Imagine that you want to show your constituents where they can buy fair-trade coffee, or represent to decision-makers the lack of doctors in a particular region of town. Perhaps you want to communicate the disparities of housing levels and heath indicators across different counties, or show the impact of polluted rivers on the surrounding environment.

These things are hard to effectively convey in writing, but a map can be worth a thousand words.

Enter GIS. Geographical Information Systems provide tools to display and analyze information geographically. By layering information on top of a map, we can visually represent data in a way that can be readily understood by a large audience. Maps can reveal significant data relationships that are difficult to comprehend otherwise.

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