Geospatial analysis, traditionally utilized in fields such as city planning, geography, and the environmental sciences, has been widely adopted as a digital humanities method. Over the next few weeks, there will be numerous opportunities to receive discipline-specific perspectives on geospatial analysis and undertake some foundational training in these methods.
Historical GIS with Daniel Viragh
Daniel Viragh, the post-doctoral fellow at the Magnes Collection for Jewish Art and Life, will be hosting two events on the Historical GIS Project, an effort to build a historical geo-database of 1896 Budapest. Working with a team of URAP students and John Radke in the Department of City Planning, the team digitized data from an 1896 map of the city and a book-length listing of the city's commercial, industrial, and government resources.
On February 24th, Daniel will host a workshop at the D-Lab on “Starting a Historical GIS Project” where he will discuss basic steps and considerations when working with historical maps and historical data, such as georectifying a historical map, digitizing archival ledgers and cleaning data with OpenRefine, and geocoding addresses. This will be an excellent workshop for digital humanists who are in the early stages of a project and are considering whether this method will be suitable for their sources. Please RSVP here.
On February 27th, Daniel will share his experiences with the Berkeley Digital Humanities Working Group. He will approach his work from a digital humanities perspective and explore the research question he addresses through geospatial analysis.
Geospatial Analysis Series at the D-Lab
The D-Lab will be offering several workshops to get scholars acquainted with ArcGIS, a program for working with maps and geographic information. On March 9th, Kelly Clonts’ “Introduction to Data Visualization in ArcGIS” workshop will acquaint students with the basic concepts and functions of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and displaying data on maps. On March 10th, Kelly will lead a lab-approach workshop, “Working with US Census Data.” The workshop will cover searching and downloading US census data via Factfinder and Social Explorer, mapping data with ArcGIS, and graphing data with Excel tools. Later that day, Susan Powell, the GIS & Maps Librarian, will lead a workshop on georeferencing (spatializing scanned maps or aerial imagery so that they can be used in a GIS) in ArcGIS.
Software
These workshops utilize ArcGIS, a proprietary software platform only available on Windows. All UC Berkeley affiliates can take advantage of a free one-year license of ArcGIS through the Geospatial Innovation Facility. Licenses may take up to 48 hours to process, so please be sure to request your license well in advance of the workshop. D-Lab will be hosting a workshop for installing ArcGIS on a Mac on March 12th.
Users who will be leaving UC Berkeley soon may also want to consider training in QGIS, a free, open-source geospatial analysis software available for PC, Mac and Linux platforms. See the upcoming QGIS workshop at GIF and “Georeferencing with QGIS” at the D-Lab.
Researchers who will be working with larger data sets may prefer using computers at the Geospatial Innovation Facility. Computers in 111 Mulford Hall are equipped with robust compute capacity and pre-installed geospatial analysis software and are available 24/7 for registered users.
Intensives at the Geospatial Innovation Facility
Those who are looking for solid, foundational training should consult the Geospatial Innovation Facility workshops. Workshops are $84 for all UC affiliates and $224 for non-UC affiliates. A 4-hour intensive introduction to GIS will be offered on March 9th. Researchers aiming to publish their results geospatial work on the web should consider GIF’s “Creating your own web maps” workshop (April 13th) , which works with the Google Maps API, Google Fusion Tables, and CartoDB.
More Resources:
- Resource guide: Geospatial Resources on Campus (hardware, software, consulting, etc.)
- Geolunch at GIF - a weekly seminar series
- Maptime SF / Oakland - a beginner-friendly weekly meetup for working on maps, learning about geospatial data, and learning cartographic tools