Map Club commenced its first meeting of Fall 2016 by experimenting with Cartagen, a vector-based framework for rendering maps in HTML5. Cartagen was originally developed by a research team at the MIT Center for Civic Media. One goal of Map Club is to explore the less populous corners of GIS, legacy projects included. Though Cartagen has stood the test […]
Category: Workshops & Training
Map Club! (Fall 2016 Edition)
Join us for Map Club! A series of fast-paced hack sessions geared towards the rapid acquisition of skills in geospatial technology. Led by DSSC Spatial Research Intern, Emily Fuhrman, each session provides an informal and fun opportunity for the exploration of a web-based library or framework. Sessions will be loosely divided into three phases: background and setup, […]
Map Club, Session 05 — Geographic Projections in D3.js
In its fifth and final summer session, Map Club delved into the geographic projection capabilities of D3.js, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 supports a comprehensive range of both common and unusual projections, further augmented by the most recent 4.0 release. Attendees sought to become familiar with the syntax for rendering JSON data in the […]
Map Club, Session 04 — Vibrant Maps with Mapzen
Map Club spent this week’s session exploring Mapzen, an open, sustainable, and accessible mapping platform. Attendees focused specifically on Tangram, an open-source renderer that allows intricate control over the design of web-based interactive maps. Mapzen leverages vector graphics and OpenGL to generate speedy, beautifully-rendered tiles, easily displayed using Leaflet. Centered on Columbia, Tricia customized Tangram’s lighting model to produce a concentrated spotlight: Jeremiah made use of […]
Map Club, Session 03 — Introduction to QGIS (PLUS: Buttons!)
By popular demand, Map Club dove into a structured exploration of QGIS this week. QGIS is a free and open source geographic information system that offers powerful tools for data editing, viewing, and analysis. In contrast to previous sessions, this session focused on a few key areas: importing and exporting different file types, re-projecting raw data, and geocoding a list of locations using […]
Map Club, Session 02 — SVG Maps with Kartograph
This week, Map Club embarked upon its second session by experimenting with Kartograph, a lightweight framework for building interactive map applications without an external mapping service. Kartograph is comprised of two libraries: the first is a Python library, Kartograph.py, which generates compact, Illustrator-friendly SVG maps from shapefiles and PostGIS; the second, Kartograph.js, is a JavaScript library for […]
Map Club, Session 01 — Exploring CARTO & CARTO.js
Map Club kicked off its first summer session with a dive into CARTO.js, a unified JavaScript library that interacts with the CARTO (formerly CartoDB) web mapping and visualization engine. After setting up CARTO accounts and local testing servers, attendees prepared datasets for upload to the CARTO interface, explored different geovisualization methods provided by the platform, and experimented with interactive capabilities offered by the CARTO.js library. Next […]
Using R with ArcGIS
With a successful collaboration between DSSC and ESRI, a hands-on workshop on ESRI R plugin was presented by Shaun Walbridge, a senior developer from ESRI, on Wednesday, April 20. Shaun provided an in-depth tutorial on how to use R in ESRI, and answered questions from students and librarians. Our audiences were from a broad background: […]
R Open Labs: QQPlot
Post by Ellie Ransom, Research Services Coordinator, Science and Engineering Libraries At last week’s R Open Lab, we visualized our data to test our assumptions of normality using two of of R’s native commands, qqnorm and qqline. We practiced using the built in dataset, trees, and looked at the variables Height and Volume separately. Notice how the Height […]
R Open Labs: Loading Data
At last week’s R Open Lab, we explored two packages (Memisc and foreign) as well as some of R’s native commands for loading data files into our R Studio workspace. View Slides We practiced with ASCII, .TSV, .SAV, and .DTA files, all available from ICPSR, a data […]