As you would expect, Amy Glasmeier gave a killer presentation at the ABA Equal Justice Conference on what GIS is all about, and how and why legal services programs should grab hold of it as a basic accounting and advocacy tool. Among the examples she used, Amy displayed and explained a series of maps detailing demographic and income data relative to Food Stamp household eligibility in Pennsylvania. Really good stuff. An amusing personal note: Before the presentation, fellow panelist Klaus Sitte of Montana Legal Services Association and I were chatting and discovered we both owned a copy of Amy’s Atlas of Poverty in America. We both agreed it is a must-have. Within the legal services world, she’s a GIS rock star, that’s for sure. I only wish I had brought my copy of her book, to get her to sign it.

The maps Amy displayed were all created with CensusMapper, a still-free GIS software application that includes “pre-loaded quality assured/quality controlled data available for immediate analysis and a pre-defined set of mapping and statistical tools to process it. No data acquisition and validation, GIS technicians, or graphic artists are necessary to produce publication quality results.” You need to order CensusMapper from its site, but it’s free. If you buy her book, you’ll discover that it comes with a free copy of CensusMapper attached to the inside of the back cover. It’s definitely still a work in progress, and the interface needs a lot of attention, but it is well worth trying out and a singularly useful way to dip your toe into the world of GIS, with a very low learning curve.

So, what’s it like to follow a rock star? As I explained it to someone at the conference, “I was like a kid who knows a few good blues licks on the guitar, goes to open-mike night at a local bar, and discovers he’s gotta follow Eric Clapton.” Really.

My assignment on the panel was to highlight how and why LSNC has promoted GIS over the last few years. Judging from comments and questions I got, during and after the presentation, there is still considerable institutional resistance or misunderstanding in some quarters within the legal services community about the whole GIS thing. But clearly, the interest and enthusiasm is there among many others.

I’m not a big fan of PowerPoint presentations, in general, but I admit to using them like everyone else. Why? Because our increasingly attention-deficit-dependent culture demands it. In any event, for the curious, here are the slides I currently use for basic GIS orientation within LSNC, adapted for the EJC presentation, to explain the LSNC GIS Project. As alluded to in an earlier post, during the presentation I also stressed my concerns about how legal services programs track client race and ethnicity data, and how it risks diminishing the value of mapping that same data against Census data.

Think you know how the Census defines race and ethnicity? Think again.