Hello World!

My name is Amanda Chambers and I am a map connoisseur who is continuously inspired by the seemingly endless range of bad maps produced by mainstream news outlets, governments, and other corporations. Ergo, I am a fourth year Human Geography student doing a minor in Geographic Information Science and Geographical Computation at the University of British Columbia. Looking beyond the traditional terrestrial realm, I have become most interested in how geographies are built, manipulated, maintained, and interacted with on the internet and in the digital realm by humans.

This blog is designed for Geographical Sciences 479: Research in GIS, a course taught by Dr. Brian Klinkenberg at UBC. It is a collection from my time during this course and includes synopses on lectures and labs, paper reviews on the three pillars of GIS (landscape ecology, health geography, and crime analysis), and an overview and link to my self-directed final project.

This class was intended to run from January 8th, 2020 to sometime in mid-April, 2020, yet the unfortunate reality of this time period was the COVID-19 pandemic officially commencing in Vancouver, BC on March 16, 2020. As all our lives came to a halt, so did this class. That was until Jose Aparicio, our trusted lab supervisor at UBC, created a VPN for us to remotely access the UBC Geography Lab computers with all the statistical and ESRI software we needed to complete this course. For that, I would like to thank Jose and anyone else involved in the creation of the VPN, allowing my colleagues and myself to access our tools remotely. I would also like to apologize to Dr. Klinkenberg for thinking he had gone slightly mad when planning for a final option in place of the final project in late January/early February due to COVID-19 when he himself is a medical geographer. Don’t doubt the experts!