We are seeking evaluation colleagues who would be interested in contributing to an issue of New Directions in Evaluation focused on geographic information systems and geospatial analysis, and we would like to welcome you to consider contributing. We are seeking examples of using geographic techniques in evaluations that include Indigenous People and places. See the abstract below for details. We will need a 1-2 page abstract from contributors before the end of the calendar year. If you are interested, please contact Katie (katie@geoliteracyproject.com) and Marcel (marcel@performhy.com) to discuss additional details.

Program evaluation is an inherently cross-sectoral discipline. Evaluators use methods and philosophies from social sciences and integrate these with quantitative data collection and analysis techniques to present fulsome pictures of program strategies, implementation, and results. Geographic methods and philosophies are designed to accomplish a similar task using different techniques. Geography is an inherently interdisciplinary approach to understanding the interactions between places and people. Once the purview of ecologists and other Earth scientists, geographic tools and techniques have advanced and simplified in the past 20 years. Mapping tools are now more accessible and affordable. Evaluators can access and approach free, simple geographic tools for understanding, analyzing, and presenting evaluation data. Using these tools provides evaluators with improved access to contextual information that can be used to target their evaluation methods, like surveys, focus groups, and workshops. The tools also provide additional data analysis power, allowing evaluators to correlate findings with underlying sociological and ecological geographic information. This issue of New Directions in Evaluation provides philosophies, methods, and examples of how geographic techniques can enhance evaluation results.