Preface from Proceedings Editor

As the COVID-19 pandemic continued into its third year, the University of Washington (UW) geospatial community gathered virtually for the 6th Annual UW GIS Symposium on May 25, 2022. The annual symposium was established to create an opportunity for faculty, students, and staff across disciplines to come together, network, and share their GIS-related research.

This year’s symposium featured a truly interdisciplinary representation of work from across the UW campuses. Notably, as a result of increased awareness and use of digital scholarship and mapping tools such as Story Maps, the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences community accounted for over half of this year’s presentations. Students and faculty in Geography, History, French and Italian Studies, and Human Centered Design & Engineering all delivered lightning talk presentations on topics ranging from counter-mapping the history of Asian migration onto Coast Salish lands to interactive digital story mapping of housing injustice through community-based design.

The Sciences were also well represented at this year’s symposium, with students from Earth & Space Sciences and Environmental Science & Resource Management delivering two talks on the impact of earthquakes – one on earthquakes’ influence on populations and the other earthquake disaster response from a bicyclist’s perspective.

Each lightning talk presenter attended the symposium and was on hand to answer attendee questions via a live Q&A session following the lightning talk portion of the event. Abstracts from the lightning talks are included in these Proceedings below.

The keynote of this year’s symposium was delivered by UW Bothell faculty members Jin-Kyu Jung and Nora Kenworthy and titled, GoFundUS: A Critical and Creative GIS and Geovisualization Project to Unmap and Understand Inequalities in Medical Crowdfunding. In their talk, Jung and Kenworthy outlined their project to develop a public interactive map (GoFundUS) that disrupts some of the problematic aspects of mainstream crowdfunding sites.

This year’s symposium was open to all members of the UW community and the public. 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 and the Open Scholarship Commons for being gracious hosts of the virtual event.

Proceedings Editor

Kian Flynn, Geography & Global Studies Librarian, UW Libraries