We start with an overview of GIS, then present the functionality and potential of GIS. Several of the readings have already discussed issues of GIS and public health: we will extract certain parts of those, expand on others, and try to make the issues relevant to the course and your projects.
This module does not, by any means, replace a GIS course. But as you procede through the modules you need tools to help you organize your projects, and GIS is definitely one of them. Croner et al.[1] make no bones about it: they call GIS ``the essential software and hardware configuration through which digital georeferenced data are processed and displayed....'' Essential.
You have already used a GIS, however unwittingly, in an earlier module: the Spatial Autocorrelation game invokes the public domain GIS GRASS to create the image (raster data) of the 4 by 4 random matrix. This module makes direct, conscious use of GIS, as we focus on ArcView in the lab.
In the previous lab you downloaded some spatial data. You saw that there were some obstacles to overcome in acquiring that data, including problems of data transfer (resolved with ftp, directly, or via your browser), and compression. Just figuring out what data you wanted wasn't necessarily easy. Warning: the problems can get worse! Be patient, be strong.
As you go through this material, think about how you might apply the functionality of GIS to your project, and what sort of data you will want to use. The sooner you do this, the better, as you can immediately apply the techniques we discuss here and in lab to your own data (which is, afterall, much more interesting than someone else's data).