Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in today. We're very pleased to welcome you to this panel presentation ahead of GIS Day, which has turned into GIS week at Indiana University. Our theme this year, "Geographies of Disruption," provides an opportunity for critical reflection on how mapping, in the broadest sense of that word, could help us make sense of the many 2020 societal upheavals, from the pandemic to political unrest, that we've witnessed and we continue to witness. The purpose of this panel is to preview a series of talks we have scheduled for GIS Week, from November 16th through November 20th. We will have a brief presentation per day followed by a Q&A from each of today's panelists. Before introductions, we'd like to acknowledge and honor the indigenous communities native to the Bloomington region and recognize that Indiana University Bloomington is built on indigenous homelands and resources. We recognize the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land. I'm Michelle Dalmau, I'm an Associate Librarian and co-director for the Institute of Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University Bloomington. In a few minutes, I'll briefly highlight our sponsors and introduce our panel moderator. For now though, for more information about our speakers, including their bios and their abstracts, or if you would like to learn more about GIS day in general, feel free to visit our main website, which is at  go.iu.edu/gisday. If you would like to participate in a Twitter discussion around this event, please use the hashtag #gisday2020. Now I'd like to quickly acknowledge the folks who make GIS day possible at Indiana University. Our sponsors this year are the Media School, the IU Department of Information and Library Science, the IU School of Public Health, the IU Libraries, the IU Cultural Studies Program, Government Information, Maps, and Microform Services, which are part of the IU Libraries, and the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. So a big thanks to all these units for their support. And finally, I'm thrilled to introduce our panel moderator today, Christy Hyman. Christy Hyman is a PhD student in the program of geography at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Christy's research focuses on African-American efforts toward cultural and political assertion during the Antebellum Era and the Great Dismal Swamp region. We invited Christy as our panel moderator today because of her very humanistic approach to geography as well as her approach to critical GIS. Both of these approaches will serve this panel discussion well. And with that, I'm going to turn the presentation over to Christy, who will provide a brief intro to the panel and facilitate panelist introductions. Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to introduce today's panel. I will do so in alphabetical order of each panelist's last name. We have Heidi Rae Cooley -- Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley -- who is an associate professor in the School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Cooley will present "Sensing Place: Habit Change in the Mobile, Connected Present" And we also have Terra Graziani, who is the founder and co-director of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and a researcher with the UCLA Institute on Inequality in Democracy, as well as the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA. Graziani will present "Research in Solidarity: Documenting Dispossession and Resistance with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project." Today, Graziani could not be with us due to unforeseen circumstances. Girmaye Misgna is a mapping and geospatial data librarian in the Research Data in Digital Scholarship Center within Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. He will present "Aspects of Mapping and GIS Service in the Higher Education Library." Dr. Erik Nelson is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the IU School of Public Health Bloomington. Doctor Nelson will present "Placing Environmental Lead Exposure on Notice." Dr. Arrianna Planey is an assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Planey will present "GIS and Spatial Thinking for Public Health: Dr. Planey will present "GIS and Spatial Thinking for Public Health: Potential, Pitfalls, and Considerations." It is truly an honor to be in community with these amazing scholars today. And I want to thank IDAH for this opportunity. As a historical geographer who uses GIS, I know this conversation today will provide important vistas for my own scholarly investigations. So this panel considers how researchers using critical approaches with GIS can function in a world deeply etched by processes of uneven geographical development, and escalating environmental destruction. Drawing on insights highlighted in the article "Boundless Contamination and Progress in Geography," written by Noel Castree, Louise Armoore, Alex Hughes, Nina Laurie, David Manley, and Susan Parnell, our forum today will contribute important pathways in the field of GIS and geography in an ever-changing world. And we will engage with a range of topics in our panel. Our hope is to highlight the possibilities as well as responsibilities of critically engaged GIS. So we'll begin with our first question. How should we describe, explain, and evaluate the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, while foregrounding its dimensions of spatiotemporal unevenness? DR. COOLEY: I mean, generally speaking I'm interested in the shifting terrain of local geographies, the kinds of geographies that happen at the level of neighborhoods and sidewalks and grocery stores, local areas. And when COVID-19 