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 5. Geospatial Data and Maps in R, part 2: geoprocessing and analysis
Part two of this two part workshop series will introduce methods for processing and transforming spatial data stored as sp spatial objects. Students will learn about coordinate reference systems and map projections and how these impact maps and spatial analysis. We will explore geoprocessing operations and spatial queries that are the building blocks of spatial analysis.
R experience equivalent to the D-Lab R Fundamentals workshop series is required to follow along with the tutorial. Part I of this series is a prerequisite to following along with the material. Bring a laptop with R, RStudio and the following R packages installed: sp, rgdal, rgeos, ggplot2, ggmap, leafletR, RColorBrewer, classInt, and tmap. 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.
