In my case, I needed to use it as a tool. Carmin traveled to the Czech Republic to conduct her dissertation research. Since the 1989 revolution, Czechs have stretched their newfound freedom to participate in public decisions. She wanted to see how communities respond to new development proposals landfills, inciner-ators, and highways. Unlike development in the United States, where sprawl stretches everywhere, you have lots of villages in the Czech Republic, over six thousand of them.
People are well-connected to their cultural traditions.
To evaluate her statistical models, Car-min turned to Ryznar for help. She needed to find out if one town's response to a development proposal influenced the response of neighboring towns. It turns out that in a number of cases it was. Carmin used intensive GIS analysis for just a few paragraphs in her dissertation. Without GIS, I'd be missing a way to understand the quality of my data and to fully understand factors influencing behavior in Czech communities.