Objectives
The overall objective of the intensive is to introduce participants to the fundamental concepts of and tools for creating, manipulating, mapping and analyzing geospatial data. These topics will be introduced in the context of a project of interest to social scientists and digital humanists - The Louisiana Slave Conspiracies - which uses scanned maps, census and land use data, and modern tools to gain insights on historical events.
The first three days of this intensive will cover the basic workflows of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which are software programs and applications that let you create, display, and analyze geospatial information. The last two days will introduce the R programming environment as a tool for working with geospatial data.
Day 4. Geospatial Data and Maps in R, part I: getting started with spatial data objects
Part one of this two part workshop will introduce basic methods and R packages for working with spatial data objects in R. Participants will learn how to import and export spatial data and store them as spatial objects. We will use the tmap and rleaflet packages to create static and interactive maps. Participants will learn about different types of geospatial data, spatial overlay, and methods for creating custom map symbology based on data attributes. We will also discuss how to share interactive maps online.
Bring a laptop with R, RStudio and the following R packages installed: sp, rgdal, rgeos, ggplot2, ggmap, leafletR, RColorBrewer, classInt, and tmap.
R experience equivalent to the D-Lab R Fundamentals workshop series is required to follow along with the tutorial. Participants are expected to have some basic familiarity with geospatial data or to have taken Day 1 of the D-Lab’s January Geospatial intensive.
