Writing Assignment

The chapter from your book is matched with a journal paper that focused on GIS for emergency management situations that include preparedness components. Your written deliverable for this week’s lesson (beyond what you wrote for the class participation section) is to produce a brief (no more than 400 words) critical assessment of the paper by Lochhead and Hedley. The critical assessment should begin with a one-two sentence summary of the authors’ goals in the project reported. Then, in 2-4 paragraphs, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work reported. Consider the following issues:

• the most important contribution that the paper makes to understanding the role of geospatial data and approaches in emergency management (what do we know now that we did not know before this work?);
• critical aspects of the methods applied and/or decisions made about those methods that make the work something that others should emulate (e.g., things that they considered that, if they had been ignored, would make the conclusions unreliable or invalid);
• flaws that you see in the work reported (these might be in methods developed, in the way they were applied, or in the interpretations that the authors make about the applicability of their results).