---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Exploring the World With Maps and Data: A Critical Introduction to Geospatial Information'
tags: [Key-Documents]

---

---
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