Humanistic GIS Laboratory
Geographic information is not only a technical instrument, but also a moral and affective medium — capable of care, connection, and collective memory.
Through research, teaching, and public scholarship, we examine how geospatial technologies can serve as instruments for empathy, justice, and human understanding — even as we interrogate deepfake geography, the collapse of GeoAI, and the reproduction of bias in geospatial big data.
- Projects
- Press
- Talks
- Maps
Special Topics — Geospatial Artificial Intelligence
A hands-on course on integrating machine learning, deep learning, and large language models into spatial analysis. Students work with real-world datasets — housing inequality, algorithmic bias — while reading the ethics and political stakes of the technology.
Course code updating from GEOG 495 → GEOG 428
Research Seminar: Critical GIS
Graduate seminar on the social, ethical, and political dimensions of geographic information systems.
Apr 17, 2026 · Friday Harbor
Does the AI Really Know Your City?
Asked to draw Seattle's neighborhoods from its own internal model, GPT-5.5 Thinking returned polygons that mostly miss their real-world counterparts. Read the misses as a diagram — where a language model's geographic imagination thickens, and where it thins.
2021
Deepfake Geography
A public scholarship project on AI-fabricated satellite imagery and the emerging challenges deepfakes pose to spatial truth, trust, and geographic knowledge.
2023
Archiving the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP)
Critical and creative (un)mapping of the 2020 CHOP, weaving archival materials and oral histories into a layered geo-narrative of the protest space.
Recent media
- UW Geography Announcing Our 2025 Halmo Geography Scholars!
- UW Geography 2025 Awards, Honors and Achievements
- UW Geography GeoAI Prompt Contest 2024