First Palouse GIS Day Planned for Nov. 19 at University of Idaho, over Zoom
For the first time, WSU Libraries team up with the University of Idaho Library to host GIS Day 2025 on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at the UI Student Union Building’s Clearwater Room and over Zoom. Free and open to everyone, the event will bring together scholars, students, professionals, businesses, and the public to discuss geospatial technologies and demonstrate their use. For information on the day’s schedule, a registration link, and more, visit the event website.
Organizers invite submissions from UI, WSU, and other educational, government, and private entities to present at the event. Speakers can discuss their GIS/geospatial-related work, projects, organizations, or research during 10-minute talks in the morning and afternoon either in person at the Clearwater Room or via Zoom. The call for presentations will be open through Friday, Oct. 31. Details for presenters will be available soon after closing. Visit the UI call for presentations webpage to register for a timeslot.
WSU Libraries’ GIS librarian Josh Conver said event organizers hope to promote and celebrate spatial data and the “circumference of geography.” University of Cincinnati professor Nevin Fenneman coined the term in a paper from 1919 to explain how geography can complement many disciplines from history and biology to geology and economics.
“Another goal is to bring multiple disciplines together to share knowledge and enhance the research tools available to tackle the pressing problems of the contemporary world,” Conver said. “GIS Day was a UI function, but with the first GIS Day on the Palouse, we hope to bring our two institutions closer and foster collaboration.”
With the new partnership between WSU and UI libraries, the GIS Day location will alternate between the two universities, he added. Next year’s event will be held at WSU.
To learn more about the Palouse GIS Day event, email Conver or UI Library GIS librarian Bruce Godfrey. The Library of Congress Research Guides website has information on past GIS Day themes, geospatial data, maps, and a history of computer cartography and geographic information sciences.
More about GIS
GIS, short for geographic information system, is the integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. GIS has applications in engineering, planning, management, transport/logistics, insurance, telecommunications, and business, as well as forestry, ecology, and earth science.
According to the GIS Day website, the roots of GIS go back hundreds, even thousands of years in the fields of cartography and mapping. Early maps were used for exploration, strategy, and planning. In one notable example from 1854, London physician John Snow used early spatial analysis to map cholera cases, tracing the origin back to one water source.
Jack Dangermond, Roger Tomlinson, and students celebrated the first GIS Day in 1999 at Murch Elementary School in Washington, D.C. Dangermond credits American lawyer, consumer advocate, and political activist Ralph Nader as the person who inspired GIS Day, now celebrated worldwide on the third Wednesday in November during Geography Awareness Week.