began to close things down, those of us in the Public Interactives Research Lab found ourselves confronted by a question, what is the new public? How do we design and build public interactives, interactive experiences, for publics that have often historically understood the interface, or the touchscreen interface. Think of all of the smart screens in airports and in shopping malls and so on, and new developments. What does it mean to imagine a new way of thinking about designing for publics, 80% of whom no longer want to touch a screen -- and rightly so. And we spent most of our summer thinking -- it really required us to reevaluate who it is that we are designing for. What is it that we're hoping our designs do? What questions are we hoping our designs ask of the communities that we hope to engage? We haven't come to any solid decisions yet. We're still talking because we're still in the midst of it. But we've been observing how have the terrains of the grocery market shifted over time as you see what social distancing means in the context of things that we have to do on a daily or weekly basis. And so that's -- I think those are important questions to ask because those questions get handled differently depending upon which community you're looking at. CHRISTY: Does anyone else want to weigh in? DR. NELSON: I'll go ahead here. I think it's really first and foremost important to realize that each of us is experiencing this pandemic in a unique and individual way. This is a real human problem that we have right now. Everything around us, all the environments, all the communities, however we define and describe those, have been set adrift and things are not right for any of us. And so when we're talking about what can we do in an academic setting or with the skill sets that we have to be able to describe and explain this problem and communicate it to others to help them protect themselves, and also to cope, and get through this problem together. There's a lot that needs to be considered here. And in my role in public health, the thing that I'm constantly thinking about is how can I make sure that people know what's around them, where these hotspots are, so to speak. Classic tools. But also to point out the disparities and the problems that we have not only in the United States of America, but worldwide. And the disparities that are being perpetuated by such a hideous virus. And this spans politics, it spans religions, it spans boundaries in ways that are really hard to describe and hard for a lot of us to grapple with. And so there's a lot in this muddy mass of a pandemic that hopefully will help us emerge as better people. So as we're describing this problem, I often come back to the fundamental -- it's a human problem and that we're all humans, we're all brothers and sisters. We're in this together. And how are we going to use our skill set to approach this problem and solve it together? GIRMAYE: Yeah, it's mainly my observation in this regard is it's a temporal-spatial aspect of the COVID. This happens once in a lifetime kind of thing. And the observation is that this is happening or operating in the era of when technology is highly developed, you know, the big data, open data. And we have the technology there. And it has really revealed the weakness of where we need to reach in this case. For example, you know, it's happening in real time. Data has been gathered in real-time. But it's giving us an opportunity where our system is weak at this moment. And it has revealed also starkly the demographic, the disproportionate effect in different demographics. So this has been really, you know, it's the ethical question of gender aspects, racial aspects that have been starkly revealed. And this will, going forward, it will really help researchers and academics to focus. where focus when developing algorithms and analysis. DR. PLANEY: So for me, I'm going to speak to my position as a researcher within a public hospital, My current work -- I'm doing a lot of work right now, but I have a couple of COVID-related projects. And I admit, it does feel kind of icky to be doing research on COVID and pushing out publications. But at the same time, it's the kind of question, it kind of helps ground me. And so one thing is we're looking at, we're looking at one project--we're looking at population mobility, and evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place orders,  or the state emergency order. And we're looking the effects of those on population mobility and transmission and evaluation of COVID. And as we're doing the study, a lot of things are coming up. So there's persistent inequities along the axes of race, ethnicity, class, age. That means that the people who were the least protected before the pandemic are the least protected and the most exposed now. So we're seeing that -- so black and Latino workers before the pandemic were less likely to be able to work remotely. They're more likely -- they're over-represented among essential workers. We also know that these same groups, in addition to older people, they're less likely to have access to broadband, which is going to enable working from home, or taking advantage of telemedicine. And other ways that you can reduce your mobility and reduce your exposure. And we also know that mobility is stratified based on where you live. So urban centers have a lot more jobs that can be done remotely. Much more broadband connectivity. And when you look at mobility by urban, rural, suburban, what you see is that pre-pandemic mobility was actually highest in urban places. We actually had the highest income workers in these places, and these are also the most mobile workers. So when you're comparing urban versus rural