This two-hour course will review the fundamental concepts of GIS, demonstrating them through basic mapping and analysis of a variety of spatial datasets. Historical social science datasets will serve as the didactic vehicle, but knowledge and skills gained are broadly applicable to GIS in any field. Please note: This workshop was designed as a component in Professor Muller's course, "Methods for Historical Social Science."
Prior knowledge: To make the most of the workshop, at least basic familiarity with R is recommended. Completion of D-Lab's R FUN!damentalsworkshop series should be sufficient.
Technology requirement: All participants asked to come with RStudio installed, as well as the following R packages: utils, rgdal, sp, raster, maptools, readxl, dismo. Some of those packages require that you first install GDAL.
The links above should provide adequate information for these installs to work for you regardless of your operating system, but the instructor will be available from 2:00 to 4:00pm on the day of the workshop to help troubleshoot if you are having installation difficulties. (Note: Please do not show up during that window without having first tried to work through the installation on your own; we prefer to reserve that time in case there are participants who have already tried to install and have run into problems.)
