10 October 2001
Technology Fellows Program
Associated Colleges of the South Technology Center
Southwestern University Box 7385
Georgetown, TX 78626

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We attach our application for a Spring-Summer 2002 ACS Teaching with Technology Fellowship. We are excited to have the opportunity to expand the course we offered last year on the use of GIS technology in the redistricting process. Our goal this year is twofold. First, we will augment the GIS applications this year so we can introduce the students to a more powerful redistricting package. Second, we will also introduce the students to applications of GIS in other aspects of social science research.

The application form and proposal are attached. Please do not hesitate to contact either of us if you require additional information. Many thanks.

Sincerely,

Mark E. Rush
John Blackburn
Department of Politics
Instructional Technology Specialist

Project Title: GIS Applications in Politics: Redistricting and Beyond

Mark E. Rush, Department of Politics, Washington and Lee University
John Blackburn, Instructional Technology Specialist, Washington and Lee University

We are developing an interdisciplinary GIS course that is offered for the time being under the auspices of the Politics Department. We first administered the course last Spring as an introduction to GIS using census data and redistricting software. Substantively, it was quite successful. However, much to our surprise, we were constrained by technological limits.

We intend to administer the course in a similar manner this Winter. We will focus on resolving the technological difficulties that we encountered while expanding the substantive aspect of the course beyond voting rights and redistricting. Our ultimate goal is to provide students with an opportunity to learn and use GIS technology to conduct interdisciplinary research and analysis across a variety of social science fields.

Background

In Phase One of our project (original proposal is available at http://miley2.wlu.edu/redist), we developed a new politics course in which we introduced students to the ArcView GIS package and the redistricting extension developed by ESRI. We did this in the substantive context of a seminar on the legislative redistricting and voting rights law in the United States.

We limited course enrollment to freshmen and sophomores to avoid stigmatizing the course as merely a politics offering and to enhance its interdisciplinary nature. The students quickly became proficient at using both ArcView 3.1 and the redistricting extension. The course was highly successful, culminating in a final examination on the substantive aspects of voting behavior and voting rights law and a final project in which the three students workgroups created their own maps of new senate districts for the state of Virginia (the maps, along with the course website can also be seen at http://miley2.wlu.edu/redist ).

In addition, we were able to hire one of our students on for summer research and data management. He assisted us in the conversion of the census data for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and also did some consulting work for the Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington, DC.

Despite our success thus far, technological limitations constrained our administration of the course in two important respects.

1. Server problems/workstation needs. In a nutshell, the sheer size of the census database that we were using made it impossible to run the course using an ordinary server setup. At one point, we found that ONE student performing ONE graphic operation-using the small dataset (roughly 10% the size of the big census dataset) and using the less powerful redistricting package-occupied TEN PERCENT of our server's capacity! We were clearly threatening to dim the lights all over campus...

2. The ESRI redistricting extension allows us to make only 50 districts. This limited our analysis to working with Virginia Congressional Districts or the State Senate. We acquired a license to use the more specialized Autobound Redistricting software, produced by Digital Engineering Corp. in Columbia, MD. This will allow us to redistrict larger legislative bodies such as the Virginia House of Delegates (100 members). But it requires a more advanced operating system than that which was installed on the computers in the teaching facility we were using

New Course Administration and Expanded Goals for Student Learning, Teaching Enhancement and Research

Substantive Goals. Using last year's model as a benchmark, we would like to expand the course in two directions. First, with the enhanced redistricting capacity of the Autobound software extension and the enhanced speed of the workstations, we intend to allow student workgroups to choose states other than Virginia-ideally, we will be able to use both Virginia and New Jersey (two states that have completed their redistricting state-level redistricting) as benchmarks. Second, we hope to undertake more complex analysis now that we can use the actual census bloc data-as opposed to the larger scale, voting district data we use last year.

Additionally, we intend to assign students projects of a broader substantive nature. Accordingly, students would have the option of using the GIS technology to complement work they might be doing in other course offerings such as Introduction to Environmental Studies (Intr 110), Poverty: An Introduction (Intr 101), Latin American Economies (Econ 296), European Politics (Politics 245), Western Democracies (Politics 240), Asian Politics (Politics 392) and so forth. Ideally, this course will ultimately serve as an interdisciplinary social science complement to the Natural Science courses that already incorporate GIS analysis.

Finally, we intend to develop more student opportunities for summer employment or academic year independent study. We have already arranged for one of our students from last year to serve as a course assistant this winter. He will be available one evening a week to assist students with their projects. As well, two of our graduates are working with us this Fall semester to develop an urban politics database and to continue processing the census data for use in the course

Administrative Concerns. For the upcoming iteration of the course, we have made temporary arrangements that will allow us to work with the larger census dataset using secure workstations. We will borrow high-speed machines from our Biology Department and maintain them in a small storage room ( a service room for one of our amphitheater classrooms) to which we can limit access. For classroom purposes, we will use a separate teaching lab with a local high-speed server that will allow us to use the smaller (voting districts) census dataset for teaching purposes, while giving students access to the larger dataset on our secure workstations at night.

Sharing of Results and Collaboration

Using ESRI's ArcIMS 3.0, an Internet map server platform, we will present student projects on the Web in a uniquely interactive and dynamic fashion. Internet users will be able to view student redistricting plans and other maps by panning, zooming, identifying features, and even querying data through this map server.

The Future

Administrative and Pedagogical Issues. To free us from the constraints imposed by a server-based computer lab, we will seek funding for a several top of the line laptops that we can assign to each workgroup. This will provide more flexibility in scheduling the class and also allow us to teach the course using what is essentially the industry standard for redistricting analysis-the laptop. As well, it will enable students to access the census data throughout the school day and therefore have more flexibility in arranging their work time. Currently, we will have to restrict access to our workroom to the evenings because the classroom that it serves is in use throughout the school day.

Substantive Issues. While we will use redistricting again as the primary course focus, we intend to develop the course as a complement to our environmental studies and global stewardship programs. Ideally, in the future, students will come into the course with a research prospectus, gather data, analyze that data using GIS and other software, then present their findings in writing as well as in electronic projects.