versus suburban, you see -- or it's kind of like a step down -- where urban places were the most mobile, suburban places were next, and then rural places had much longer trips to get anywhere, just because there's fewer amenities and they're far less dense. But with the shelter-in-place order, we're seeing that the stretch in mobilities is pretty drastic and it's actually really highlighting these inequities where urban trips among residents in urban places have dropped very dramatically while trips in rural places had much less steep drops, and much less sustained drops. So you can see the places where there are more people that can't work remotely and so we're watching what we're seeing a sustained level of daily trips to work. And this is also in the context of North Carolina, we're also seeing a higher incidence of COVID in rural places compared with urban places, in contrast to the beginning of the pandemic in March and April. And there's also a race and ethnicity gradient, which we're not quite able to get at. But you can see those differences in who has to be mobile and who is choosing to be mobile. There's a lot happening there. So what I'm trying to do is kind of bridge these disparate pieces of data, in looking at occupational risk, occupational stratification. So two big industries -- North Carolina actually has the highest rate of employment in the meat and poultry processing industry. And nationally we're seeing huge outbreaks in these facilities. There's one study of twenty-three states -- but didn't include North Carolina -- it basically found that 87% of the cases associated with these facilities were among workers of color. So Black, Latino, and Asian immigrant workers, typically, were the most affected by these outbreaks. And in North Carolina, nationally, we have a higher share of employment in meat and poultry processing plants. We're also seeing very large outbreaks in these facilities. So you can kind of see it, spatially, when you map out where are the workers living, where are these migrant worker camps, where are the facilities and where are we seeing spikes in cases. So, I mean, it's hard to draw causal conclusions from that because there's a lag with the data and there's a lack of testing. But when you look at it in a whole picture -- And then another area that I'm looking at is actually nursing homes. So nursing homes account for about half of COVID mortality to date in the US. What we know is that among health care workers, people who work in a nursing home are among the least paid and the least protected. They're less likely to have sick days, less likely to have insurance coverage, and also much more likely to work in multiple facilities. So what's happening is we have hospitals releasing patient who have a lower likelihood of recovering from COVID to these nursing homes. And then you also have other nursing home residents being exposed because you have such high and sustained contact between the resident in the nursing home and the people who work there. And they are going from room to room with very limited PPE. That means that we have very efficient means of spread within nursing homes. And what I've found so far is that about half of nursing homes have COVID outbreaks in North Carolina. And, also, another important piece there is that Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among nursing home workers. CHRISTY: So what I'm hearing is there is a push to make this moment, no matter how cataclysmic and uncontrollable it is, still dynamic in a way so that certain institutions can still flourish. We're also hearing that this is a human problem that comes down all the way to the individual effect of habit. They can respond to this. We're hearing about the disparities of how, on a macro and micro level, of how people can respond to the COVID-19 crisis and how it's been made much more clear. And we are also hearing that in various industries, in different locales, those industries being overrepresented as means of being able to pay your bills are also the same occupations that are causing disproportionate ethnic groups to be more, more exposed to COVID risks. So I mean, you know, I'm from North Carolina,  and Dr. Planey -- it's true, it's true -- in certain places if you don't have some type of educational attainment that allows you to become either a public school teacher or a health worker, or anything in maybe the local business sector that is in management -- these are the only jobs that are available.  So we think about the different policy changes that have happened in the last 40 years with regard to access to, you know, safety valve type things like AFDC, which turned into TANF -- people can't be on what some people call "welfare" programs beyond five years. That's the lifetime limit. Two years, and then it has to stop. So these employment sectors are the only aspect that a person can take care of themselves. In many locales in rural parts of North Carolina, and in other states. So I'm glad that all of these aspects were brought up because they are very, very important. So I'm going to move to the next question, which is -- geography as a discipline an ongoing obligation to respond to the wider context in which it operates. And not just in moments of manifest crisis. As political and social context evolve, how can geographers and researchers of geospatial methods use or adjust their methodologies to answer public-facing demands that may arise within our work that require the use of spatial methods? And I think one of the things that jumps out to me when I see that question is data. How do you attain the data? How do you attain data that is still happening? How do you attain data that is behind either paywalls