Geospatial Literacy as Digital Literacy: Building GIS Program to Support and Engage with Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Research Communities

What is geospatial literacy and how is a form of digital literacy? This paper addresses the importance and the need for geospatial literacy across the community, particularly the research one. Digital literacy is the ability to discover, interpret, synthesize, create, evaluate and use digital information such as texts, images, video, sound, interactive web pages and other multimedia formats collectively and effectively. Geospatial or spatial literacy is one kind of digital literacy that is becoming highly important for anyone who wishes code or decode visuals and identify key elements in a visual or digital media. The paper explores how creating geographic information system (GIS) program that emphasizes geospatial literacy can teach 21st century digital literacy skills through visual and data analyses; empower users to access and create resources in digital mapping tools; and how a GIS program can foster and build a community of researchers and activities as demonstrated in two case studies: NYPL’s Map Warper and Harvard’s WorldMap pages.