The Bureau of Labor Statistics (URL below) estimates that the annual growth in geospatial technology is almost 35 percent per year. With companies like Uber, Tesla, Google, and Apple relying on geospatial data to power their latest innovations, companies are in need of highly skilled and critical thinking geographers.
The goal of the UTK GIS Outreach and Community Engagement Lab is to help promote the role of GIS and related technologies in our everyday world and encourage people to pursue a career in geography. We offer outreach opportunities to the K-12 community by giving presentations at schools, attending college and career fairs, participating in teacher in-service and workshops, and offering a variety of hands-on activities for students. We also promote GIS on UT’s campus by hosting events like GIS Day as well as partnering with other departments on campus to conduct collaborative research. Private Industry, research labs, all forms of government, and non-profits rely on geospatial analysis to more efficiently pursue their goals and we offer training opportunities and student internships for those organizations.
If you would like to learn more about how GIS and Geospatial Technology are relevant to your world, please contact the GIS Outreach Coordinator.
Quotes about GIS, Cartography, Mapping, Geography, and Spatial Analysis:
GIS Quotes:
“GIS is a form of digital mapping technology. Kind of like Google Earth, but better.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Government Technology Conference, 2008
“Digital mapping is about to change our world by documenting the real world, then integrating the information into our computers, phones, and lifestyles. Roll over, Mason and Dixon: spurred by space photography, global satellite positioning, mobile phones, search engines and new ways of marketing information for the World Wide Web, the ancient art of cartography is now on the cutting edge.”
Levy, S. 2004.
“The application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it”.
Jack Dangermond, Esri
Cartography Quotes
“The good cartographer is both a scientist and an artist. He must have a thorough knowledge of his subject and model, the Earth…. He must have the ability to generalize intelligently and to make a right selection of the features to show. These are represented by means of lines or colors; and the effective use of lines or colors requires more than knowledge of the subject – it requires artistic judgement.”
Erwin Josephus Raisz (1893 – 1968)
“The foremost cartographers of the land have prepared this for you; it’s a map of the area that you’ll be traversing.” Blackadder opens it up and sees it is blank.
“They’ll be very grateful if you could just fill it in as you go along.”
Blackadder II, British Comedy set in Elizabethan times. From the episode called “Potato”
Maps Quotes
“A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.”
Gilbert H. Grosvenor, Editor of National Geographic (1903- 1954)
“A number of astronauts, and then all of us who saw the photography from space, marveled at how much the Florida peninsula, meandering Mississippi, the islands of Britain, and the boot of Italy resembled the maps everyone had grown up with. We had taken it for granted that maps were faithful reflections of reality; but we were somehow amazed when reality turned out to be true to the maps.“
John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers
“I’ve always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going — in a sense it’s three tenses in one.”
Peter Greenaway, Welsh film director in an interview for Film Comment, May/June 1990
“When our maps do not fit the territory, when we act as if our inferences are factual knowledge, we prepare ourselves for a world that isn’t there. If this happens often enough, the inevitable result is frustration and an ever-increasing tendency to warp the territory to fit our maps. We see what we want to see, and the more we see it, the more likely we are to reinforce this distorted perception, in the familiar circular and spiral feedback pattern.”
Professor Harry L. Weinberg, 1959 in Levels of Knowing and Existence: Studies in General Semantics
“I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Art of Writing on Treasure Island
“Maps are like campfires – everyone gathers around them, because they allow people to understand complex issues at a glance, and find agreement about how to help the land.”
Sonoma Ecology Center
Spatial Arrangements Quotes
“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”
Tobler’s First Law of Geography
“Knowing where things are, and why, is essential to rational decision making”
Jack Dangermond, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)
Geography Quotes
“Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.”
Terry Pratchett in The Last Continent
“Geographers never get lost. They just do accidental field work.”
Nicholas Chrisman, Professor of Geomatic Sciences, Université Laval