GIS Textbook Content as a Basis for Skill Development in Map Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has noted that enrolments in US map-interpretation courses have been declining since the mid-1980s. One reason for this could be the rise and development of GIS technology and its implementation in the curricula of many universities. In this situation, GIS courses may play a dual role, both directly siphoning away potential map-interpretation students and offering an alternative venue for those wishing to develop map-interpretation skills. This study investigates the materials available in 13 current GIS textbooks and tutorials with respect to the inclusion of map-interpretation and cartographic topics. The findings suggest that these materials contain a significant amount of map-interpretation and cartographic content. The prevalence of each topic varies by source. Based on the degree of prevalence, four groups of topics were defined. The findings suggest that GIS courses may be an alternative avenue for students seeking to obtain or improve their map-interpretation skills. However, textbook choice will play a certain role in the process of reaching these goals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".