Every semester, her 120 students would create beautiful, complex GIS projects—analyzing flood zones, mapping food deserts, tracking wildfire spread. But when a student accidentally saved over a shapefile, or when a group of four tried to collaborate on a single ArcGIS Pro project, chaos ensued. Emails with attachments named final_map_v3_REAL_FINAL.aprx flooded her inbox.

And every semester, when a student pushes their first commit with a message like add population density choropleth , she smiles. Another cartographer has learned the new code of modern geography. Geography 76 + GitHub represents a broader shift: geographers are no longer just map readers—they are spatial data scientists. GitHub provides the infrastructure for transparency, collaboration, and reproducibility in GIS, turning messy folder structures into rigorous, version-controlled geospatial narratives. Whether you’re mapping a city park or a continent, Git helps you answer the most important question in geography: What has changed?

“There has to be a better way,” she muttered, sipping cold coffee.