching and learning technocracy?
As mentioned above, the individual credits listed in each skills tutorial can only scratch the surface in describing the work that the various students named have put in to compiling the materials collected here. In addition to grabbing screenshots and producing gifs, they’ve honed their own skills in striving for the cleanest, quickest approach to explaining techniques to others. They’re also the ones who periodically check the tutorials for possible updating. I can’t thank them enough.
Leah Meisterlin (2022-2024) Learning Critical GIS: A Workbook.