Abstract
The 1st Annual University of Washington (UW) GIS Symposium took place in Seattle, WA on May 25, 2017 at the UW Libraries’ Research Commons. The UW GIS Symposium replaced UW’s previous mid-November GIS Day event, which was held annually on the nationally-recognized GIS Day, beginning in 2011. The intent of this symposium was to create an interdisciplinary opportunity for faculty, student, and staff to come together and share their research.
The theme of this year’s symposium was the importance of geospatial literacy and the transformational role Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing technologies play at the UW and beyond. Sarah Battersby, a Senior Research Scientist at Tableau Research, kicked off the event with her informative and humorous keynote talk, “Geospatial Literacy & Some Other Stuff,” that stressed the importance of the GIS community’s responsibility to help everyone think critically about the maps that help us understand the world around us.