or the government is not making it readily available? And I think libraries are really important for longitudinal data and what data is available to libraries of how we can do our work,  our methods, whether it's using R or whether it's using geospatial software on a desktop, or whether it's, you know, trying to code our way to creating maps. GIRMAYE: Now I'll go with this first. This has been an ongoing debate since the spatial technology had been developed. In the old days, you know, for example, when it was at the command level -- the GIS was a command level on the desktop. And then graphic interfaces started coming; then there was a big debate because it was a special methodology with new algorithms. When they're working without enough knowledge of what goes  on behind, then that can be abused. So now the current issue is, there's this huge amount of data. Big data has been collected and the technology is advancing, being advanced to the level of machine learning. And with that comes the issue of algorithm bias and also data bias. So how do you overcome this kind of thing? Because algorithms are made by people, and people have their own bias. So when the algorithms are being built, those biases are also built in within the algorithms which is really now a big issue in the machine learning field. So people are trying to tackle that. And the machine learning process, the algorithms are learned using this huge data. And the datas themselves are biased because they are collected from certain demographic or certain demographics are represented highly in those data. So how do you overcome these kind of ethical issues? So this is currently one of the big issues that researchers, academics, and people are trying -- and policymakers are trying to package in this case. So special methodologies also are developed. Previously, it was small data on a desktop. Now, with the advent of this cloud computing and big data, so the algorithms has also to catch up with that new technology. They have to change. So how do you tackle this? You know, how you catch up with these kinds of technologies and how do you provide those services to your clients? You know, for example, in my case, in the libraries, the faculties, and so on. So it's always, constantly exploring, researching how these spatial technologies, analysis and algorithms are going forward. DR. COOLEY: I'm happy to go second. Again, I go back to the importance of local geographies. I spent 11 years at the University of South Carolina. And a number of my projects are actually based there or were based there before moving to UT Dallas. This is my third year here. And so what we found is the importance of being able to think about local histories and local narratives of community as a place, as interventions into the politics of institutions and institutional expansion. And what does it mean -- and the way to do this, we found, in one of our projects was interdisciplinary conversation and outreach and working very closely with our librarians. We built a prototype of a mobile app for iPad Mini years ago called Ghost of the Horseshoe that presented the unacknowledged history of slavery that made possible the original campus, the horseshoe campus of South Carolina, which is the heart of the campus currently. And we worked, my colleague and collaborator from computer science and I brought teams of students from across computer science and humanities together in conversation with a, a graduate class of public history to bring this narrative to bear on site. So they had this really robust website, you know, of the history of South Carolina and slavery and the university. But it was super rich and dense, which was fabulous. But it didn't -- there was a disconnect between the site where our public historians were calling it a surprisingly intact landscape of slavery. So what would it mean to bring that history to bear on-site using geo-locative platform, using AR, really early AR technologies, which fumbled a little bit, but it was a really good experience for, number one, the students to work with other students to learn about the history of the institution, about the grounds across which they walk every day and never think about what it is that made it possible for those grounds to be there in the first place. And so they became very much advocates of speaking the history of the Horseshoe campus and the the University of South Carolina. And it was only a few years later that we started seeing plaques being placed announcing the fact that, oh, this here used to be a slave quarters. This building behind the president's house used to be this. And we see, we started seeing fewer, you know, fraternity and sorority gathering pictures in front of those sites. Because they began to understand the history of place and, and the kind of the importance of recognizing that history and being responsible to that history. Being able to entertain what that looks like and the materiality of history and how that materiality resonates for them and matters to them, even if they don't necessarily have first-hand knowledge of it. It was really important for the community to see that this was happening. And it became visible because of the kinds of relationships that we were making across colleagues, across schools with students, both graduate and undergraduate, and with libraries. The libraries are huge repositories for materials that document the university and its history. And that we learned, we learned what that looked like. We learned what it smelled like, we learned what it felt like. And then we were able to get, we were able to experience imported into digital form. And it was really, really impactful, I think. DR. PLANEY: So being in