Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

1. 

   quinnanya
   Member

   We're looking at developing a set of workshops, resources, etc. for folks who are interested in using GIS as part of their humanities / social science research, but we're debating what software to use for it (ArcGIS or QGIS, though other suggestions are welcome).

   ArcGIS is the industry standard, but it doesn't work on Macs, which means that probably a majority of the students would have to go through the hassle of setting up a virtual Windows desktop to even access it. That's making us take a close look at QGIS, but we don't want to train students in software that most people aren't using.

   I know DHSI's GIS course is mostly based on ArcGIS -- what is everyone else using?

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   Posted 11 months ago Permalink
2. 

   Ethan Gruber
   Member

   I've used QGIS, and I like it quite a bit. It may not be as powerful as ArcGIS yet, but with an open source backing for the plugins, I think the ceiling for the software is quite high.

   Since the majority of students are now using Macs, I just don't think it's worth it to set up the virtual machines. After all, in order to get Windows to function properly, you still need an active license, correct? Unless, of course, you are hooking them up with pirated copies, which, as an institution, is probably a bad idea.

   Posted 11 months ago Permalink
3. 

   aelang
   Member

   Posting here to say that the good people at Edina are currently developing some training materials for QGIS which they are going to pilot on my masters students, then make available to everyone. So those should be available sometime in early 2016.

   The high cost of ArcGIS licences means that for me, I'm going with QGIS over ArcGIS for both teaching and research. I did the DHSI GIS course (highly recommended!) some years ago, and that was actually pretty helpful for learning QGIS. There are significant differences between the two packages, of course, but once you have learnt the basic functionality of ArcGIS, it's not too difficult to figure out the equivalent, or near-equivalent, thing in QGIS.

   Posted 7 months ago Permalink

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