Reflections on Our 2018-2019 Workshops

Posted 1 July 2019

A successful year of workshops

It’s summer at the CSDS, and that means we’re taking some time to reflect on the year and get ready for the year ahead. Our quarterly workshops have ended, and we have successfully run two research computing bootcamps.

Our last bootcamp of the year, Introduction to R for Geospatial Raster Data, introduced researchers and geospatial data practitioners to using R for raster data analysis. It was the final event of the newly-organized Geospatial Science Symposium at UChicago, organized by Marynia Kolak and the undergraduate YouthMappers chapter, the Tobler Society. We had over 35 individuals register for a day of learning how to work with R for raster data. Many students and several individuals outside the university attended the day-long workshop.

The day was ambitious, in that I had to cover both the basics of the R programming language and the basics of raster data. Combining both into a single day was challenging because of the quantity of material, so in the future, we could consider organizing a two-day workshop to introduce both basic R and geospatial data concepts. We will continue thinking about what programs are most useful for our researchers.

Upcoming work and plans for next year

Looking ahead to fall quarter, we will be putting together a series of R workshops for Luc Anselin’s Introduction to Spatial Data Science class taught in the fall. Currently, most of the labs are written for GeoDa, so we will be developing an R version of the course. We plan to run the fall R Spatial workshops as a supplement to the GeoDa version of the course.

Additionally, we are looking into organizing an Advanced R for Social Scientists course this fall, to further help our researchers and those in the UChicago research community. This curriculum has not yet been developed, so Colin Quirk and I are interested in building this out. We plan to introduce researchers to string and date manipulation, R Markdown, and advanced data joins.

Finally, now that workshops are complete for the year, I am putting together specialized resources for spatial analysis, including an R Spatial Cookbook. I also plan to add more content to this site, including blog post tutorials. Stay tuned for more in the next several months.

Have a great summer from all of us at the Center for Spatial Data Science!