a department of health policy management, the emphasis is on producing work that is legible to policymakers. And the COVID project that I mentioned earlier is funded by the state legislature. So we're being expected to produce monthly briefs -- so sort of translating our work and connecting it with policy levers. It's a slightly different orientation than communicating with the public -- the policymakers are a very particular self-elected group. So it's about writing to be understood, translating the work, but also connecting it, like kind of in that translation, connecting what we're finding with things that they can do, to ways that they can act to protect and improve the public health of the community. DR. NELSON: Yeah, when I think about this, especially in the terms of political and social context, I hear what's been said about big data -- what a, what a day to live! So much information is out there. We can capitalize it and develop new methods. I hear you and we're talking to our stakeholders and making sure we're meeting their needs, whether it's a governmental agency or the public. There's a lot that's embedded in this question. I think maybe one of the things that would be interesting to think about the evolution of geography and where we are as geographers, or social scientists, or whatever hodgepodge we call ourselves these days, really the idea is what are some of the, what are the tools that are emerging right now and what are the tools for the future? For example, tracking people on Facebook was pretty cool for a little while and using Twitter and data from there to get information. Also pretty cool methodology. We see people using wearables and ecologic momentary assessment and cell phone apps and tracking people. And all these create that big data problem, but they also present new opportunities for training and for public-facing information so that we can help each other. If you think about something like the COVID-19 pandemic, making these data available to people from outside of geography who don't think this way but have great knowledge, maybe they could help come up with some mitigation practices or in other problems that aren't so right in front of our face, things like cancer disparities. How can we use all of these kind of information sources to better create access for disadvantaged groups and improve treatments and see how people are doing and check up on them and their mental health throughout the whole process of that, that monstrosity of going through cancer treatment, for example. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to adjust on the fly. And I think that's what geographers have done best throughout history. As I see people as people, and we see what tools we have and then we find new ways to tweak and use them. CHRISTY: Thank you. Yes, I'm hearing so much important work and some of your responses have actually addressed another question. So as we are kind of wrapping up our session we'll go to question three. And that question is, in what ways has your work incorporated these intersections of positionality for agents represented in your data collection. So, for example, Dr. Nelson, your work in St. Louis. Can you kind of speak to that and anyone else speak to how data collection concerning human burdens to communities, what type of thought processes go through you as you design the data model and implement it, how you're going to address the analysis. DR. NELSON: Yeah, that's a great question. So whenever we're dealing with humans and so forth, and especially in my world of health data, these are very sensitive issues that we're talking about. So there's a real sensitivity around personal health information or PHI, and making sure that you're making that all secure, private and safe, but while also being able to exploit it, to look at some of these problems. So some of the work that we've done in St. Louis that I'll talk about in my talk about lead remediation and some of the things we've looked at, they're really went to how far can we push these data while not exposing exactly where individuals live, but still getting at the heart of the problem--that there are racial disparities that go back to historical red lining and other issues that are much bigger than the problem I'm actually talking about, about lead exposure. But again, that social problem of how have we done this to each other? And how do we, how do we improve health for all? And how do we allocate our resources in a more justified, dignified human way to help people who are not at the same level of playing field. So some of those things are really tricky to answer. How do we go about collecting these data? I don't know. I love to see what's next and what others are doing. Like I mentioned, it's all about getting creative while also maintaining that privacy. And also I think a key part of this is to step outside of our silos. And as academics we're really good at staying where we are. But some of the most amazing things that I've done in my career thus far have been working with criminologists who speak a very different language than myself, or social workers, or even physicians who will also speak a very different language from myself or even a school teacher who had great insights about how can, how can we better track people and interact with them and get meaningful data? That's what we need to do is get outside of ourselves and stop worrying about careers and start worrying about science. GIRMAYE: Yeah, no, I would just agree with that. You know what they're saying about this redlining stuff. I have been recently involved, been approached by faculty trying to investigate the relationship between red lining and the impact of COVID. So actually