Purdue GIS Day: Personal Take

Last week was GIS Day at Purdue University. It is an academic conference with various events where experts can talk about various uses for GIS. Individuals on the sides of land management, digital technology, remote sensing technologies, data management, environmental sciences, and the humanities were all involved. In general, I found the event to be very enjoyable and informative. There were a few major takeaways, positive and negative.

Positive Takeaways

This was one of my first academic conferences where I was not presenting material but was in my general field. It was interesting to experience the event as a observer and allowed me to make several key discoveries. First of all, it was interesting and actually sort of warming to really understand how small but diverse the Purdue GIS community is. Through my years at Purdue, I have run into an assortment of people working with various geospatial tools. It was incredible how many of those people were involved in the conference in some way. I also enjoyed seeing how people use this segment of technology in other fields. While I am certainly not accustom to researcher methods in history or the humanities, it was interesting to see how geospatial methods I am at least a little familiar can be used in those fields. GIS Day also showed me how powerful these sort of conferences can be for networking. Personally, as well as others at the conference, seemed to be successful at interacting with other participants. As a person who tends to think interdisciplinary, this was an exciting component that helps me look forward for the future.

Negative Takeaways 

Something I noticed is that some speakers, including ones with the most impressive backgrounds, truly struggle at communication of their work. Either due to jargon use, poor speaking volume, overly complicated slides, or very poor visualizations. It was interesting to see how some people were not using components in their maps that we have been trained to include, such as scale bars and labeling. Due to the complex nature of the presentations, it was remarkably clear how important those components are. When combining difficult to understand material with poor presentation, the entire point being conveyed can easily be lost. I think that in some ways, understanding what did not work during the conference was more important than what I learned from the good presentations. I am exciting to build my research career, because I want to be a scientist. This conference really solidified to me that good research does not make a good scientist. Science is about contributing to human knowledge and understanding. Being able to communicate discoveries is as important as the discoveries themselves because that is what makes the discoveries important. I have to be understanding that if I want my work to mean something, I have to learn to explain it in an consumable way.