Teaching Cartography for Interactive Web Maps
Presenter: Alicia Cowart
The recent proliferation of web mapping tools presents opportunities for students to engage with new technologies and gain cartographic design skills in a variety of media. This talk summarizes the outcomes and lessons learned from a new web cartography course taught at UC Berkeley in Spring 2019. The course emphasized cartographic principles as they apply to web maps, explored the capabilities and limits of web tools for representing geographic data, and examined how recent developments in geospatial technologies have influenced how we both use and produce maps. Students created their own thematic web map as a final project.
Crowd Sourced City: Learning by Doing for the Design and Technology of Public Space
Presenter: Sarah Williams, MIT Civic Data Design Lab
Co-presenter: Dylan Halpern, MIT Civic Data Design Lab
Crowd Sourced City: Civic Technology Prototyping was a semester-long course in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning that developed a tactical urbanism intervention and utilized sensing technologies to map the performance of students' projects. This presentation synopsizes the structure of the course, student outcomes, and the potential for practice-based education of mapping public space. Through workshops on strategies from William Whyte and Jan Gehl, the class explored sensing, visualization/web mapping, and physical design. Results from the course include activity maps related to programmed activity, reports on how to replicate the project, and furniture remaining on the intervention site.
The role of interactive coding notebooks in data-to-map design flows
Presenter: Rich Donohue, University of Kentucky
New Maps Plus is an innovative online graduate certificate and degree program focusing on geospatial data wrangling and web mapping. This talk will share useful processes and insights for distance learning environments that prepare students for a dynamic, professional workforce. In particular, we will discuss the growing role of interactive coding notebooks within our curriculum to support web cartography, as well as and their integration within Git-supported development and distributed code repositories.
Thoughts on Working with Map Projections
Presenter: Fritz Kessler, Penn State University
Co-presenter: Sarah Battersby, Tableau
Working with map projections can be challenging, especially when map makers select a projection for their map. Selection guidelines do exist, but they do not recommend a single named projection or explain the rationale why particular projections are recommended (e.g., thematic maps require equivalent projections). Thus, to utilize existing selection guidelines, the map maker needs a working knowledge of projections. We present a holistic approach to selecting an appropriate projection by asking the map maker to consider how the phenomenon are spatially described (e.g., continuous - discrete), what symbolization method(s) will be used, and what are the intended map uses.
From Quiz to Collection: Linking archival resources, student analysis and online collections via interactive maps
Presenter: Nicholas Kohler, University of Oregon
Co-presenters: Joanna Merson, University of Oregon; Bianca Malkoc, University of Oregon
This presentation describes a project to develop interactive maps via student engagement with online archival resources such as historical periodicals, YouTube videos, and art collections for the class "Hike, Bike, Skate, Surf, Ski: Geographies of Adventure". Online quizzes were used to promote student critical student engagement with the varied materials and gather thematic information about individual archival items. The workflow combined open-source digital collections, programming, and webmapping tools (Omeka, Python, and Leaflet) to geocode these student-crowdsourced items, put them in an online content collection of examples, and build an ever-expanding interactive map to rapidly explore the collection.
Study Design: Spatial Analysis in K-12 Education
Presenter: Tesla DuBois, Consortium of Policy Research in Education (CPRE), Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
School administrators and teachers do everything they can to provide a good learning environment within their school walls. But schools do not exist in isolation. They are set in the context of their city, neighborhood, and catchment area. This project explores the way that the location of a school impacts what happens inside the school walls. Here you will find a description of the process of using spatial analysis to answer the question, "Which community attributes account for variation in school level variables, and to what extent does each variable have influence?"
