Geography Awareness Week—also known as GeoWeek—will be taking place at Carleton from Nov. 13-18, with the theme for this year being the “Power of Parks.”
Meaghan Kenney, a program support officer with Carleton’s department of geography and environmental studies, said that several events have been taking place at Carleton for GeoWeek, including an alumni careers event and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day.
“This year for Geography Awareness Week we have a beautiful display up in the library showcasing what we do in the department here . . . and we have students’ work showcased as well,” she said.
Drones, ice cores, and equipment used to measure water quality were also exhibited in the library as a part of the week.
The annual worldwide event was founded 100 years ago by the National Geographic Society, who publishes National Geographic Magazine.
According to National Geographic’s website, the week was created “to raise awareness to this dangerous deficiency in American education and excite people about geography as both a discipline and as a part of everyday life.”
On Nov. 16, GIS Day was celebrated in the Discovery Centre at the MacOdrum Library. GIS is a form of mapping that creates a visual map of data.
According to Carys Carrington, a data technician at the library who helped organize Carleton’s GIS Day event, the celebrations take place annually in over 80 countries.
It provides an opportunity for people to “come together to look at how GIS is being used in real world situations dealing with spatial data,” Carrington said.
Rebecca Bartlett, GIS and digital resources librarian in the library’s Maps, Data and Government Information Centre, said she has also been involved in organizing Carleton’s GIS Day.
According to Bartlett, the library’s GIS services are used by students from a variety of programs, including health sciences, architecture, history, English, journalism, and archeology.
“If you’re interested in place, and you have information about a location, then you can use GIS to do some analysis or mapping,” Bartlett said.
Carrington said the purpose of GIS Day is to raise awareness.
“It’s a way to expose our students to the GIS technology, because not all students really know about GIS,” she said. “You wouldn’t think that incidence rates of a disease would be mapped. But in mapping it, it gives you another layer of knowledge and you would actually see the spatial component of that, which helps you problem-solve more.”
According to Kenney, GeoWeek is overall about educating people on the different aspects of geography.
“It’s important to highlight the different ways that we geographers engage with research just because it’s often misunderstood,” she said. “A hundred years ago, geographic inquiry was looking at maps and boundaries and borders in different ways than we are today . . . today it’s more about people, place, scale, politics, geopolitics, [and] cultural politics.”
Kenney added, “We’ve tried our very best to reach out to the entire student body and faculty of Carleton University. It really is for everyone.”