the problem with that, with public health like Eric said, it's, the data is very, extremely sensitive. So the data that's available is aggregated at the zip code level. And in the red lining, you have to have at least at the block group level to really reach into the correct conclusion or correct methodology. So how do you assign different levels of red lining? A group within a certain zip code. How do you build that assignment of the COVID incident to the red line when the incident data that you have is only at the zip code level? So increasingly, this kind of methodology, people are going to be confronted with this kind of methodological issues. This is just recently what I encountered. So yeah. DR. NELSON: Yeah, data misalignment as you're talking about, is a really hard problem to deal with and trying to figure out how do we assign exposures and so forth at aggregate levels, that's, that's a great place for methodologists to play, but also for us to get creative again and piece together data sources that we never would have thought of.And that's what I love about what spatial analysis allows us to do. It allows us to bring in lots of sources  and look at lots of angles of the problem. And that's the whole framework, the social-ecological model idea that there are lots of layers to this. We want to expose all of them.  DR. COOLEY: And at the same time I think -- also the voices of the communities that are at issue become important. So in the projects we've done, beyond Ghost of the Horseshoe, was to think about urban renewal, red lining policies, all of these kinds of things that made possible in the nineteen-- the mid-1900s making possible the expansion of the University of South Carolina westward at the expense of a predominantly African-American neighborhood. And to come back and think about what those histories are and how people commemorate what used to be their homes on lands that now boast these fabulous structures that the university has, has built. And so part of, I think what's important is not forgetting that there are people behind the data, or that people support the data that's collected because their voices often get overshadowed. And I think some of the most important data we've acquired are the oral histories of people who remember what Columbia, South Carolina used to be in the shadow of the State House grounds when they used to grow up, when they were growing up on the wrong side of the State House and couldn't play on the Horseshoe grounds. And the stories that they have to share about what universities and institutions look like to them gives a different face to the kinds of data that are also so important to collect, to understand how to intervene in the issues that we have today. Because the issues we have today aren't necessarily completely separate from the politics of before. And I think the more we understand that and bring a human voice to some of the data, I think the more impactful those landscapes that we can produce and present to the larger public -- hopefully including policy makers, but yes -- but to get people to engage in the kind of  histories that often they want to avoid. And I think it's by having conversations not only cross-disciplinarily with those we don't speak, with whom we don't speak the same languages,  but out beyond the communities for whom the institution has different meanings, for whom the institution has become something different. But also that might be something that becomes something they embrace also in different ways. DR. PLANEY: I think everyone else covered the ground I think I would cover. It's just going to be really important to collaborate with people who have different, different ways of looking at  whatever you're studying, whatever the outcome, or whatever it is that you're interested in. people who have different tools in their toolkit, so that even if they're not trained in spatial methods, they might really familiar with how the data that you're using is collected,  they also may have a deep knowledge of the community that you're studying, so that they can help you ask a better question instead of asking a question that you would ask coming from the outside but not knowing, not knowing, that local context. That's something that's come up in my work on healthcare, particularly like hospital closures -- our definition of a hospital closure has to account for the community perception. Did the community feel that loss?  It could look like a lot on paper, but the community still had the institutions that they relied on that are still there. So maybe they don't consider it a loss. Yeah. CHRISTY: Well, thank you. Those were all important interventions and I want to thank you for all of the insights that you all have provided and contributed as we've gone through the questions. And most of all thank you for your work  and for your time. You know, you'll be hearing more from me because I've been blown away and I'm just like, how did they get all this data and how did they go through it, you know! [laughs] So you'll probably see me in your inbox at some point, not anytime soon because we're all trying to deal, but yeah. So I'm going to turn it back over to Michelle to make closing statement. Thanks so much for joining us today and thanks again to Christy for moderating today's panel discussion and thanks to the speakers for participating. Here again are the dates and times our speakers will be presenting their work and their research more in-depth during the week of November 16th. Again, for more information about the speakers including their bios and abstracts,  visit go.iu.edu/gisday We hope you've benefitted from this panel discussion, and we hope to see you next week for GIS Week at IU.