Preface from Proceedings Editors

The 5th Annual University of Washington (UW) GIS Symposium was held on June 2, 2021. This year’s symposium was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The symposium continued its mission of creating an opportunity for faculty, students, and staff across disciplines to come together and share their GIS-related research.

Greg Babinski from the King County GIS Center, kicked off the symposium with a talk on incorporating the human experience into the process of GIS design, development, and critique through a new research agenda referred to as ‘Humanistic GIS.’ Dr. Zhao’s talk posited that Humanistic GIS “prioritizes GIS-mediated experience over the immediate physical experience of a place,” and analyzes the complicated implications of GIS by exposing “unintended but vital influences, including but not limited to, physiological discomfort, fake geospatial information, competition with GIS and surveillance.”

After the keynote, UW students and GIS professionals from a variety of disciplines, departments, and agencies presented posters accompanied by recorded talks. Presenters represented the following UW Seattle campus departments: Earth and Space Sciences, Evans School, and History. There was an additional presentation by staff from the Washington Sea Grant and ESM Consulting Engineers. A total of five poster-talk proposals were reviewed and accepted by the conference committee, however one presenter withdrew prior to the event. Each poster-talk presenter attended the symposium and was on hand to answer attendee questions via a live Q&A session following the poster-talk portion of the event. Abstracts from the poster-talks are included in these Proceedings below.

This year’s symposium was open to all members of the UW community and the public and was attended by approximately 35 people. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to the success of this year’s UW GIS Symposium. Special thanks goes to members of the GIS Symposium planning committee for their numerous contributions and the staff of the Research Commons for being gracious hosts of the virtual event.

Proceedings Editors

Kian Flynn, UW Libraries
Matthew Parsons, UW Libraries