Exploring the World With Maps and Data: A Critical Introduction to Geospatial Information

--- tags: Key-Documents --- # Exploring the World With Maps and Data: A Critical Introduction to Geospatial Information ## Course outline for internal planning ### Overview **Students in this course will learn:** * How digital sources of information get turned into maps and visualizations, and how to do this yourself * How to find data sources for mapmaking projects, including sources in the LMEC's Public Data Portal, and how to create new data sets from scratch * What might be missing, misleading, or frustrating in the data sets you are likely to encounter * How to move forward confidently, purposefully, and critically when learning more about data analysis and cartography *(We also want them to learn, but don't need to put this in the description):* * Key vocabulary around file types and data types * Very basic cartographic vocabulary * What well-structured and poorly-structured data looks like * What "metadata" is and why it's important * What some of the most important geospatial software packages are and why you might choose one over another * How to do simple data cleaning and conversion operations, including geocoding * What the 3-5 most important data portals for Boston/MA data are * An understanding of the social embeddedness of data * Thinking about what is meant by "big" data * What kinds of institutions/people offer more resources for help ### Before the course begins * Read the [Same Data, Different Stories](https://www.leventhalmap.org/digital-exhibitions/bending-lines/how-to-bend/data-stories/) section of _Bending Lines_ * Look at the five sets of competing maps and think about *what data was needed to create this map?* * Watch the [Do Maps Lie?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0_MBrJnRq0&feature=emb_title) video * Come with one example of a (contemporary) map that you think is well made, thought provoking, or otherwise interesting ### Session 1: Reverse Engineering a Map **Key learning goals** * Be able to look at a map and think about what kinds of sources were required to create it * Understand what we mean by "geospatial data," and the difference between the data and the map itself * Critically evaluate what happens when observations of the world are encoded into computer data *Stuff we'll also be trying to communicate* * Insights of Harley, "Deconstructing the Map" and critical cartography * "Raw" data versus visual frames around the data * Data ontologies ### Session 2: **Key learning goals** * Understand key terms describing different types of spatial data * Identify common types of documents that are likely to be part of a mapping project * Become a proficient user of the LMEC Public Data Portal * Work with metadata as a key part of the data lifecycle *Stuff we'll also be trying to communicate* * Importance of stable identifiers * Encoding types * Projections and coordinate systems * Joins and crosswalks ### Session 3: Becoming a Data Detective **Key learning goals** * Work with messy, incomplete, or poorly-structured datasets * Create a dataset from scratch * Critically engage with the representational absences of data sets *Stuff we'll also be trying to communicate* * Geocoding * Data permanence and versioning * Plaintext vs. proprietary file formats ### After the class: What you could do next