The disks of galaxies are primarily stellar systems, and fundamentally
dynamical entities. Thus, to fully understand galactic disks, we must study
their stellar kinematics as well as their morphologies. Observational
techniques have now advanced to a point where quite detailed stellar-kinematic
information can be extracted from spectral observations. This review presents
three illustrative examples of analyses that make use of such information to
study the formation and evolution of these systems: the derivation of the
pattern speed of the bar in NGC 936; the calculation of the complete velocity
ellipsoid of random motions in NGC 488; and the strange phenomenon of
counter-rotation seen in NGC 3593.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX (including 7 figures), uses paspconf.sty and
epsf.sty, to be published in Proceedings of the EC Summer School on
'Astrophysical Discs', eds J. A. Sellwood and J. Goodman, ASP Conf. Serie