Other Digital Tools

In addition to documentation and communication of work via digital scholarship sites, ENVS students acquire a number of other digital skills in our courses. Below is a partial list; please contact the ENVS Program for details.

  • Concept mapping: Students explore and visually communicate connections related to environmental phenomena via concept maps, in particular actor-network maps. Concept mapping is a flexible qualitative skill suitable for the broad, interdisciplinary nature of environmental issues, and can utilize a variety of applications
  • Digital field scholarship: The ENVS Program prioritizes field-based data collection, which our students do via a suite of iPad Mini field devices and an array of apps. Some of these apps support collection of geolocated data for input into ArcGIS (below), including Collector and Survey123.
  • GIS: Students acquire geographic information system (GIS) skills initially via ArcGIS Online, then ArcGIS Desktop. GIS skills are in demand in a number of professions today, and offer students the all-important spatial context to our situated approach to interdisciplinary environmental research. We also support open-source GIS tools such as QGIS.
  • Zotero: A key element of scholarship involves finding, storing, and citing key publications We train students in use of Zotero, an open-source application that supports this full process via ready browser integration.