Over the last few years there are a growing number of universities who offer workshops and instruction for faculty and students in the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Most of us in the humanities, to be sure, are probably still hitting up our map librarians for a quick map for that book manuscript, scanning or photocopying maps we find in books around us—or even worse—trying to draw something by hand for our lectures and handouts.  However, I suspect more than a few of us find ourselves looking on in envy at those social science PhD students we see working late in the campus computer labs who appear to be doing wondrous but complicated looking things with maps in some kind of program called ArcGIS.

I have personally faced two major frustrations with learning geographic software:

1) The leading software package out there, the ArcGIS suite, is expensive and…

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